Landscape architecture and urban planning join aesthetics of design with the hard science of engineering. These areas foreground the complex influence of history and culture in the mapping and planning of social space. Since men have traditionally served as both prime architects and builders of metropolitan areas–designing plans and constructing buildings from the ground up–it is unsurprising that they have historically dominated cities. Contrastingly, women have been encouraged, implicitly and explicitly, to remain within the interior spaces of the home, or even far more distanced from society.
Within the context of Spain, society educated women to limit themselves to domestic, interior spaces with refrains such as “la mujer y la sartén, en la cocina están bien,” and during the majority of the twentieth century, the Franco regime reinforced these antiquated behavior codes. While the hindsight we have of the twenty-first century provides us with substantial perspective on the politics that bolster such a gender divide in urban spaces, recent theory related to the cultural production of space informs our understanding of cities as deeply encoded with social-sexual meaning. For this volume of critical essays, the editors invite submissions of abstracts examining the synergistic interplay of urban space and architectural structure with gender and sexuality in recent cultural production, primarily literary fiction and film, from 2000 to the present.
Submissions, must include a working title, 250-300 word abstracts attached as Word documents, the author’s academic affiliation and contact information. In your email, please include a 2-3 sentence biography. Email article proposals to both Maria DiFrancesco (mdifrancesco@ithaca.edu) and Debra Ochoa (dochoa@trinity.edu) by March 1, 2015. The editors will respond with their selection of abstracts by March 25, 2015. Complete papers (18-24 pages), will be due by the end of June 2015.