Thanos Tzimeros and the Gender Dimensions of Space
The National Technical University of Athens explores how gender shapes—and is shaped by—space, urging wider academic focus on feminist perspectives within engineering to challenge ingrained patriarchal norms.
Our world is undergoing epochal changes, and the School of Architecture and Engineering at NTUA is addressing issues of corresponding gravity: the gendered dimensions of space.
If you didn’t get it, the introduction explains it: space shapes gender, and vice versa.
Were you born in Votanikos? You’ll grow up tough. Born on the pink sugar-sand beach? You’ll be a Rosa-Rosalia. It’s obvious. Could Rosa Rosalia be from Votanikos? No way!
Nor could the tough guy be from the pink sugar-sand beach. But I am concerned. I look for similar studies in other Schools, and there are none. Gendered reinforced concrete, for instance, or gendered soil mechanics. Nothing! I protest!
Will we leave so many political and chemical engineers, so many mechanical engineers, at the mercy of toxic patriarchy? What kind of world will our children live in?
P.S. If you want to enjoy contemporary poststructuralist gender theory, read the doctoral dissertation of the lecturer (supervised by another who studied the same subject), here: https://freader.ekt.gr/eadd/index.php?doc=16244&lang=el
It is a masterpiece! Here is an excerpt:
Incorporating gender into a broader critical framework exercised by poststructuralism (mainly through the work of Foucault and Derrida) on empiricism and humanism, poststructuralist feminist analyses focus on how binary oppositions function in specific contexts.
In order to highlight the hierarchical construction of these oppositions, attention is turned to the gendered substratum of seemingly neutral concepts, the significance of the symbolic meanings of dominant discourse, and the ways each side of the dichotomies is defined in different (mainly scientific) texts.
These analyses emphasize the power that inevitably operates in the production of discourse and knowledge, and argue that the category ‘women’ is constructed through discourse and in a hierarchical understanding in relation to their supposed opposites, men.
Within this framework, subjectivity constitutes a position within various authoritative textual formulations, as it is argued that there is no fundamental ‘I’ outside culture and language.
Understanding subjectivity as a textual phenomenon is directly connected to the dominant approach introduced by psychoanalysis in the formation of a Lacanian version, according to which the gender order of things, gender identity, and consequently femininity and masculinity, are constituted by language and symbolic representations and metaphors.
Thus, experience is no longer considered the given that transforms external conditions into consciousness and action, since, it is argued, it cannot be separated from the language through which it is transformed.
Happy studying!
