Assistant Professor Sara Mautino
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Journal Articles
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Designing Sapphic Modernity
This article addresses the question of why so many of the women involved in the practice and profession of interior design during the early part of the twentieth century were what we might now identify as lesbians. While design historians have acknowledged these women's non-heterosexualities, the connection between female sexual dissidence and modern interior design has been left largely underexplored and undertheorized. In the spirit of historical inventiveness which characterizes most work on the aesthetic cultural history of sexuality I argue that these women's designs were importantly involved in creating the historical spaces of sapphic modernity, and that the growing field of sapphic modernity has itself been designed by these women's works. Overall, I suggest that modern interior design was a critical site for the regulation and contestation of sexuality, and generate a speculative theoretical framework for understanding the centrality of women's design works to the generation of a sexually dissident, sapphic modernity. -
Queer Space in the Ruins of Dictatorship Architecture
This article examines the role played by “third world” queer place-making practices in the reproduction of postcolonial dreams of urban and global modernity. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Manila, the Philippines, the article investigates the transformation of the Brutalist structures erected under the Marcos dictatorship into sites of transgender performance. More specifically, it examines the conversion of the Manila Film Center (1981)—a long-abandoned structure rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of entombed construction workers—into the host site for the Amazing Philippine Theater, a “drag” production marketed to tourist audiences as “the largest transvestite show in Asia.” The paper suggests that the Film Center can be read as a modern ruin: a spectral environment that elicits a lost sense of optimism and globalism, while inducing feelings of terror and dread by serving as a reminder of what awaits those who subscribe to the dictatorship’s promise of modernity. In turn, the paper reads the Amazing Philippine Theater as a queer space emergent in the ruins of modern dreams: a space that has inherited the never-to-be-completed task of becoming global and that thus enables the aspirations embodied by dictatorship architecture to have a life beyond death. By drawing links between transgender performance and the production of a third world city in “first world drag,” the paper demonstrates the relations of complicity that bind “third world” queer place-making projects to the postcolonial state’s monumentalist attempts to materialize claims of truth, beauty, order, and progress through the adoption of modern aesthetic forms. -
Queer Undergrowth: Weeds and Sexuality in the Architecture of the Garden
This article considers the queer roles of weeds and undergrowth in the architecture of the garden. With the garden defined as a site where human pleasure is ordered and controlled, undergrowth is interrogated as both architectural agent of queer space and as intimate co-producer of queer sensuality. This argument charts the roles of weeds in the sexual history of the English garden, with a particular focus on the vegetal architecture of eighteenth-century wildernesses, especially at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in Lambeth, London. The article produces two speculative modes of interrogating the queer potential of weeds and undergrowth. The first is a schematic outline of the material functions of undergrowth in creating spaces for queer desire, seduction and intimacy. The second is a narrative re-performance of the embodied labor of gardening, as a key site where the conflict of plant and human desires is enacted, and through which queer modes of sensual relation are constituted.
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The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification
This paper examines how queer practices of transformation enable the preservation and perversion of the logics, aspirations, and violences that animated Imelda Marcos's “war of urban beautification”. It traces conceptual overlaps between the notions of truth and beauty that underpinned Imelda's faith in architectural modernism and which operate in the sex/gender tradition of kabaklaan. Using the case study of the Manila Film Center, a formerly abandoned and famously haunted Marcos‐era building that has been transformed into the host site of a “transgender” revue, the paper demonstrates how queerness, necropower, architecture, and dreams of urban and global modernity come together through the spatial effects of authoritarian power. -
Home Is the Place We All Share Building Queer Collective Utopias
In the early 1990s, feminist challenges to mainstream architectural discourses were taken upon by queer space theorists, who broadened the focus from understanding how space is gendered and sexualised to suggest new ways of inhabiting space. In the last decade, a new generation, exemplified by artists Elmgreen & Dragset's transformation of architectural spaces, further pushed the challenges, offering a communitarian ideal that puts aside traditional public and private divisions. These spatial experiences can be linked to the ideas of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz who proposes a queer futurity tainted with political idealism which can inspire architecture to emulate a queer collectivity.
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Queer
This project locates itself at an intersection of queer theory with art and architecture theory relating to identity, the home, and political agency. The research is born from the desire to explore alternative notions of domesticity and speculate on the way architecture can facilitate and respond to new definitions of family and home. The homogeneity offered by the prototypical nuclear family and the suburban context in which it resides has proliferated, despite an increasingly diverse population of homeowners and increasingly empowered minority groups within our society. Intended to specifically address queer domesticity, this MDP uses queer theory as a catalyst to directly subvert traditional interpretations of the domestic realm, and offer an architectural speculation as to how a critical engagement from a position of marginality can offer a new, positive interpretation of domesticity. -
Hiding in Plain Sight: Love, life and the queering of domesticity in early twentieth-century New England
"The Scarab" (1907), a sprawling Shingle-style house in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was built by poet and professor Katharine Lee Bates as a home for herself and her partner Katharine Coman, a social economist and labor activist. Both women had lived and taught at Wellesley College, founded as a single-sex institution for higher education in 1870, for over a quarter of a century. In their new home they adapted many of its hybrid spaces for living and working, surrounding themselves with friends, family, colleagues, and students to form a lively and engaged community of women. While it decisively broke with familiar conventions in both plan and program, "The Scarab" nonetheless fits comfortably in its leafy, suburban neighborhood, demonstrating that this committed couple could "hide in plain sight" while radically queering the terms of early-twentieth-century domesticity.
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Sex and the Single Building: The Weston Havens House, 1941—2001
This study explores an iconic twentieth-century house, the Weston Havens house, in
Berkeley, California, designed by architect Harwell Hamilton Harris between 1939 and 1941. It was inspired by personal circumstances. After occupying his beloved "Sky House" for sixty years, philanthropist Weston Havens donated the famous house to the University of California in 2001.1 As part of my planned sabbatical in Berkeley in 2007-2008, I was offered a chance to live in the Havens house. But when university representatives learned that I would be coming with a husband and two children, the offer was recanted: "The house won't work for a family," they said. Curious to know how an icon of post war domestic architecture could not accommo date my family?which, I usually assume, is the conventional family size and organization meant to inhabit such houses?my interest was piqued. Why was this impossible? Could such a house exist? How queer. -
Is Creativity Masculine? Visual Arts College Students’ Perceptions of the Gender Stereotyping of Creativity and Its Influence on Creative Self-Efficacy
This study investigated visual arts college students’ perceptions of the gender stereotyping of creativity and the influence of this stereotyping on creative self-efficacy. The sample consisted of 1198 Chinese visual arts college students. The results showed that (a) both male and female students identified stereotypically masculine traits as more important to creativity than stereotypically feminine traits are, (b) male students demonstrated higher creative self-efficacy than their female counterparts did, and (c) students’ gender significantly moderated the effect of the gender stereotyping of creativity on creative self-efficacy. Specifically, the gender stereotyping of creativity had a positive effect on male students and a negative effect on female students. These findings revealed that gender stereotypes dominate concepts of creativity in Chinese art education and may hinder female students’ development of creative self-efficacy, resulting in gendered inequality in the visual arts field. The implications of these findings for visual arts education in China are discussed. -
Vapour and Steam: The Victorian Turkish Bath, Homosocial Health, and Male Bodies on Display
This article glances into the exotic Oriental interior spaces David Urquhart created for his Jermyn Street Hammam (Turkish bath). Unlike most Victorian public baths, Urquhart's hammam figured prominently in the Victorian imaginary as a privatised public space erected for the cleaning, cleansing, detoxification, and relaxation of the male body. Located in the ultra fashionable West End, the Hammam offered its patrons a location distinct from the harried and polluted streets outside its exotic doors. As the sheath defining and protecting masculine bodily integrity and health, skin and architecture were equally implicated in the defining of an ideal, normative healthy male body. Finally, I highlight how as exotic, Oriental, and decidedly ambiguous the various modulated spaces of the Hammam furnished an ideal venue for a queer constituency to experience safely-at the levels of the visual and the corporeal-homoerotic desire. In this all-male environment, the performances enacted in the hammam centred on a scopic and somatic pleasure which enlivened a distinctly illicit homoerotic desiring gaze and subsequent queer appropriation of its space, despite its best attempts to keep things clean and pure.
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Dress-code: gender performance and misbehavior in the manor.
This article is a queer reading of the architecture of Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf's mansion Mårbacka. Through a combination of performativity theory and architecture theory, the article addresses social and historical constructions of gender and sexuality, complicit with the entities age, class and nationality, through architecture. Architecture is explored ‘on the one hand’ as a representation of social norms and ‘on the other hand’ as a practice which can subvert them. Departing from a performative perspective on identity, the term cross-cladding is introduced as a tool to interpret architecture as dressing and thereby its complex, layered and manifold performances of gender and sexualities. The article writes a social and architectural history of what has been called ‘the most famous manor in Sweden and of Swedish manors the most famous in the world’ (Sterner 1935, 4). Mårbacka was not simply the home of Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) and her kin but also a public display of this Nobel Prize-winning first woman of the Swedish Academy – a national monument. Lagerlöf continuously worked on the main building. In 1919–1924, it was transformed with the help of the architects' office of Isak Gustaf Clason. It also appears in Lagerlöf's novels and throughout the building there are references to her books and biography. There is something queer here. The master of Mårbacka was a woman who loved women and made room for a household of women. This article discusses how architecture can represent a gendered disguise and reveals Mårbacka as an excessive, patriarchal ‘power suit’, which enabled a lifestyle that deviated from the norms of society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
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The End of Queer Space?
In 1997, Aaron Bet sky published Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire. The book worked fiuidly between histories of queerness and design, constructing a lineage of queer space
while also locating sites and geneses of queerness within architecture's disciplinary boundaries. He looked at Serlio, at mirrors, at antiques, and at Charles Moore. He considered decorating, postmodernism, and AIDS (not necessarily together), ultimately developing a story of queer public presence and queer space that,
in the end, considered its possible dissolution. The book was both a celebration and an elegy - and while participating in the spatial approach to queerness that was so dominant at the time, it was also prescient in anticipating the appropriation and deradicalization of queerness by mainstream culture that would occur in the following decades. He introduced concepts like "postindividual" to predict
new forms of social collectivity enabled and invented by the advent of digital networking, and raised points about a range of issues - from collecting to the everyday - that seem particularly relevant in
our postdigital age. Betsky, now president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin, agreed to a Skype conversation in August to track how his thinking
on these topics has changed in the intervening years, giving insight to how the relationship between architecture and queerness has evolved through recent cultural transformations. -
Holes in Architecture: A Queer Eye on a Design Method
This article analyzes the formation of a conceptual persona in a narrative which some architects use in the design process. It focuses on a description of such a persona borrowed
from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ’s What is Philosophy? It presents the work of three architects who explore how this persona can express a corporeal, public and emotional presence; elaborating
on relations which extend beyond the design task and engage with their cultural context. The task all three were given is to design a
glory hole that links divided lovers. The actuality of this configuration asks the inhabitants to imagine the presence of the
other much like the architects would in the design process. The research is novel allowing architects to truly indulge in exploring the presence of sexual desire and longing in public space.
Books
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Sex and Buildings
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Call Number: 720.1030904 W726s - Main LibraryISBN: 9781780231044Publication Date: 2013-08-15Massive modern skyscrapers, obelisks, towers--all are structures that, thanks to their phallic shape, are often associated with sex. But other buildings are more subtly connected, as they provide the frameworks for our sexual lives and act as reminders of our sexual memories. This relationship between sex and buildings mattered more than ever in the United States and Europe during the turbulent twentieth century, when a culture of unprecedented sexual frankness and tolerance emerged and came to dominate many aspects of public life. Part architectural history, part cultural history, and part travelogue, Sex and Buildings explores how progressive sexual attitudes manifest themselves in architecture, asking what progressive sexuality might look like architecturally and exploring the successes and failures of buildings' attempts to reflect it. In search of structures that reflect the sexual mores of their inhabitants, Richard J. Williams visits modernist buildings in Southern California, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, the Seagram in New York, communes from the 1960s, and more. A fascinating and often funny look at a period of extraordinary social change coupled with aesthetic invention, Sex and Buildings will change the way we look at the buildings around us. -
Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole
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Call Number: eBook - clink link for instant accessISBN: 9780271085883Publication Date: 2020-07-15Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole shows that the Gothic style in architecture and the decorative arts and the tradition of medievalist research associated with Horace Walpole (1717-1797) and his circle cannot be understood independently of their own homoerotic culture. Centered around Walpole's Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Walpole and his "Strawberry Committee" of male friends, designers, and dilettantes invigorated an extraordinary new mode of Gothic design and disseminated it in their own commissions at Old Windsor and Donnington Grove in Berkshire, Lee Priory in Kent, the Vyne in Hampshire, and other sites. Matthew M. Reeve argues that the new "third sex" of homoerotically inclined men and the new "modern styles" that they promoted--including the Gothic style and chinoiserie--were interrelated movements that shaped English modernity. The Gothic style offered the possibility of an alternate aesthetic and gendered order, a queer reversal of the dominant Palladian style of the period. Many of the houses built by Walpole and his circle were understood by commentators to be manifestations of a new queer aesthetic, and in describing them they offered the earliest critiques of what would be called a "queer architecture." Exposing the role of sexual coteries in the shaping of eighteenth-century English architecture, this book offers a profound and eloquent revision to our understanding of the origins of the Gothic Revival and to medievalism itself. It will be welcomed by architectural historians as well as scholars of medievalism and specialists in queer studies. -
Queer Spaces
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Call Number: eBook - clink link for instant accessISBN: 9781003297499Publication Date: 2022-04-30An independent bookshop in Glasgow. An ice cream parlour in Havana, where strawberry is the queerest choice. A cathedral in ruins in Managua, occupied by the underground LGBTQIA+ community. Queer people have always found ways to exist and be together, and there will always be a need for queer spaces. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell have gathered together a community of contributors to share stories of spaces that range from the educational to the institutional to the re-appropriated, and many more besides. With historic, contemporary and speculative examples from around the world, Queer Spaces recognises LGBTQIA+ life past and present as strong, vibrant, vigorous, and worthy of its own place in history. Looking forward, it suggests visions of what form these spaces may take in the future to continue uplifting queer lives. Featured spaces include: Black Lesbian and Gay Centre, London Category Is Books, Glasgow Christopher Street, New York Coppelia, Havana New Sazae, Tokyo ONE Institute for Homophile Studies, Los Angeles Pop-Up spaces, Dhaka Queer House Party, Online Santiago Apóstol Cathedral, Managua Trans Memory Archive, Buenos Aires Victorian Pride Centre, Melbourne -
The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods: Renaissance and Resurgence
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Call Number: eBook - clink link for instant accessISBN: 9783030660734Publication Date: 2021This open access book examines the significance of gay neighborhoods (or ‘gayborhoods’) from critical periods of formation during the gay liberation and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to proven durability through the HIV/AIDS pandemic during the 1980s and 1990s, to a mature plateau since 2000. The book provides a framework for contemplating the future form and function of gay neighborhoods. Social and cultural shifts within gay neighborhoods are used as a framework for understanding the decades-long struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and equality. Resulting from gentrification, weakening social stigma, and enhanced rights for LGBTQ+ people, gay neighborhoods have recently become “less gay,” following a 50-year period of resilience. Meanwhile, other neighborhoods are becoming “more gay,” due to changing preferences of LGBTQ+ individuals and a propensity for LGBTQ+ families to form community in areas away from established gayborhoods. The current ‘plateau’ in the evolution of gay neighborhoods is characterized by generational differences—between Baby Boom pioneers and Millennials who favour broad inclusivity—signaling various possible trajectories for the future ‘afterlife’ of these important LGBTQ+ urban spaces. The complicating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic provides a point of comparison for lessons learned from gay neighborhoods and the LGBTQ+ community that bravely endured the onset of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in various disciplines—including sociology, social work, anthropology, gender and sexuality, LGTBQ+ and queer studies, as well as urban geography, architecture, and city planning—and to policymakers and advocates concerned with LGBTQ+ rights and social justice. -
Another Country
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Call Number: Main Library, Stacks ; 306.76620973 H567aISBN: 9780814737187Publication Date: 2010-06-01The metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplines--art, media, literature, performance, and fashion studies--he develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater. Impassioned and provocative, Another Country expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond its city limits. Herring leads his readers from faeries in the rural Midwest to photographs of white supremacists in the deep South, from Roland Barthes's obsession with Parisian fashion to a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel set in the Appalachian Mountains, and from cubist paintings in Lancaster County to lesbian separatist communes on the northern California coast. The result is an entirely original account of how queer studies can--and should--get to another country. -
Queer Constellations
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Call Number: eBook - clink link for instant accessISBN: 0816644039Publication Date: 2004-12-15Hardcover sales of more than 30,000 copies confirm the growing interest in perennial gardening and a natural garden style."If you want lots of helpful advice, if you want a garden that reflects nature rather than the artifice of conventional gardens, and if you want to look at some quite splendid photographs, this is the book for you." -The Scotsman -
Stud
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Call Number: 720.108 S933ISBN: 9781568980768Publication Date: 1996-05-01Stud is an interdisciplinary exploration of the active role architecture plays in the construction of male identity. Architects, artists, and theorists investigate how sexuality is constituted through the organization of materials, objects, and human subjects in actual space. This collection of essays and visual projects critically analyzes the spaces that we habitually take for granted but that quietly participates in the manufacturing of "maleness." Employing a variety of critical perspectives (feminism, "queer theory," deconstruction, and psychoanalysis), Stud's contributors reveal how masculinity, always an unstable construct, is coded in our environment. Stud also addresses the relationship between architecture and gay male sexuality, illustrating the resourceful ways that gay men have appropriated and reordered everyday public domains,from streets to sex clubs, in the formation of gay social space. Essays include Steven Cohan on the bachelor pad, Ellen Lupton on the electric carving knife, Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders on the psychoanalytic office, Lee Edelman on the urinal, Marcia Ian on the gym, D.A. Miller on the piano bar, and George Chauncey on the street. Visual projects include work by architects Rem Koolhaas, Mark Robbins, Violich and Kennedy, and Interim Office of Architecture, and artists Matthew Barney, Renee Green, Vito Acconci, and Flex-Torreros. -
Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction
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Call Number: Library Auxiliary Building Available , Closed Stacks - Request via Special Collections - Main Library - 2nd Floor ; 2019-001 T2703ISBN: 9781938922091Publication Date: 2013-05-30As the 1960s became The Sixties, architect Horace Gifford executed a remarkable series of beach houses that transformed the terrain and culture of New York's Fire Island. Growing up on the beaches of Florida, Gifford forged a deep connection with coastal landscapes. Pairing this sensitivity with jazzy improvisations on modernist themes, he perfected a sustainable modernism in cedar and glass that was as attuned to natural landscapes as to our animal natures. Gifford's serene 1960s pavilions provided refuge from a hostile world, while his exuberant post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS masterpieces orchestrated bacchanals of liberation. Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift once spurned Hollywood limos for the rustic charm of Fire Island's boardwalks. Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's here. Diane von Furstenburg showed off her latest wrap dresses to an audience that included Halston, Giorgio Sant' Angelo, Calvin Klein and Geoffrey Beene. Today, such a roster evokes the aloof, gated compounds of the Hamptons or Malibu. But these celebrities lived in modestly scaled homes alongside middle-class vacationers, all with equal access to Fire Island's natural beauty. Blending cultural and architectural history, Fire Island Modernist ponders a fascinating era through an overlooked architect whose life, work and colorful milieu trace the operatic arc of a lost generation, and still resonate with artistic and historical import.
