Summer
Show
2022
Show
2022
24
November
18:00 SAST
November
18:00 SAST
Gender Geography
From Rural Tales to Kitchen Realities
Codified Artefacts. Mdiya, L. Unit 19. 2021.
Liso Mdiya
BArch Hons 2021Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Tuliza Sindi
Unit Tutor: Muhammad Dawjee
Unit Assistant: Lynette Breed
UNIT 19︎︎︎
The Act of Service: The Myth of Violence
Social theologist Barney Warf (2010) states how gender geography has long been recognised as an important social tool that constructs the realities of black women’s lives (Warf, 2010). It does not manifest as an intrinsic system of choice, but is rather enforced in the lifetime of black women.
The investigation analyses the gendered spatial conditions of eMantlaneni Village in the Eastern Cape through the study of Xhosa women’s training from girl to woman through the ritual practice of the Reed Dance. The project maps architecture’s complicity in the social classification of black women, or how architecture aids in subjugating Xhosa women through this Reed Dance, and explores the complicity of the authority figures that oversee this cultural rite of passage. The Reed Dance perpetuates gender roles and re-programmes spaces such as the rural kitchen into a training ground of pacification and domestication.
The project proposes a traditional camp that rearranges the existing Reed Dance site’s architectural components, to trouble patriarchal systems embedded in traditional Xhosa spaces. I propose that architecture should reconfigure this spatial programming to disrupts these inherited spatial practices, to allow Xhosa women to claim their identities from this public pedestal of the Dance.
The investigation analyses the gendered spatial conditions of eMantlaneni Village in the Eastern Cape through the study of Xhosa women’s training from girl to woman through the ritual practice of the Reed Dance. The project maps architecture’s complicity in the social classification of black women, or how architecture aids in subjugating Xhosa women through this Reed Dance, and explores the complicity of the authority figures that oversee this cultural rite of passage. The Reed Dance perpetuates gender roles and re-programmes spaces such as the rural kitchen into a training ground of pacification and domestication.
The project proposes a traditional camp that rearranges the existing Reed Dance site’s architectural components, to trouble patriarchal systems embedded in traditional Xhosa spaces. I propose that architecture should reconfigure this spatial programming to disrupts these inherited spatial practices, to allow Xhosa women to claim their identities from this public pedestal of the Dance.
Keywords:
Gender Geography, Kitchen, Social Classification, Black Womanhood, Social Object, Inciyo
Gender Geography, Kitchen, Social Classification, Black Womanhood, Social Object, Inciyo
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