EMBODIED UTOPIAS
Gender, Social Change, and the Built Environment
 

A CONFERENCE AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
CENTER FOR GENDER STUDIES
APRIL 16 - 18, 1999


 


    The Embodied Utopias conference, sponsored by the Center for Gender Studies and made possible by a generous grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies, will bring together scholars in architectural history and theory, urbanism, philosophy, political science, communications and other fields with practicing architects, artists and activists to examine the intersection between the politics of gender and sexuality and the utopian ambitions of architecture and city planning.
    Papers address gendered social reform movements, relations between the domestic and public spheres, utopia and the politics of sexuality, the dystopian implications of utopia, gender and the architectural avant-garde, technotopias and nationalism.
    To pre-register for the conference, please send your name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, email address, and telephone number by email to Julia Nitti at  julia@cheerful.com or by fax to 773-834-2000; or call the Center at 773-702-9936.
    All events held in Judd Hall Auditorium, Room 126, 5835 South Kimbark Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, unless otherwise noted.
    For further information contact Julia Nitti or Rebecca Zorach or visit the Center for Gender Studies.


Keynote Address
6pm, Friday, April 16
The Time of Architecture
ELIZABETH GROSZ
State University of New York - Buffalo

 
 

Conference Program


 




Friday, April 16
                                                           1-3pm
Embodying the City: Beyond the Public/Private Divide

Against Utopia: The Urban Romance of Indeterminate Spaces
Elizabeth Wilson, University of North London

The City Politic: Normalizing the Body Politic in Washington, DC
Margaret Farrar, Pennsylvania State University

"At Home" "In Public": The Hull House Settlement and the Study of the City
Sharon Haar, University of Illinois, Chicago

Woman, Allegory, and the Fragment: The New Jane Addams
Miriam Gusevich, University of Maryland - College Park
 

                                                    3:30-5:30pm
Making Space: Women and Social Action

A Women's Berlin: How Female Patrons and Architects in Imperial Germany Re-Gendered the City
Despina Stratigakos, Bryn Mawr College

Endeavors and Expectations: Housing Washington's Women in NEW and NEXT
Kelly Quinn, University of Maryland

Domestic Reform of Gendered Spaces and Built Environments
Suzanne Spencer-Wood, Harvard University

Public Housing: Site of Women's Resistance
Roberta Feldman, University of Illinois - Chicago, and Susan Stall, Northeastern Illinois University
 
 

                                                       6pm - Keynote Address
 

Saturday, April 17
                                                        10am-12pm
Spaces of National Identity

Dystopia in Utopia: Alienation and the Fear of Spaces in Indochina
Hazel Hahn, University of California - Berkeley

Greig Crysler and Lesley Lokko, University of Illinois - Chicago

Mass Subject, National Imagination and Culture of Fear in the Indonesian Metropolis
Abidin Kusno, New York University

Strategic Beautification: The Politics of Somatic Experience
Grant Kester, Washington State University

                                                         1:30-3:30pm
Space and the Response to Trauma

Bauhaus Dream House: Gender and Utopia in Architectural Education
Katerina Ruedi, University of Illinois - Chicago

Dropping the Soap within the Prison Setting
Ira Tattelman, Washington, DC

Dismantling Fascism, Rebuilding the Republic: Domesticity, Surveillance, and Urban Planning in Postwar Italy
Ellen Nerenberg, Wesleyan University

                                                         4:30-6:30pm
Urbanism and its Discontents

Uncovering Dystopian Foundations: Deceptive Agency in Disney's Celebration
Andrew Wood, San Jose State University

Panurbanism and the Question of Identity
Brent Stringfellow, Boston, MA

Urban Space, Modernity, and Masculinist Desire: The Urban Lusts of Le Corbusier
Barbara Hooper, University of California - Los Angeles

Sunday, April 18
                                                            10-11am
Spatial Speculations
A Talk with Beverly Willis, AIA

                                                        11:30am-1pm
No/Good Place: Can Utopia Be Built?

Women on the Street: Community Muralists in Chicago
Olivia Gude, University of Illinois - Chicago

Is there a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?
Thomas Markus, University of Glasgow

Final speaker TBA