Excess
the possibility of disruption on the side of woman/women
In this paper I explore the tropic figure 'woman' as a disruptive 'excess' in the field of architectural theory. My curiosity about this term is due to its associative relations to another tropic figure, 'space.' In recent social theory there is extensive use of these two figures - 'woman' and 'space.' In Gynesis, Alice Jardine puts forward an interesting interpretation pendence on this association between 'woman' and 'space,' and its implications for female subjectivity. It is a way of incorporating that which has eluded or engulfed the master narrative. She argues that the term 'space,' which stands for 'nonknowledge,' has been coded as feminine, as woman. My interests are specifically architectural in that I want to focus on 'space' as architectural space, a space in which the metaphoric associations cannot leave behind the materiality of space on the ground, but also in which metaphoric space cannot simply be superimposed onto space on the ground without careful translation. The other level of architectural specificity is in the use of woman and/or its associative term, the feminine, within architectural discourses. This is most often implicit in the infrastructure of the text and it has taken strange turns within recent sexualisations of texts.
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