Anandita Ghosh and Shivani Satija are pleased to share G&D’s special issue on Gender and Public Space.
Gender and Development Journal’s March-July 2024 Issue on ‘Gender and Public Space’ is an effort towards engaging with the expanding body of work on the subject– as a theoretical field as well as a site of methodological experiments, collective politics, and creative labour. Guest edited by Pumla Dineo Gqola, Iromi Perera, Shilpa Phadke, Nazanin Shahrokni, and Sofia Zaragocin, this issue centres the experiences of marginalised groups, delving into questions of physical spaces as well as the symbolic, political, and affective dimensions of infrastructure with respect to matters of power, intersectional identities, solidarity, care, and citizenship. The authors of this volume deploy a range of theoretical approaches and modes of analyses (such as through auto-ethnography, art, literary and film criticism, and archival work), allowing for a layered engagement with public space. Together, this collection explores sites such as urban and rural spaces, parks, bridges, benches, public toilets, sugarcane fields, digital platforms, and more. The contributions traverse the transformative potential of reclaiming public spaces, through movements, writing, artwork, and protests by marginalised individuals. The contributions span across multiple countries, including Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Chile, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iran, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, and Uruguay.
Navigating fear, safety, and surveillance in public spaces
Neoliberal economic and public policies across the world have enabled the privatisation of various spaces, consequently reshaping urban and rural landscapes, resulting in exclusions of marginalised groups from public spaces. Marginalised groups occupying intersectional identities across religion, caste, sexuality and gender, class, race, ethnicity, and citizenship status further shape their engagement with public spaces and services. Additionally, such ruptures enable further regulation of certain bodies in public spaces (upper caste, middle class, white women) through the moral discourse of safety, protectionism, and fear while stigmatising and criminalising the presence of working-class men, trans persons, and sex workers (Phadke 2010) and through the strategic deployment of fear (Gqola 2023). Fernandez, in this issue, describes many negotiations of the “female fear factory” (Gqola 2023) through the experiences of Ethiopian migrant women in Lebanon, along with the ways that its intersections with nationality, ethnicity, and migration pose threatening effects in their daily lives.
Marginalised bodies also feel at risk due to control and regulation of their movement by the state and through social and religious norms. In the context of Peru, Amaya Perez-Brumer et al.’s article in this issue discuss the COVID-19 policies that restricted mobility based on sex, and the consequent increase in fear of violence amongst communities of trans persons. Muchiri (2024) envisions safety as a process instead of a destination while examining young women’s civic participation in Nairobi, Rift Valley, and Nyanza in Kenya.
Streets emerged as a significant space of discussion in this issue. Streets simultaneously serve as spaces of and for liberations, income generation, political participation and connections with community members, and as spaces of harassment and intimidation, leading to feelings of unsafety, ‘unbelonging’, and exclusion. The contradictory character of streets as sites of gendered fear and political mobilisation is demonstrated by Bednarczyk in the case of Argentina. Dessie also demonstrates how sex workers who operate on the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, alleviate their economic strains but are often vulnerable to violence from the police. Aftab et al. (2024) lay bare the lived experiences of shame, discrimination, and humiliation experienced by ‘lower’ caste, Christian women sanitary workers working in public spaces in Lahore, Pakistan.
However, despite the obstacles, individuals and groups use a diverse set of strategies and coping mechanisms to negotiate public spaces, including acts of blending in or standing out. For instance, in the context of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Pakistan, Jansen et al elaborate on the tactics that queer communities used to negotiate risk and violence. Caparrós (2024) presents the coping strategies that women cab drivers employ while working in public spaces in Spain, such as avoiding night shifts. Dessie’s (2024) participants also deployed a range of strategies, such as only taking clients to hotels where the staff knew them.
The contributions suggest that patriarchal, caste, and race-based discourses of safety and fear control the mobility, presence, and access of women and other marginalised groups in public spaces while stigmatising particular spaces, bodies, and labour, making public spaces inaccessible, hostile, and unequal for many.
Porous boundaries and questions of liminal spaces, bodies, and experiences
Given that feminist analyses of private-public defy easy categorisation and are widely understood to be fluid, how do we then interpret and understand the ‘public’. The authors of this collection have questioned and challenged the dichotomous understandings of care and paid work, public and private, sex and gender, male and female, and digital and physical by employing feminist, queer, and trans geographies, resulting in the production of alternative decolonial place-based feminist knowledge(s).
In Ambur, India, Jagannathan draws attention to ‘thinnas’ – a verandah/porch that is attached to the front of homes serving as a ‘quasi-public space’ – that enables women homeworkers to participate in the public to some extent. Subramaniam shows how women sugarcane field workers harvest ‘breathing spaces’ in shared kitchens outside their temporary homes, on the way to morning ablutions, and during transit between work sites, forming friendships and intergenerational alliances. Women and young girls spend time in ‘enclosed-outsides’ such as courtyards and terraces which constitute spaces for leisure and sociality in a riverside settlement in Northern India, as demonstrated by Taneja. The public-private binary is disrupted through these ideas of ‘enclosed’, ‘controlled’ public spaces, through notions of ‘in-between’ space, labour, and bodies.
The articles in this issue also demonstrate complexity of notions of belonging and ways in which people often experience inclusion and exclusion to varying degrees, simultaneously. In the Palestinian Refugee Camp in Al Wehdat Camp in Amman, Jordan, Qudah examines the multiple intersecting meanings of safety and insider status through the symbolic and spatial roles of walls and streets. Lemma and Spark discuss how Ethiopian migrant women in Footscray, Australia, construct a feeling of belonging and home outside of their home while simultaneously experiencing feelings of not belonging and lack of safety due to street harassment. Similar sentiments are echoed by Özdemir Dal & Görentaş in their article that deals with the experiences of Syrian women refugees in Turkey.
Contributions in this issue also highlight how presence in negotiated, asserted, and contested in virtual and conceptual landscapes. Sigurdardottir et al. (2024) show how TikTok users in Iran exercise their agency through participation in the ‘Women-Life-Freedom’ movement, in the process politicising the social media platform and bringing attention to their cause. Mehta’s study explores how a digital regional public space might emerge in the Middle East and North Africa, questioning essentialist representations of what makes a region and emphasising the various, contradictory, and diverse representations of the “Arab World.” Moqadam highlights how Iranian women’s rich, vibrant and agentic lives were dismissed and flattened in western accounts of Iranian publics and spaces by comparing the local historical accounts of women in Iran during the Naseri era (1848-1896).
A rich tapestry of conflicting narratives, contested meanings, and changing identities that resist straightforward and singular portrayal is shown by a number of papers that use a social, political, cultural, and historical lens to analyse public spaces.
Everyday mapping and methods to make other spatialities
Articles in this issue challenge and subvert dominant and top-down mapping processes through acts of walking, archiving, excavating, and writing. Through their respective works on Johannesburg and Kabul, Vosloo and Paul try to make sense of places and bodies that have been bounded, robbed, dispossessed, extracted, bombed, pillaged, and plundered —resulting in the loss of lives and identities as well as the destruction of families and homes. To make sense of “placelessness,” Blackness, gender, and movement/mobility, the authors connect various decolonial feminist thinkers and artists in order to reclaim, remap, and suture their history and present. The sense of placelessness or “no place” that transgeographies expose is also addressed by Lubinsky and Aultman.
Mental maps provide methods for identifying the underlying power dynamics and illustrating the gendered nature of public spaces (Ranade and Phadke 2023). Some articles in this issue examine mental maps through engagement with the perspectives and affective experiences of women and young girls (Katsavounidou, 2024; Theocharides-Feldman and King, 2024). Mental maps of safety help individuals navigate spaces perceived as dangerous or unsafe (Lemma and Spark, 2024; Abbas, 2024).
The articles in this collection reiterate that maps are not just markers of physical spaces, but rather affective and political aspects lie deeply entrenched within them, which could write some bodies and experiences out, or ensure their inclusion and recognition.
“Feeling designed out”: urban planning and gendered design
The authors of this collection contribute to ongoing conversations on feminist and trans geographies, architecture, planning, and infrastructure. Theocharides-Feldman and King draw attention to how urban planning and design can lead to many feeling ‘designed out’ of public spaces and services. The surveillance that young women and girls experience in UK and Greece, respectively, leave them feeling like they do not belong and out of place. In the words of one of Caparrós’ informants, women cab drivers have to negotiate ‘the drama of accessing toilets’ in the absence of public toilets. In the context of infrastructures that are often designed to be hostile towards queer bodies, Lubinsky and Aultman explore negotiating ‘forbidden’ desire and intimacy in public spaces. The powerful role of local and regional feminist activism and communing emerged in Levy & Celiberti’s work on the functioning of the Plaza las Pioneras in Montevideo, Uruguay – envisaging space as being in the process of commoning.
Spaces that might be perceived as commons, or even as feminist commons, compel us to consider the ways in which feminism, as a philosophical framework, influences urban planning, accessibility, and ecology, and how it could allow us to conceive of cities in alternative ways through the frame and practice of communal politics, care, and solidarity.
Cultivating solidarity, care, fun, and friendships in physical and digital spaces
Solidarities, rooted in a politics of care, have often emerged through protests and resistances to reclaim public spaces. In light of this, fun may be viewed as enabling subversive possibilities that permit claims to citizenship. Some of the contributions in this issue bring together fun and resistance. Avila and Zamora demonstrate how communities were created, counter publics carved, and care, friendship, and solidarity cultivated through cycling, by cyclist groups in Mexico. Flesler and Spataro draw attention to the needs of the university community at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina – survey participants expressed the need for spaces for “eating, resting, smoking, talking with classmates or colleagues, and even crying” during ‘downtime’/idle time. In her work, Mattar argues that care is essential to sustaining life (individual, human-non-human, city, and planet).
Transnational publics are produced by these solidarities, which span across the connections between bodies, femininity, state, nation, and the world, through digital mediation. Mehta and Sigurdardottir et al.’s contributions include national, regional, and transnational digital publics and solidarity, and may be an entry point for broader feminist mobilisations that creatively challenge normative “transnational,” global discourse.
Challenging erasures through art and creative theorisations
For women, the public-space-body is primarily characterised by erasure. Some bodies, experiences, and histories are marginalised or even erased as a result of socio-spatial changes brought about by neoliberal planning practices. Many contributions in this issue speak to this erasure. There is everyday resistance to this invisibilisation, even in the face of efforts to control and/or exclude women and queer bodies. Through embodied activities of walking, archiving, excavating, and writing, a number of essays in this issue challenge and subvert the narratives of the city’s demise and erasure, as well as those of its marginalised residents. In this volume, Avila and Zamora (2024), Mattar (2024), and Lubinsky and Aultman (2024) utilise creative writing styles, ‘aesthetic activism’, and highlight the experiences of trans, queer and black persons, magnifying their grief and desire through art, respectively. These radical yet commonplace acts of labour and remembering provide what Vosloo calls “livingness” in the face of death.
The rhetorics by which Marasela creates an embodied language to synthesise conflicting presences, desires, fantasies, and unmourned erasures are traced in Vosloo’s (2024) article. Paul’s (2024) approach to two creative texts to address the intersection of the hegemonic constructions of Kabul by using the postures of walking women to reflect on, revisit, and rewrite Afghan histories of access from 2000 to 2014, while Vosloo (2024) connects South African art through the work of Black female artists, urban narratives, and Black feminist geographies.
Thus, creative theorisations are a valuable approach to considering how gender and public space intersect. Top-down linear narratives that seek to restrict creative possibilities, particularly for marginalised groups, are challenged by the innovative ways in which women and other gender and sexually marginalized communities respond to attempts at their symbolic and material erasure- are present in this special issue. These articles evoke creative places where feelings are present, where desire, possibility, and hope coexist, and where normative, racist, and colonial conceptions of queerness, transness, and liminality are questioned and challenged.
Concluding reflections
While this issue attempted to engage with ideas and experiences of public space across geographies and disciplines, certain important themes are missing in this special issue. Unfortunately, concerns of caste, disability, and religion as factors that shape engagement with public spaces is not sufficiently engaged with this in issue. Concurrently, the pieces in this volume contribute to new fields of study such friendships, feminist fun, and faltupan (idleness) among women in both urban and rural settings. Others add further value to public activism by integrating care, ecological sustainability and solidarity, while deploying ‘demonic’ feminist methodologies, ‘disobedient’ citizenship (Mattar 2024) and ‘subversive invisibility’ to carve alternative geographies. Further, several authors have engaged with the affective and emotional dimensions of public spaces. The issue also highlights some gaps in scholarship such as the experiences and voices of children and young people. The use of creative theorisation by some of the authors serve to contest the frames of despair, drudgery and death that is typically utilised to articulate the experiences of marginalised groups. Thus, contributions foster new interdisciplinary partnerships across philosophy, ecology, fiction, literature, feminist and transgender geography, and other fields, allowing for the emergence of innovative theories. These collaborations support citizenship claims and bring theoretical conversations closer to activism, art, and policy.
Some of the key concerns that this special issue raise are: the need to integrate community care and ecological sustainability into planning and design of public spaces; build solidarity and alliances at local and trans-regional levels in order to strengthen citizenships claims; and reinscribe newer, more inclusive and equitable meanings to publics, public spaces and publicness. This volume would be interest to scholars and practitioners working on issues related to public spaces as well as readers who might want to explore the many ways in which public spaces are conceptualised and experienced.
This piece is based on the introduction to the special issue authored by Pumla Dineo Gqola, Iromi Perera, Shilpa Phadke, Nazanin Shahrokni, Sofia Zaragocin, Shivani Satija, & Anandita Ghosh.
References
Gqola, Pumla Dineo, Iromi Perera, Shilpa Phadke, Nazanin Shahrokni, Sofia Zaragocin, Shivani Satija, and Anandita Ghosh. 2024. “Gender and Public Space.” Gender & Development 32 (1–2): 1–25. doi:10.1080/13552074.2024.2376976.
Phadke, Shilpa (2010) ‘If women could risk pleasure: Reinterpreting violence in public space’, in Bishakha Datta (ed.) Nine Degrees of Justice: New Perspectives on Violence Against Women in India, Delhi: Zubaan.
Gqola, Pumla Dineo (2023) Female Fear Factory, Abuja & London: Cassava Republic Press.
Ranade, Shilpa and Shilpa Phadke (2023) ‘Putting people in place: Deconstructing gendered imaginations through mental maps’, in Hesam Kamalipour, Patricia Aelbrecht, and Nastaran Peimani (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Urban Design Research Methods (1st ed.). Routledge, pp 168–178.