Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopolitics of Architecture: From the Secret Museum to Playboy

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the work of Michel Foucault on biopolitics, as well as its feminist, queer, and transgender readings by Judith Butler, Teresa De Lauretis, Donna Haraway and Susan Stryker, amongst others, this dissertation understands architecture as a biopolitical technology for producing gender and sexuality: it studies how political and sexual identities are shaped through architecture, examining the relationship between gender, sexuality, techniques of vision and surveillance, medical techniques of management of reproduction, and techniques of body production, and the construction of the public/private divide, grounding such analysis in a series of case studies (the secret museum, l'Enfer, the boudoir, the state brothel, Playboy Enterprises' spaces, the Pill...) which outline a genealogy of modern regimes of spatialization of gender and sexuality. This dissertation studies the impact on architecture of the displacement from what Foucault called a disciplinary regime of production of sexual subjectivity (characterized by the architectures of the panopticon, the hospital, the state-brothel and the domestic space) to what I shall define as pharmacopornographic regime derived from the introduction of new chemical, pharmacological, prosthetic, media, and electronic surveillance techniques for controlling gender and sexual reproduction, as well as the post-Fordist capitalist modes of production of gender and sexuality.