Hypersexual City

The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism

Nicole Kalms

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317028260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Much of feminist architectural scholarship focuses on the enormous task of instating women's experience of space into spatial praxis. Hypersexual City: The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism suggests this attention to women's invisibility in sociocultural space has overlooked the complex ways in which women already occupy space, albeit mostly as an image or object to be consumed, even purchased.

It examines the occupation of urban space through the mediated representation of women's hypersexualized bodies. A complex transaction proliferates in the commercial urban space of cities; this book seeks to address the cause and consequence of the increasing dominance of gendered representation.

It uses architectural case studies and analysis to make visible the sexual politics of architecture and urbanism and, in doing so, reveal the ways that heterosexist culture shapes the spaces, behaviour and relationships formed in neoliberal cities. Hypersexual City announces how examining urbanism that operates through, and is framed by, sexual culture can demonstrate that architecture does not merely find itself adrift in the hypersexualized landscape of contemporary cities, but is actively producing and contributing to the sexual regulation of urban life.

1 Introduction

In the year 2000, Melbourne architect Cassandra Fahey was commissioned by local footballer and celebrity bad-boy Sam Newman to build a contemporary home on a prominent strip in the suburb of St Kilda. A scandal erupted when the laminated glass façade was unveiled to reveal a nine- by eight-metre pixelated image of the Playboy bunny and actress Pamela Anderson (Figure 1.1). The unveiled project made the front page of Melbourne newspaper The Herald Sun, which reported that a neighbour suggested that it looked ‘like a very big billboard for a high-class brothel’.¹

Figure 1.1 Newman house, Cassandra Complex, St Kilda West, Melbourne, Australia, 2001.

Image: Peter Hyatt, Hyatt Gallery.

The project and the public response to the Newman house must be understood within the context in which they were developed. While the resurgence of feminist architectural scholarship in the mid-1990s was still buoyant, ‘raunch culture’² was dominating popular culture and encouraging women to publicly objectify themselves as an expression of transgressive sexual empowerment. Pamela Anderson's face shimmering on the glazed domestic surface stimulated a growing anxiety about the intersections between sexuality, media and urban space. Images of women and women's sexuality as passive and receptive objects of heterosexual masculine desire saturated the mass media, yet in this context, the appearance of a hypersexualized celebrity with her face-as-façade attracted an unusual amount of media attention to Melbourne architecture.³ It prompted questions from scholars of architecture and urbanism about conservative ‘planning strategies’ and Australian architecture's resistance to popular culture.⁴ The architect proposed the house was ‘for the public’ and described how she showed them a part of the celebrity client. She conceptualized the intriguing home as turning the client ‘inside out’.⁵ In this sense the house reflected the movement of soft-core pornographic consumption from being a personal experience to one that is shared and shaped in urban space. The project also signalled the arrival of architecture that enfolds media, hypersexuality and the public realm.

Soft-core urbanism: problem, aims and scope

Hypersexualized representations of women increasingly pervade urban spaces in North American, British, European and Australian cities. Billboards, retail districts and sexualized precincts are notable sites where representations of women are in excess and highly sexualized. The term hypersexual is used in this book to describe the overwhelming abundance of simulated sexual images, practices and narratives where the representation of sex and sexual stereotypes becomes dissociated from sexual experience.⁶ Borrowing from the aesthetics of pornographic and strip club culture, hypersexuality intertwines an exaggerated and excessive focus on the female body as a sexual object with sexualized identity.

Following the debates of second wave feminism, pro-sex feminists intensely debated conservative sexual morality in the early 1980s, suggesting that women's sexual freedom was fundamentally linked to personal freedom.⁷ This sex-positive feminism suggests that repressing sex, sexuality and sex work are violations of women's right to free speech, and that anti-pornographic positions are amplifications of the dangers of both pornography and the economic use of women's bodies.⁸ Since this time, urban representations of sexuality have been further transformed by raunch culture, and as such, the original pro-sex viewpoint requires deeper analysis. Journalist Ariel Levy and academic Emily Maguire critique the popularized and fashionable hypersexual phenomena or ‘raunch culture’ as associated with porno-chic aesthetics, and agree that young women are increasingly and prolifically engaged with rehearsing this media-driven sexuality.⁹ The ‘raunch’ phenomenon reveals the trajectory of women's representation in the media from the ‘passive, mute objects’ of mainstream culture in the twentieth century and earlier, to the bra-rejecting liberationists of the 1960s, to today's ‘active, desiring sexual subjects’.¹⁰

I distinguish the term hypersexual from more fashionable and recognized terms such as ‘raunch’ and ‘raunchy’, made famous by Levy.¹¹ Populist terms such as ‘raunch culture’ help to make the phenomenon of hypersexuality more seductive and disguise the deeper social issues at play. ‘Porno-chic’ is a useful description as it neatly couples the mainstreaming of pornography with popular culture, referring specifically to the uptake of stripping and pornography aesthetics in fashion, music and popular culture.¹² ‘Hypersexuality’, by extension, denotes a more critical position and problematizes contemporary sexualization as a moment of excess.

Thinking more directly about the idea of sexualized culture, media studies professor Feona Attwood perceives sexualization as:

a rather clumsy phrase used to indicate a number of things; a contemporary preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identities; the public shift to more permissive sexual attitudes; the proliferation of sexual texts; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience; the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay; our fondness for scandals, controversies and panics around sex.¹³

Attwood seeks to identify how and if the construction of and attitudes towards sex take on ‘new forms of expression’.¹⁴ Within her discussion she assembles the territory of what I describe as ‘hyper’-sexualization where the combination of more permissive attitudes to sexuality, the mainstreaming of sexual services and sex ‘work’, pornography and sexualized communication technology, have all extended sexual discourses and feed an extensive discussion of sex which can been described as an ‘excess’ or hypersexuality.

Others have adopted this word too; for example, Kenneth C. W. Kammeyer associates hypersexuality not only with academic scholarship and research into sex therapy but also with legislation and judicial rulings, the entertainment world, and increasingly with the cyber world. His use of the word fits routinely with what he describes as the sex-saturated culture specific to North America. With Jean Baudrillard at the centre of his analysis, Kammeyer extends the definition of hypersexuality to suggest that the images of mediated simulations ‘undermine and take the place of unmediated sexual experience’.¹⁵

The mediated simulation of hypersexual representations is visually similar to soft-core pornographic content and ‘pin ups’ found in privately viewed forums such as magazines, and invites sociopolitical comparisons.¹⁶ Lauren Rosewarne views pin ups and other categories of pornography as focused on the display of women with a sexualized appearance; in the case of both pin ups and pornography, the appeal is primarily sexual.¹⁷ While pornographic representations exist routinely across many and varied private arenas such as men's magazines and adult DVDs, this research specifically engages with the inevitable intersection of hypersexualized content, media and architectural praxis in neoliberal cities. These contemporary urban spaces form both the context and a significant mode for the visual delivery of hypersexual representations and signal a shift in contemporary experiences of urban spaces.

While feminism has many multiplicities and a singular surviving ‘feminism’ is an impossibility, the postfeminist view presently dominates neoliberal cities and seems to suggest that urban life is undergoing a territorial transformation that echoes women's expanding sexual empowerment and liberation.¹⁸ But there remain tensions between different modes of feminist thought.

As opposed to postfeminism, third wave feminism seeks to reunite the ideals of gender equality and sexual freedom by claiming inclusion, pluralism and non-judgement in a culture where women negotiate contradictory desires for gender equality and sexual pleasure.¹⁹ Yet in postfeminism (the model in which hypersexuality thrives) complex ideas of feminism are expressed simultaneously and distinguish it from other moments in feminist politics. For example, feminist ideas are intensely articulated but also repudiated. They are expressed but disavowed. Rosalind Gill uses the example of the ‘extensiveness of self-surveillance and discipline now normatively required’ for women to ensure that the problems of body size and shape, personal style, sexual performance as well as work and home life are controlled and monitored.²⁰ Laura Garcia-Favaro states that: ‘in the spirit of neoliberalism women are constituted as adaptive factors fully responsible for their self-care and enhancing their own well-being through strategic cost-benefit calculation’.²¹ The irony of this effort is that it must appear ‘fun’ and ‘self-indulgent’ and is best kept hidden as though effortless and easy. There is a strong relationship between the emergence of neoliberalism and postfeminism, and this is evidenced in the contradiction that places autonomy, choice and self-improvement against surveillance, discipline and vilification.²² As Angela McRobbie observes, women in neoliberal cities are precariously positioned in the ‘context of a wide range of social, political and economic changes’,²³ and McRobbie further suggests that there is a sense that women should understand that these changes are often coupled with highly regulated ideas of women's sexuality and femininity. This implies that for many women this sense of hypersexualized identity can be perceived as a benefit of the battle of (a no longer needed or relevant) feminism.

Scholars of cultural theory and feminist studies as well as media analysts have researched the social changes and effects of sexualization, yet little research exists in the realm of urban and architectural praxis, where commercially hypersexualized representations are particularly complex. This book addresses the dearth of scholarly critique of hypersexualized urbanism and the lack of discrete examination of key hypersexual typologies in architectural discourse. A series of questions underpins this research project: What are the architectural and urban manifestations of hypersexualization in neoliberal cities? Do the infrastruc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of case studies
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Critical contexts
• Introduction to the case studies
• Conclusion
• Index