Theotical workshop about
urban sexual culture
The sexual and sexed dimension of the city is often hidden behind the idea that public space is a “neutral” space where all subjectivities and categories disappear to leave room for the expression of universal citizenship, without any gender, sex, class, “race”. Indeed sexuality includes many places of everyday life.
Due to this reason its importance in individuals' life cannot be confined within the limits of the “private” sphere. Public space is not a simple backcloth, a theater stage where human actions take place, a social relations static platform, but rather public space is one of their constitutive dimensions, in turn historically made, reconfigured and transformed.
Riscop(r)iamo la città:
the sexual dimension of urban space
Riscop(r)iamo la città was at:
Genderotica, Rome, juin 2013
The development of modern cities contributed to root the division between public space and private space, strengthening the idea that there are bodies that are “out of place” in the public space, strengthening the idea that they are in the wrong place.
So space is continually exploited to highlight the “otherness” of the bodies and, consequently, their illegality to appear in the public space. In this workshop we will try to explore the sexual and sexed dimension of the city by readings, texts, video, stories, examples of experiences and experimentations .
We will pool our reflections, experiences and perceptions of/about city spaces and then, at the end of the day, go to get them back!
Public space is not a “neutral” space and neither the space “of everybody”, as very often we are led to believe. Contrariwise it is thought, managed and modeled on the basis of rigid dichotomies, focusing on pairs such as male/female, lawful/unlawful, homosexual/heterosexual, young/old, immigrant/native, healthy/sick. This placed nature of the public space is full of meaning and hides itself behind the naturalization of the division between public space and private space, that in turn is a reflection of the division of the social life between public and private.