This summer I was lucky enough to attend a symposium in São Paulo, co-sponsored by Princeton University School of Architecture and the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU) and the University of São Paulo (USP) and led by Professors Beatriz Colomina and José Lira. The conference oriented itself around the theme of singleness – probing research from Ph.D. students on how architecture responds to the spatial needs of the single individual in world organized around the nuclear family. My presentation, titled “The City of Sexual Deviancy: Race, Rodents, and the Queerness of Single Motherhood” sought to answer these questions by centering the racialized figure of the single mother in an analysis of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Maternity Center (1975-2014). Though distinct, this work is connected to my previous writing on single motherhood – a theme I pursued in an essay entitled “‘Housing Is a Human Right’: Moms for Housing’s Black Feminist Politics of Shelter,” published in Public Culture in September 2022. The essay examines the activism of Moms for Housing – a group of formerly unhoused Black mothers in Oakland confronting dispossession, real estate speculation, and the extractive privatization of housing in California’s Bay Area – arguing that their work offers potential flightlines toward a post-property future.
Conferences
In 2023 I was fortunate to attend four conferences – each with a unique audience ranging from architectural and art historians, to designers, urbanists, sociologists, and artists. As a queer PhD student in the History & Theory of Architecture, I’ve found it incredibly important to build a network of queer and feminist scholars who think about the built environment through multiple lenses. For me, attending conferences is a way to be in community with these folks, to offer and receive support with an aim always set towards imagining ways to make cities more inhabitable for LGBTQIA + and marginalized people.
Global Connections
My particular experience at the University of São Paulo was incredibly meaningful. In addition to sharing and receiving feedback on my research, I was connected to several LGBTQIA+ students of architectural history at the school whom I now consider friends and colleagues. I’m a member of a transnational group called the Queer Space Working Group, and we have already had the occasion to meet with some of my Brazilian colleagues organizing Arquitetura Bicha, also a transnational organization of queer Brazilian scholars and practitioners of architecture. I’m so excited to see where our collaboration takes us – this is the kind of organizing I hope will be central to my career!
Inspiration
This publication emerged from research I was conducting while pursuing at Master in Environmental Design (M.E.D.) degree at the Yale School of Architecture. I was interested in resonances in feminist spatial activism between the late 1960s/early 70s and the present moment. At the time, Moms for Housing was emerging as an organization, calling attention to California's ongoing housing crisis, which became even more deadly during the COVID-19 pandemic. From the beginning, Moms for Housing’s organizing felt incredibly capacious to me – tackling both real estate speculation and the very gendered and racialized terms by which “home” has been constructed in the U.S.
View Slideshow
