Domesticities · Gender, Infrastructure and the Production of Domesticity in the (Post)Communist City

Gender, Infrastructure and the Production of Domesticity in the (Post)Communist City

The project explored the manner in which housing infrastructures built during 1965-1989 in Bucharest were employed as a political technology in the production of gendered subjectivities in the communist and post-communist periods. The point of departure in this project was constituted by two major reforms that were initiated during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, which tied a gendered domestic sphere directly to the urban landscape of socialism. The first reform — regarding the urban systematisation — aimed to transform the city of Bucharest through mass technologies of housing standardisation and aiming to a social homogenisation. The second reform — regarding women’s reproductive agency — criminalised abortion and placed motherhood at the pinnacle of the social construct. Within the specific context of Bucharest, whereby domestic infrastructure became an instrument for control and standardisation, it is fundamental to investigate the formation of a gendered subject in their interaction with spatial patterns and structures. Such investigation is even more important insofar as more than 85% of the housing provision in contemporary Bucharest is provided by socialist blocks. The research investigated the intersection between the spatialisation of power — especially through mass housing — and the politics of reproduction during the socialist regime in Romania and their effects in the contemporary condition. In taking this approach, the project emphasises the importance of the ethnographic dimension in the study of post-socialist cities, bringing to light the conflicting relations between the public and private spheres – between the legal, administrative and material arrangements of the state’s regulatory framework and the actual lived experiences of women. In view of analysing these relationships, the project had three main objectives: 1) To examine the social, cultural, political and technological contexts of the production of such housing infrastructure 2) To understand the patterns of subjective transformation and the transformation of practices of gender through an ethnographic investigation 3) To investigate the intersections between the above mentioned processes in order to generate a deeper understanding of the relationship between domestic spaces and women under communism and within the contemporary post-communist condition.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз