Gender and the Reality of Cities: Embodied Identities, Social Relations and Performativities

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Institute of Geography Online Paper Series: GEO-005
Gender and the Reality of Cities:
embodied identities, social relations and performativities
Liz Bondi, Institute of Geography, The University of Edinburgh
liz.bondi@ed.ac.uk

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Bondi, Liz. 2005.
Gender and the Reality of Cities: embodied identities, social
relations and performativities
, online papers archived by the Institute of
Geography, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh.

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Gender is an integral, ubiquitous and taken-for-granted aspect of urban life. It is an
influential dimension of urban identities, an axis of urban inequalities, and it animates
the everyday practices that characterise and constitute cities and city life. Perhaps
because it is so familiar and taken-for-granted, gender is also a complex and slippery
idea that carries a range of inter-related meanings. Numerous commentators (including,
for example, Haraway 1991; Moi 1999; Widerberg 1999) have pointed to problems of
translation, even between closely related European languages. In addition, usage within
particular languages is far from singular, stable or coherent. In this essay, I do not
attempt to engage with issues of translation between languages, focusing solely on
anglophone urban studies, but I do wish to acknowledge that, however influential they
may be, the meanings of gender in anglophone contexts are also idiosyncratic1. Setting
these considerations to one side, I explore some of the different ways in which the idea
of gender is used in anglophone urban studies to help explore and understand the simple
fact that cities are peopled by women, men, girls and boys, drawing especially, but not
exclusively, on British feminist urban geography. More specifically, I consider three
kinds of gender analyses of urban life, which approach gender through embodied
identities, social relations, and performativity respectively. As a dimension of embodied
identities, gender focuses on how everyday urban experiences relate to, and are
influenced by, the anatomical categories “male” and “female”. While gender is embodied
by human individuals, it does not reside entirely within human bodies but is produced at
the intersections between human bodies and the milieux that surround them. As a facet
of those surrounding milieux, it constitutes a social relation or organising principle of
urban life. For gender to be felt as integral to embodiment and as a social relation that
precedes gendered embodiment requires human beings to be recruited into gender
categories. In so doing, gendered persons activate meanings or scripts of gender, hence
the idea of gender as performatively cited in everyday lives. The different approaches
to gender on which I focus are not mutually exclusive, but there are important
variations in emphasis between them. Cities are vital arenas in the embodiment,
contestation, mobilisation, subversion and transformation of all these aspects of gender.
In the sections that follow, I explore how each approach to gender informs
understandings of urban life and sheds light on the specificity of cities. In conclusion I
point to emotion as an important theme for all three approaches to analysing the
gendered reality of cities.
Embodied gender and the reality of cities
Early efforts to consider the gendered reality of cities sought to correct the implicitly
male-oriented character of existing research by focusing on women’s everyday
experiences of city life. Jacqueline Tivers (1985), for example, explored the daily lives
of women with young children in south London, UK, focusing on their experiences of
1 My failure to engage with issues that extend beyond English-language usage reflects
the fact that, like so many other British (and US) anglophones, I am a monoglot, unable
to read or converse in any other language. One aspect of my personal trajectory bears
particularly poignant witness to the wider trajectory of anglophone imperialism: my
father’s first language was German. He moved from Austria to the United Kingdom at
the age of 17, never spoke German in the home in which I grew up, and never encouraged
any of his five children to learn any language other than English.

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socio-spatial constraints. She described how responsibility for the care of young
children, which continues to fall primarily to women, is often associated with highly
circumscribed everyday geographies, limited by an array of social and physical
constraints. Tivers (1985) also documented the detrimental effects of lack of choice on
many women’s quality of life, especially those in poorer households and those without
access to a car. The language within which Tivers presented her findings is
conventionally neutral, dispassionate and objective, and she does not focus explicitly on
issues of embodiment or emotion. Nevertheless her study conveys a powerful sense of
recurrent features of women’s subjective experience of urban life, including, for
example, frustration at limitations that impoverish some women’s lives, and exhaustion
resulting from the daily effort to negotiate urban environments designed without
consideration of the needs of those carrying infants, pushing buggies, and/or
accompanied by toddlers.
A good deal of work concerned with the gendered reality of cities echoes Tivers’ (1985)
portrayal of cities as designed by men, for men, and as hostile to women. For example, an
extensive body of research explores the geography of women’s fear. In the UK, official
crime surveys have repeatedly demonstrated two mismatches in the demographic and
the spatial distribution of the fear and the risk of violence (Pain 1991). While older
people and women of all ages tend to be much more fearful than others of violent crime,
it is young men who are statistically at greatest risk from officially recorded violent
crime. Further, while women are at greatest risk of suffering violent crime in private
space from men they know, they are most fearful in public space from men they do not
know. Researchers concerned with gendered realities of city life have challenged the
inference that women’s fears are “irrational”, elaborating how women’s experiences of
cities as oppressive relate to daily encounters with gender-specific threats (Valentine
1989). Thus, Rachel Pain (1991) has shown how men’s utterances and gestures foster
hostility to women in numerous city spaces, constituting forms of violence that render
the geography of women’s fear easily understandable. Indeed Esther da Costa Meyer
(1996) has gone further, arguing that cities produce a feminine experience of space that
is similar to, albeit less intense than, the condition of agoraphobia.
Approaching the gendered realities of cities through a focus on everyday lives has
sometimes entailed treating women as a homogeneous category. In so doing it has also
emphasised commonalities in women’s experience across different cities. However,
studies have increasingly attended to the diversity of women’s lives and considered
men’s experiences too. For example, within work on the gendered geographies of fear,
researchers have unpacked how women’s embodied experiences are differentiated by
race, class, age and sexuality (Day 1999; Namaste 1996; Pain 1997, 2001); different
ways in which men inhabit urban space (Day 2001); and the complex geographies of
women diagnosed with agoraphobia (Bankey 2002; Davidson 2003).
The portrayal of cities as hostile to women, albeit to varying degrees, has attracted
criticism. Some have sought to counter the implication that women are more or less
passive victims of male domination. For example, Hille Koskela (1997) and Carolyn
Whitzman (2002) emphasise women’s active and resilient presence in urban space, while
Anna Mehta and Liz Bondi (1999) have shown how women and men actively participate in
myths about fearful women and fearless men in their ideas about appropriate behaviour
in urban space. Moreover, for many women, urban life is rich with pleasures, including
opportunities to escape the narrow confines of traditional assumptions about gender and

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sexuality (Wilson 1990). For example, it is in cities that women have gained entry to
male-dominated professions (McDowell 1997), found ways of living in alternative
households (Hayden 1981; Rose 1989), or explicitly challenged gender stereotypes
(Longhurst 2000). Likewise, notwithstanding the pervasive and limiting effects of
heterosexism and homophobia (Valentine 1993a; Myslik 1996), numerous cities contain
gay and lesbian neighbourhoods (Adler and Brenner 1992; Forest 1995; Lauria and Knopp
1985; Mort 1998; Peake 1993; Rothenberg 1995) and urban spaces offer extensive
possibilities for challenges to dominant norms (Brown 2000; Bell and Valentine 1995; Bell
et al
. 1994; Duncan 1996; Hubbard 2005).
Thus, cities are places where embodied meanings and experiences of gender are not
necessarily reproduced according to dominant norms, but can be challenged, reworked
and reshaped; they are not intrinsically oppressive or liberatory for women but present
complex and variable pressures and possibilities for gendered embodiment. Moreover,
these pressures and possibilities are themselves geographically patterned in the sense
that different cities, and different urban neighbourhoods, are different. In other
words, multiple ways of embodying gender are forged within particular geographical
contexts.
The geographical specificity of embodied gender identities is complex. Processes of
globalisation intersect with others in the constitution of gender, for example, through
transnational migration (Yeoh
et al
. 2000; Pratt and Yeoh 2003), and other forms of
recruitment into globalised forms of production and reproduction (Cravey 2005; Gibson-
Graham 1996; Hochschild 2000). These intersections contribute to the local specificity
of cities, which are manifest in the complex spatialities of embodied identities (Probyn
2003). As Doreen Massey (1994) has argued, places and place-based identities are
fundamentally processual and relational, and consequently, even among long-term
residents, the embodiment of gender does not vary from place to place in any
straightforward way. Nevertheless, the localness of many women’s lives to which
Jacqueline Tivers (1985) drew attention, contributes to subtle spatial variations in
gender identities and practices (Pratt and Hanson 1994). As Tovi Fenster (2005) has
illustrated in relation to “majority” and “other” experiences of London and Jerusalem,
complex combinations of movement and emplacement relative to a diverse array of
places and complex histories, generate distinctive formations of gendered geographies
of urban belonging.
Approaching gender in terms of the embodied experiences of urban dwellers locates
gender primarily within subjective experience, and as an aspect of identity attributable
to individual women and men. Implicitly, it assumes that gender is produced at least in
part through the cultural elaboration of bodily differences. While dominant
understandings of the underlying bodily difference draw strongly on the binary,
biological categories “male” and “female”, I have illustrated how contributions to
feminist urban studies challenge this formulation, unsettling assumptions about the
correspondence between gender identities and anatomical sex (Butler 1990). Next I
turn to work that actively divorces gender from individual human bodies.
Gender relations and the reality of cities

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While gender may be experienced and approached as a facet of embodied identity, it
can also be understood as an organising principle of societies, existing outside and
preceding the experiences and activities of individual human subjects. Approached in
this way, gender is a social relation that “shapes” the forms, functions, structures and
governance of cities. Moreover, the urban is a key scale through which gender and
gender inequalities are spatialised. In a path-breaking essay, Suzanne Mackenzie and
Damaris Rose (1983) traced how gender has influenced the socio-spatial development of
cities in capitalist societies. Of crucial significance was the increasing physical
separation between home and work wrought by industrialisation in western urban
societies. This built upon, and added impetus to, a distinction between public and private
realms, which began to emerge in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, with the
public realm evolving into the domain of productive activity and formal politics, while the
private realm became the arena of reproductive activity including consumption and
domestic life (Bondi and Domosh 1998).
Gender has been woven into the distinction between public and private in complex and
class-differentiated ways. In capitalist urban societies, the majority of adult women and
men have always participated in both productive activity (typically as paid workers), and
in daily, generational and social reproduction. Thus, the association between masculinity
and the public realm, and femininity and the private realm is not simply the result of the
differential presence and involvement of men and women in the two spheres. Instead,
the coding of public as masculine and private as feminine owes much to the influence of
ideologies associated with the emergence of a new and distinctive middle-class in the
nineteenth century. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall (1987) have shown how English
industrial capitalists of the early nineteenth century, including factory-owners,
managers and related professional groups, produced a new middle-class identity
distinctive from others, including the landed aristocracy and artisans, at least in part
through the spatial and gendered relationship between home and work. Choosing to build
new homes for themselves away from congested, noisy, unhealthy and sometimes
threatening urban cores, but still close to the urban industrial heartlands on which their
new-found wealth depended, they initiated the development of suburbs around cities
such as London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield. From their
suburban homes, men travelled to urban workplaces, while their capacity to support non-
working wives and daughters in gracious living quarters looked after by domestic
servants became a hallmark of their social status. Middle-class wives constituted a form
of property and a mode of conspicuous consumption. This objectification of women has
fostered intense gender inequalities and bound gender relations deeply within class
inequalities. It also entrenched heteronormativity within the meanings and practices of
middle-classness.
For the new middle-class, principles governing women’s and men’s daily lives were highly
differentiated, with respectable middle-class women limited to the private sphere
unless appropriately chaperoned, while middle-class men moved freely between public
and private. The connection between women and consumption itself reshaped the
contours of public space: as Liz Bondi and Mona Domosh (1998) describe, consumer
spaces such as the department stores that developed in major cities in the second half
of the nineteenth century became extensions of the feminine private sphere. By
contrast in most urban working-class households, both men and women engaged in paid
work, albeit in different occupations and often in different workplaces, while scope for
the development of a private, domestic realm of family life was very limited. Feminine

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respectability, defined according to middle-class conceptions of gender, eluded working-
class women and generated anxiety for middle-classes too (Boyer 1998; Domosh 2001;
Skeggs 1997).
From the late nineteenth century onwards, class differences in gender relations tended
to decline, partly because of the incorporation of the ideas and practices of the new
middle-class into the planning of urban areas and the architectural design of homes for
the working classes (McDowell 1983; Roberts 1991). For example, after the first world
war in particular, suburban housing became increasingly available to, and sought after by,
working-class households. The ideology of separate spheres also influenced British
legislation, including for example nineteenth century regulations about working hours of
women and children, and the principles underpinning the twentieth century welfare state
(Barrett 1980). Moreover, it was actively adopted by working-class groups, for example
in campaigns for a “family wage”, that is for wage levels sufficient to enable a working
man to support a non-earning wife and children (Mackenzie and Rose 1983). Many
working-class men never secured a family wage, and, despite periods in which the
workforce participation of married women fell to below 20 per cent, the ideology of
separate spheres never matched the reality (Beechey 1986; Rowbotham 1974).
Nevertheless assumptions about gender that systematically exaggerated socio-spatial
contrasts between women and men have significantly influenced the spatial organisation
of cities and urban life. The gap between myth and reality, as well as gender inequalities
themselves, have served to contain some of the internal contradictions of capitalist
urbanism, as well as rendering gender relations dynamic and contested.
During the twentieth century, middle-class women increasingly transgressed the
ideology of separate spheres as increasing numbers entered the waged workforce and
continued to participate in the workforce alongside raising families. This followed the
disappearance of domestic service in its traditional form, leaving middle-class women to
take more direct responsibility for homes and families as well as wage earning. Thus,
women across the social classes have increasingly combined employment with domestic
responsibilities (Phillips 1987). The spatialities of women’s lives across classes have also
tended to converge, with working mothers across the class spectrum dealing with similar
issues as they negotiate urban (and suburban) environments and transport systems
designed according to assumptions that barely acknowledge their existence, and that
contribute to the persistence of substantial gender inequalities in employment
opportunities and earnings over all timescales (McDowell 1991).
Class convergence in women’s experiences should not be over-emphasised and important
contrasts between “work-rich” and “work-poor” households have also opened up. The
class-specific experiences of the “work-rich” households in today’s cities are
particularly pertinent. Many disadvantaged working-class households face intense
economic stress that is manifest in unenviable “choices” between welfare dependence
without paid work, or combining multiple low paid jobs (Bondi and Christie 2000). The
latter often involve adult members of one household each holding two or three part-time
jobs, combined in ways that cover sequential shifts so that at all relevant times someone
is available for childcare (Casey and McRae 1990; Jordan and Redley 1994). The rise of
affluent dual-career households has generated very different “work-rich” households
within the middle class too, and the career orientation of women and men in these
households has stimulated the growth of new forms of waged domestic work (Gregson
and Lowe 1994). But what these “work-rich” households share, across the class divide, is

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the experience of time poverty (Warren 2003). While men’s and women’s employment
opportunities may be becoming more similar, it is women rather than men who continue
to negotiate and manage competing, sometimes shifting, hours, times and modes of paid
work, at the same time as co-ordinating the myriad activities of social reproduction
required for them to “go on” (Jarvis 2002, 340). Meanwhile, the continued association of
men with the public sphere persists in that it is men who are substantially more likely
than women to “free themselves up” from the work of social reproduction to engage in
leisure activities outside the home such as a trip to the pub or participating in sport
(Christie 2000).
The housing decisions of different groups of individuals and households also indicate the
complex relationship between class, gender and the spatial organisation of cities. Some
dual-career households have participated in selective shifts away from suburban (and
ex-urban) living among a variety of middle-class groups who have chosen to live in
gentrified neighbourhoods close to city centres. These include neighbourhoods upgraded
primarily through the efforts of owner-occupiers, including some whose position within
the middle-class is marginal and who pioneer gentrification through the incorporation of
their own “sweat equity” into their homes, and others who are far more affluent and
generate a market for commercially-driven forms of urban redevelopment (Bondi 1999;
Rose 1989; Warde 1991). Women especially are linked with gentrification because inner-
city locations make it easier to combine productive and reproductive activities and thus
overcome the spatial mismatch between domestic and employment spaces. In addition to
expressing locational preferences, these groups are, perhaps, implicitly attempting to
reshape assumptions about gender, class and urban space (Bondi 1998). Indeed, some
commentators regard gentrification as emancipatory for women precisely because it
affords them access to the pleasures and dangers of the city where they can
experiment with new identities (Caulfield 1994; Rose 1989; Wilson 1990). The overall
impact on cities has been to produce a complex mosaic of urban neighbourhoods, with
intensely impoverished neighbourhoods abutting highly affluent enclaves thereby
bringing inequalities in the realities of cities into sharper relief.
These contrasts are replicated at other scales, for example in contrasts between cities
that have secured command and control positions within global economic flows; those
that are economically dominated by back-offices functions, information services,
assembly and/or direct production; and those that are economically marginalised. Gender
relations are woven into the local specificities and global interconnections of these
cities in complex ways that contribute to contrasts in reproductive and well as
productive functions. Indeed one of the key contributions of a gender relational
approach to understanding cities is to show how the dynamics of production and
reproduction are always inextricably linked (England and Lawson 2005).
Approaching gender as a social relation locates gender outside the bodies of individual
human subjects, in the environments women and men inhabit and within the organising
principles underpinning the development and evolution of these environments. In this
sense, gender is something encountered “out there” in the course of everyday lives and
transcends the identities and practices of individual men and women. It structures how
urban societies work, not by dictating a singular unchanging gender order but through a
dynamic interplay with other social relations. In so doing it influences embodied
experiences of gender and is influenced by them.

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The performativity of gender and the reality of cities
I have argued that the ideology of separate spheres has been encoded within the fabric
of cities, which can therefore be “read” for their scripts about gender. In this section I
shift my focus from the processes through which meanings of gender are incorporated
into urban landscapes, to the processes through which these meanings are activated in
people’s everyday lives. On this account gender is produced performatively, that is
through the routine, unselfconscious citation or enactment of gender scripts in the
ordinary practices of urban life. These processes are as much about the embedding of
gender in urban space as in the bodies of city dwellers. Thus, gender and urban space
are performed in relation to each other and are mutually constituted (Rose 1999).
Performances of gender and space are not unchanging or set in stone, but are
recognisable only if they draw upon at least some elements of previous performances.
Consequently meanings of gender and space tend to congeal through their repetition, and
these routine, taken-for-granted forms constitute dominant or hegemonic versions, or
regulatory fictions (Butler 1990).
Dominant gender scripts are like the air that we breathe in that they are ordinarily
invisible and unnoticed except in their absence. Consequently, it is often “gender
dissidents” whose experiences most easily highlight taken-for-granted ways of doing
gender, and, among this group, sexual dissidents – especially lesbians and gays – have
been the subjects of most urban research. Gill Valentine (1996), for example, has
illustrated the intensely heteronormative qualities of urban space such that a
heterosexual couple holding hands or kissing in a street, shop or restaurant is
unremarkable, whereas a same-sex couple doing likewise is not. Lesbians and gays have
responded to the oppressive qualities of heteronormative space in a variety of ways,
often protecting themselves by concealing their sexual orientation and “passing” as
heterosexual (Valentine 1993b), and sometimes by working to transform or queer urban
space, whether through the creation of gay neighbourhoods (see for example Lauria and
Knopp 1985; Rothenberg 1995), or the temporary colonisation of heterosexual spaces in
gay pride parades (Johnston 2002; Munt 1995). These latter interventions have the
potential to alter the gendered meanings of particular urban spaces whether temporarily
or enduringly.
In an essay that highlights gender dimensions of dissident performances, David Bell, Jon
Binnie, Julia Cream and Gill Valentine (1994) discuss potentially subversive enactments
of exaggerated versions of normative masculinity and femininity by lesbians and gays.
These include hyper-feminine “lipstick lesbians” wearing make-up, high heels and
conventionally feminine clothes and hair-dos, and hyper-masculine “gay skinheads” with
shaven heads, work boots and conventionally macho clothing (Bell
et al
. 1994, 33). In so
far as such performances are recognised as parodies of dominant gender scripts, they
have the potential to unsettle assumptions that map heterosexual masculinity and
femininity as complementary opposites, and lesbian and gay identities as somehow
“twisted”. However, this account is limited by its reliance on the active choices of
performers and the recognition of parodic intent by observers (Nelson 1999). The
mutual performativity of gender and space, and the power of regulatory fictions, run
deeper than these intentional acts and interpretations. Indeed hyper-feminine and
hyper-masculine styles are at least as likely to reinforce as to disrupt normative
discourses of gender, and those who adopt them are as likely to be pressed into, and to

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find themselves colluding with, entirely conventional readings of gender and sexuality,
whatever their intentions might be.
Gillian Rose (1993) has explored the spatial production of discourses of gender as well as
possibilities for their transformation. She argues that dominant conceptions of space
privilege binary constructions of gender and press non-dualistic differences back into
this form, as I have described in the case of lipstick lesbians and gay skinheads. Thus,
while cities are sites in which women and men routinely enact a variety of masculinities
and femininities, this diversity generally remains firmly bound within the dominant
binary structure, which reduces differences to variations on a theme. Focusing on
women’s experiences of space, Rose (1993, 150) describes a paradox in which women are
simultaneously “prisoners and exiles”, trapped within oppressive, hegemonic spaces, and
yet also unable to access legitimate positions within these spaces. The power of
normative readings of gender is also illustrated by Kath Browne (2004) who describes
how women whose bodies are (mis)read as masculine are subject to punitive treatment,
especially in the gender-segregated spaces of women’s washrooms (also see Namaste
1996).
Such accounts highlight the resilience of dominant, binary gender scripts, and might
appear to suggest that these regulatory fictions are unbreachable. But Rose (1993,
1999) does not take this pessimistic view, arguing instead that women’s paradoxical
positioning needs to be grasped as an asset that contains possibilities for the tentative
articulation of alternative versions of femininity at the edges of available discourses.
Stressing the mutual constitution of space and gender, and spatialising Luce Irigaray’s
(1993) efforts to re-imagine sexual difference, Rose (1999, 258) attempts to offer “a
way of thinking, dreaming and practising other spaces that carry other ways of
producing differential relations”. Put another way, transcending the binary structure of
gender entails making space for other differences: gender and space are necessarily co-
performed.
The performativity of gender is a vital ingredient in the production urban difference.
Notwithstanding the power of binary discourses, the enactment of gender necessarily
varies in different contexts, and every citation of the available gender scripts contains
possibilities for mis-citations through which meanings of gender might shift. These
possibilities are suggested in Hille Koskela’s (2005) account of different performances
of gendered space. Focusing on women’s experiences of urban streets, she
differentiates between spaces experienced as unpredictable and anxiety-provoking,
which she calls “elastic”; the boldness and spatial confidence enacted in the “taming” of
spaces that might otherwise induce anxiety; and the “suppression” of spontaneity,
difference and challenge associated with spaces subject to continuous surveillance by
technologies, such as closed circuit television cameras.
The idea of gender as performative is sometimes criticised on the grounds that it
neglects pre-discursive practices and materiality. I have sought to articulate an
alternative view that avoids opposing discourse to practice or matter, at the same time
as acknowledging limits to discourse (Butler 1993). These limits are the limits of
legibility and intelligibility, and can be illustrated by considering the troubling effects of
gender-ambiguous bodies in urban space. Most of us recognise the gender of others
within the terms of the binary model so swiftly and so routinely that our curiosity is
swiftly aroused if we are unable, almost instantly, to allocate someone to one category

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or the other. Whatever our response to such moments – pleasure, outrage, indifference
– the point I wish to make is how they illuminate the power and reach of the binary
model, which operates beneath conscious awareness, and remains unarticulated most of
the time. Only when brought into question is it noticed. At such moments, and in all the
unnoticed ones, discourse, practice and materiality are one and the same.
Approaching gender as performative cuts across the distinction between individual
embodiment and social relations discussed in the preceding sections, locating gender as
simultaneously attached to bodies and transcending them. Performative approaches to
gender can therefore serve to enrich consideration of gender identities and gender
relations in urban life.
Conclusion: emotions and the gendered reality of cities
In the preceding sections of this essay I have sought to elaborate three ways of
approaching gender in urban life. I have drawn attention to contributions made by each
to understanding cities, including especially the distinctiveness and specificity of
different cities. In conclusion I emphasise the complementarity of these approaches and
suggest their relevance to an emerging concern with affective or emotional dimensions
of urban life.
Gender is often viewed as an attribute embodied by individuals and experienced as an
inextricable part of personal as well as social identity. On this account, gender is closely
related to sexual identity, sharing with it a location experienced as arising from within. I
have illustrated this approach to gender through studies that focus on the everyday
subjective realities of urban life. Such work helps to illuminate the richness and
complexity of urban lives and experiences among diverse groups of women and men.
While some of these studies treat gender categories as unproblematic, others engage
with post-structuralist theorisations of gender to consider the co-constitution of urban
environments and gendered experiences. Consideration of gender as a facet of embodied
identity is essential to understanding urban experience, helping to forge commonalities
among, and differences between, city dwellers whether living and/or working in close
proximity or far apart.
Embodied experiences of cities are necessarily inflected by emotions. Questions about
gender, urban identities and fear have been subject to extensive discussion, as have
issues of sexual desire and city life. However, a more diverse array of urban affects,
including excitement, disgust, hope and anger, also merit attention. In this context,
theories of subjectivity, such as psychoanalysis offer potentially fruitful ways of
deepening understandings of how urban environments are absorbed into people’s
embodied gender identities. David Sibley (1995) has drawn on the psychoanalytic
theories of Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva to explore the dynamics of inclusion and
exclusion in urban space, while Alan Latham (1999) has turned to D.W. Winnicott to
explore the personalised, subjective meanings of particular urban environments.
However, these perspectives have not yet been applied to questions of gender, emotion
and urban life.
Women’s and men’s everyday lives include numerous encounters with structures of
gender that bear only an indirect relation to their experiences of themselves as

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gendered beings. Approaching gender as a social relation provides a means of analysing
these structures. The social relations of gender are characterised by persistent
material inequalities that intersect with those of class, race, ethnicity, age, sexual
orientation and disability. They shape cities in numerous ways, from the planning
regulations through childcare provision to the hiring practices of employers. Focusing on
British cities, I have shown how gender relations are sedimented within the social and
physical fabric of cities in ways that contribute to their resilience, and reinforce
interwoven class and gender inequalities. Gender relations are also integral to the
complex positioning of cities within global divisions of productive and reproductive
labour.
Although the spatial constraints of separate spheres for “respectable” women and men
have been substantially eroded, structural inequalities associated with urban gender
relations have proved to be surprisingly persistent. While performative approaches to
gender have drawn attention to the power of dominant gender scripts, relational
approaches to gender also have a part to play in understanding this persistence. Such
approaches would locate emotion in the urban environments routinely encountered by
city dwellers (Thrift 2004). In this context Arlie Hochschild’s (1979, 1998, 2000)
analysis of gendered regimes of emotion within and beyond paid labour has the potential
to enrich understandings of gender relations and how they are embedded within
particular cities.
Conceptualising gender as performative engages with tensions between persistence and
change, and between interiority and exteriority. Like the other two approaches, it
recognises the omnipresence and spatiality of gender. It also draws attention to the
centrality of everyday urban practices in the constitution and contestation of gender.
While gender scripts are profoundly constrained by the power of regulatory fictions,
these fictions do not guarantee the faithful reproduction of gender norms. Rather,
albeit in unpredictable and non-conscious ways, the edges of gender legibility are
unstable and subject to change.
Approaching gender as performative emphasises the non-cognitive, non-rational
character of routine everyday practices. It is therefore sensitive to, and offers a
useful theoretical framework within which to explore, emotional dimensions of urban
life. A performative approach resists locating emotions or gender in either embodied
city dwellers or urban environments, insisting instead that they necessarily infuse and
reside in both. In so doing, performativity draws attention to the permeability of
boundaries between persons and the environments they inhabit, boundaries that are
stabilised only through their routine citation. For example, Joyce Davidson (2003) has
illuminated the performative interweaving of gender, emotion and urban space in a
phenomenological analysis of agoraphobic experience. Interpreting intensely disturbing
agoraphobic panic attacks as boundary crises, she shows how predominantly female
sufferers seek to protect themselves through an array of strategies designed to
reinforce their sense of being securely delimited from their surroundings. These
“abnormal” experiences challenge the limits of gender legibility and in so doing provide
resources for imagining the spatiality of gender beyond the limits of binary norms. Thus,
while restricted in its substantive focus to those whose lives are shaped by agoraphobia,
this study suggests ways of exploring how urban space, gender and emotion are
performatively constituted.

14
As I have stressed, the approaches to gender I have discussed are not mutually
exclusive but instead offer different lenses on the gendering of urban life. Just as
gender is an integral and ubiquitous feature of urban life, so too is emotion. Moreover,
both gender and emotion are simultaneously embodied by individual city dwellers,
integral to the social relations structuring urban life, and performatively cited in
everyday lives. Further exploration of this interweaving is needed in order to deepen
and extend understandings of urban commonalities and the specificities of cities.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Hazel Christie and Joyce Davidson for their comments on an earlier draft
of this paper.
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