Symposia
Noncompliant Bodies: Social Equity and Public Space
The discipline of architecture tends to overlook or actively exclude persons who fall outside white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied norms. This symposium, convened by Joel Sanders and Susan Stryker, will assemble a cross-disciplinary group of designers and scholars to explore the relationship between architecture and the demands for social justice voiced by people who have been marginalized and oppressed on the basis of race, gender and disability. The symposium will examine how designers working in collaboration with experts from related disciplines can critique and transform one of three architectural types: restrooms, museums, and urban streets. Our objective will be to propose alternative futures that rethink the relationship between bodies and built environments in ways that better serve the goals of social equity.
Noncompliant Bodies complies with AIA Health, Safety and Welfare credits. All three sessions of the symposium have been approved as HSW courses for the AIA’s Continuing Education System. Those attending the full symposium can earn 10.5 HSW Learning Units.
Program
Friday, April 6 at 2:00 p.m.
Panel 1: Restroom
Barbara Penner, The Bartlett, University College London
Sheila Cavanagh, York University
Susan Stryker, University of Arizona
Joel Sanders, Yale University
Terry Kogan, University of Utah
Quemuel Arroyo, NYC Department of Transportation
Friday, April 6 at 6:30 p.m.
Keynote
Jack Halberstam, Columbia University, in conversation with
Susan Stryker, University of Arizona
Saturday, April 7 at 10:00 a.m.
Panel 2: Museum
Joel Sanders, Yale University
Jennifer Tyburczy, UC Santa Barbara
Mabel Wilson, Columbia University
Mario Gooden, Columbia University
Charles Renfro, DS+R
Stuart Comer, Museum of Modern Art
Saturday, April 7 at 2:30 p.m.
Panel 3: Urban Streets and Plazas
Jos Boys, Northumbria University
Clare Sears, San Francisco State University
Elijah Anderson, Yale University
Keller Easterling, Yale University
Rashad Shabazz, Arizona State University
Alison Kafer, Southwestern University
Robert Adams, University of Michigan
Participant bios
Joel Sanders is the Principal of JSA and a Professor at Yale School of Architecture where he is the Director of the M.Arch II Program. Editor of STUD: Architectures of Masculinity and Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture, Sanders’s writings and practice have explored the complex relationship between culture and social space, looking at the impact that evolving cultural forces (such as gender identity and the body, technology and new media, and the nature/culture dualism) have on the designed environment. JSA projects have been featured in international exhibitions and the permanent collections of MoMA, SF MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. The firm has received numerous awards, including six New York Chapter AIA Design Awards, three New York State AIA Design Awards, three Interior Design Best of Year Awards, two ALA/IIDA Library Interior Design Awards, and Design Citations from Progressive Architecture.
Susan Stryker, a principal collaborator with Joel Sanders and Terry Kogan on the Stalled! initiative, is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, where she leads the Transgender Studies Initiative and serves as founding co-editor of the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. An Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker (Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria [ITVS 2005]), she has also been recognized for her co-edited anthologies The Transgender Studies Reader (Routlege, 2006; Lambda Literary Award) and The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge, 2013; Ruth Benedict Book Prize). She earned her Ph.D. in United States History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship in sexuality studies at Stanford University, and has been distinguished visiting faculty at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Barbara Penner is Professor in Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She is author of Bathroom (2013), awarded the 2014 RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University-Located Research, and Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America (2009). She is co-editor of Sexuality and Gender at Home (2017), Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009), and Gender Space Architecture (Routledge, 2000). She is a regular contributor to the architectural journals Places and Architectural Review.
Sheila L. Cavanagh is Associate Professor at York University, co-editor of Somatechnics and former chair of the Canadian Sexuality Studies Association. Cavanagh edited a special double-issue on psychoanalysis in Transgender Studies Quarterly (2017) and co-edited Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis (2013). She wrote Sexing the Teacher (2007) and Queering Bathrooms (2010), the latter a GLBT Indie Book Award finalist and recipient of the CWSA/ACEF Outstanding Scholarship Prize. Cavanagh wrote a play called Queer Bathroom Monologues which was given the Audience Pick Award at the Toronto Fringe Festival and later professionally staged at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto (2014).
Terry Kogan is currently a Professor of Law at the University of Utah. He has spent the last decade considering issues surrounding the legal and cultural norms that mandate the segregation of public restrooms by sex. Terry has written extensively on bathrooms and gender segregation from a legal perspective. His latest scholarship, “Public Restrooms and the Distorting of Transgender Identity” (North Carolina Law Review, Volume 95, Issue 4, forthcoming) addresses North Carolina House Bill 2, which requires that public restroom access be based on biological sex, rather than gender identity. Most recently, he has submitted an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court transgender restroom case – G.G. v. Gloucester City School Board.
Quemuel (Q) Arroyo is the first Policy Analyst for Accessibility and ADA Coordinator for the New York City Department of Transportation. Q graduated from NYU in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Design and History of Architecture. As a member of the executive staff team, Q represents DOT and advises the Commissioner on all matters relating to accessibility. He works closely with division heads throughout the agency to ensure that their programs and operations follow current policies for accessibility and that they are made accessible to all New Yorkers.
Jack Halberstam is Professor of English and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of 6 books including, most recently, Trans: *A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (UC Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book titled Wild Things: Queerness Beyond Nature.
Jennifer Tyburczy is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and affiliated faculty in the Department of Theater and Dance and the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (University of Chicago Press 2016) won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies. Based on this research, she curated the award-winning exhibition Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York.
Mabel O. Wilson is a Professor of Architecture, a Co-director of Global Africa Lab and the Associate Director at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Studio &, founded by Wilson, is a collaborative transdisciplinary practice whose projects and scholarly research navigate between the fields of architecture, art, and cultural history. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?), a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide.
Mario Gooden is a cultural practice architect and sole principal of Huff + Gooden Architects. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology. His work crosses the thresholds between the design of architecture and the built environment, writing, research, speaking, and education advocacy in the pursuit of spatial and social justice. Gooden is also a Professor of Practice at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) of Columbia University where he is the Co-director of the Global Africa Lab (GAL). He teaches advanced architectural design and theory.
Charles Renfro is a Partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), a design studio whose practice spans the fields of architecture, urban design, art and performance. With a focus on cultural and civic projects, DS+R’s work addresses the changing role of institutions and the future of cities. The studio’s major works include the High Line and the transformation of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts campus, both in New York; The Broad in Los Angeles; and Zaryadye Park in Moscow. DS+R projects in construction include the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro, as well as The Shed and the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The studio has completed academic buildings for Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Brown University. He is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts.
Stuart Comer is Chief Curator of the Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art. Recent projects at MoMA have included Tania Bruguera: Untitled (Havana, 2000) (2018), Inbox: Steve McQueen (2017), Inbox: Charles Atlas (2017), Alexandra Bachzetsis’s Massacre: Variations on a Theme (2017), Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers (at MoMA PS1, 2016), BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE (2016), Tony Oursler: Imponderable (2016), Bouchra Khalili: The Mapping Journey Project (2016), Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 (2015), Cut to Swipe (2014), and Simone Forti and Charlemagne Palestine: illlummminnnatttionnnsssss!!!!!!! (2014). Comer was co-curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2014 Biennial, and previously served as the first Curator of Film at Tate Modern, London.
Jos Boys is an independent scholar. She trained originally in architecture, was co-founder of UK-based Matrix, a feminist architecture and research practice, and has been involved in community-based design practices for many years, as well as being a researcher, consultant, educator, writer and photographer. Most recently she has been undertaking several disability-related projects across architectural and built environment education and practice. These explore new critical and creative ways of designing for inclusion. Jos co-founded The Dis/Ordinary Architecture Project with disabled artist Zoe Partington, and also publishes extensively, including 2017 (Ed.) Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (Routledge 2017) and Doing Disability Differently: an alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability, and designing for everyday life (Routledge 2014).
Clare Sears is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University. She is author of the book Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Duke University Press), which was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award in 2016 and was co-winner of the Committee on LGBT History’s John Boswell Award in 2017. She has published articles in Women’s Studies Quarterly, GLQ, and the upcoming Routledge History of Queer America. She is currently working on a new book that investigates the historical emergence of emotional disturbance as a disability category in special education law.
Elijah Anderson is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale. His publications include A Place on the Corner; Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, winner of the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society; Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community, winner of the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology, and The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. He is the recipient of two prestigious awards from the American Sociological Association, the 2013 Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award and the 2018 W.E.B. DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, as well as the 2017 Merit Award from the Eastern Sociological Society.
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and Professor at Yale. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. Other books include: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999). Her research and writing was included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and she lectures and exhibits internationally.
Rashad Shabazz is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. His academic expertise brings together human geography, Black cultural studies, gender studies, and critical prison studies. His research explores how race, sexuality and gender are informed by geography. His most recent work (Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2015) examines how carceral power within the geographies of Black Chicagoans shaped urban planning, housing policy, policing practices, gang formation, high incarceration rates, masculinity, and health. Shabazz’s scholarship has appeared in Souls, The Spatial-Justice Journal, ACME, Gender, Place & Culture, and Occasions and he has also published several book chapters and book reviews.
Alison Kafer is Professor of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University, where she also teaches in the Environmental Studies and Race & Ethnicity Studies programs. She is the author of Feminist, Queer, Crip, and her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Disability Studies Quarterly, Feminist Disability Studies, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Sex and Disability, and South Atlantic Quarterly. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Robert Adams is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master of Science Design and Health program at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. Additionally, Robert is a faculty member at the Stamps School of Art & Design and Director of the University of Michigan Initiative on Disability Studies. Robert’s design practice connects architecture, civic infrastructure, and disability culture where bodies, actors, wearable technologies, and responsive environments coalesce. The research is directed at spatial strategies that draw out the bio-politics of alterity as a critical platform for innovation.
Poster by Pentagram.
