Embodying the virus: epistemic and performative interventions to disciplinary hegemony in architecture and urbanism

Abstract

Our everyday experiences, formed in our domestic and public lives, produce and hold significant research data that, if acknowledged, observed and analyzed, can lead to new epistemological approaches to architecture and urban design. With everyday experiences as sources, Feminist Architecture emerges against the normative subjection that demarcates and fixates the predominant socio-economic order in our bodies. The production and reproduction of hegemonic knowledge in the discipline of architecture, as well as its methodologies, have been disputed and countered by the feminist movement, especially since the last decades of the 20th century. Specifically, feminism has challenged the hegemonic view of the discipline, which is based on norms, values and ideas that allows material power to be exercised. Historically this results in the erasure, misappropriation and appropriation of the work performed by feminized bodies, and others. Rethinking architectural epistemologies, implies engaging and exploring the life-territory-body-spatiality bond to expand the foundations of the discipline. Thus, this article seeks to reflect on how we can stretch architecture, while challenging traditional norms on the understanding of space, as a category and concept, in the potentially productive crisis that Feminist Architecture presents. A perspective and alliance with the epistemology of everyday lives, of bodies-territories, to point out the situated analytical possibilities of different epistemic and performative forms of intervening, challenging and contesting the disciplinary hegemony of urban and architectural studies.