Material Matters: Gender and the City

Abstract

This article provides a review of contemporary literature related to gender and the city, drawing primarily from Anglo-American feminist geography, but also architecture and urban planning. It first reflects back on early feminist interventions in the modern city, often referred to as the ‘municipal housekeeping’ movement or early ‘feminist materialism’. In this movement, middle-class female reformers drew upon ideological associations between women and homes to address ‘material’ concerns related to home/housing, health, and urban politics. I reflect on this activism to raise awareness of early feminist praxis and to suggest that these three themes (and the materiality that links them) remain important areas for investigation within feminist geography, especially as cities have been ravaged by neoliberal austerity and are embroiled in a global recession. Using new feminist materialism as an organizing theme, I argue for a refined and reinvigorated material gendered urban research that addresses home/housing, health, and urban politics. This feminist materialism is decoupled from restrictive versions of structuralism, attentive to embodiment, encompassing of intersectionalities, focused on the everyday and beyond, and attuned to social justice and feminist praxis.