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Representative of a general tendency in critical theory to avoid grappling
with complex intersections, “Untitled: Housing Gender,” in discussing the
construction of gender, overlooks issues of race; however, this essay is
unique in its elision, for it fails to mention (much less discuss) the
intersection of race and gender in the midst of sustaining a glaring reference
to it. Ultimately Wigley misses the mark by not noting the blatant racial
implications in the canonic architectural texts he uses to illustrate the
architectural production of gender; his failure to address how race figures
in the construction of gendered space is predicated on his refusal to read
the historical presence 
of racial ideology in architectural theories producing gender. Consequently,
his article offers a startling narrative of how gender-constructing discourses
and critiques of these discourses participate in racial domination. In
the context of a different but analogous argument, Toni Morrison has said,
Through significant and underscored omissions, startling
contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled
their work with the signs and bodies of this presence — one can see that
a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of
Americanness. And it shows. (6)
In appropriating the formulations of Toni Morrison’s discussion of whiteness,
Africanist presence, and American identity, I am suggesting that Wigley’s
essay must be read as “peopled” “with the signs and bodies” of an Africanist
presence and a presence of racial ideology in general. Precisely because
this presence is so apparent yet remains unspoken, this essay can be identified
as a de-raced site of race construction; moreover, because this is an essay
explicitly about the construction of gendered space, it furnishes us with
a view of how masculinity and femininity can perform the construction and
erasure of race. One “can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence
was crucial” to the housing of gender and sexuality. And it shows.
In the space of a sixty-page piece engaging issues of gender and sexuality,
the word white appears almost sixty times in different forms—whiteness,
white skin, white surface—without one mention of its function as a racial
term or concept. Discussion of the value and meaning assigned to color,
relative to whiteness, pervades the article, without ever being considered
in relation to racial ideology or consciousness. There are many mentions
of “skin” and “surface” and extended deliberations of these categories
as they relate to notions of whiteness, color, sexuality, purity, and control,
yet not as they relate to race. The way architectural theory has debated
“ornament,” sensuality, sexuality, and color as threats to the “masculine
order” is a main consideration of the article, yet there is silence on
how race is informed by and informs such debates.
In addressing such silences, Morrison writes,
In matters of race, silence and evasion have historically
ruled literary discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language
in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate. The situation
is aggravated by the tremor
that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact
that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous,
liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference.
To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body
a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. (10)
As I have stated, the encoded presence of race in “Untitled: Housing Gender”
is apparent not only in Wigley’s discourse, but in the “historical” canonized
discourses he cites. In reading Wigley reading parts of the architectural
canon, it seems all the more urgent to uncover the racial ideology encoded
in the canon’s discursive constructions of gender and gendered space: if
we fail to un-cover this (canonized) ideology, we only re-cover it, and
obviously, re-canonize it. Ironically, Wigley begins by telling us that,
Architectural discourse is clearly defined more by what
it will not say than what it says. But what it cannot say may bear a relationship
to what can be said in those discourses. Architectural discourse plays
a strategic role in guaranteeing assumptions that are necessary to the
operation of other discourses. (329)
These “other” discourses, as Wigley represents them, are discourses on
gender and sexuality; however, in the space of his essay, assumptions necessary
to the operation of another “other” discourse—race—are indeed guaranteed
in Wigley’s own architectural discourse and in his interpretations of canonic
architectural discourses. In setting out to expose the way in which architecture
and architectural theory articulate separate masculine and feminine spaces
and thus produce gender hierarchy, Wigley is generally after an “unveiling”
of architecture and architectural theory as fully engaged in the construction
of ideologies: “This sense that buildings precede theory is a theoretical
effect maintained for specific ideological reasons. . .the sense of a building’s
detachment from sexual politics is produced by that very politics”
(331). Is the sense of a building’s (or a text’s) detachment from racial
politics also produced by that very politics? Such a question manifests
itself between the lines, for Wigley limits his analysis of sexual politics
to the terms of gender (in which the “other” is the female).  |
