Interested in areas of liminality surrounding the human identity, I have been exploring Kristeva’s ideas of abjection in relation to the moment where the boundaries of identity are crossed, an obscure moment due to the mutating post modern identity and its ambiguous boundaries.
Exploring the margins of gender and sexuality within personal identity, I have been led towards the urban space and how it confines the social body’s ideas of gender and sexual identity to the clean and proper.
Identity resists a defined boundary, yet the social body is restricted to the feminine and masculine signifiers apparent in the public realm. Doreen Massey discusses how “gendering of space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood within the societies that we live in.” Looking at the social occupation of urban spaces in Saskatoon, New York and Thunder Bay, I am exploring how public spaces are constructed to control and restrict open gendered movement using visual organization of gender and sexuality within media, commercialization, architecture and urban landscaping to question how that influences the social activities which define the function and development of the space.
