The Performative Vernacular: An Approach to City and Gender

Abstract

The concepts of space in general, and of city and public space in particular, are interconnected complex articulations, which, depending on the context, may be concrete, metaphorical, figurative or representational. Viewed from the perspective of city space, the emphasis on spatiality originates from the premise that everyday routine activities take place in space whereby particular individual or group presences are intertwined with spatially organized social structures. Space contextualizes and grounds the ways of life, politics, power, and ideology of different groups and subject positions. Therefore a discourse on the idea of a public domain also needs to consider space an integral element to its constitution. However, whereas the space of the city is heterogeneous, hybrid, and embodied, more often than not characterizations of the ‘public’ space, as argued by feminist scholars, are exhaustive and universalist, repress differences, and assume that agency is homogeneous and disembodied. Today, with new interventions to theories about the public realm, the spaces women occupy (and other groups subject to domination and discrimination) are viewed as contested fields of representation where they explore and practice their differences publicly rather than in private domestic places (Rose 1993, Massey 1994).

“The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple ‘enunciative’ function: It is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic ‘contracts’ in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an ‘allocution,’ ‘posits another opposite’ the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action). It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation” (de Certeau, 1984, pp. 97–98).