Under the Light of a Posthuman Feminist Approach to Space

Abstract

There is are a wide variety of critical approaches to social sciences engaged in decentring the human in favour of the nonhuman. I aim to share some of these perspectives to analyse spatial design away from the usual rational practices and accepted conventions. As a researcher, I made an ethical commitment to explore spatial performativity under what Donna Haraway addresses as “the located view from a body” (Haraway, 1988, p. 589) (in this case, mine; a woman´s body), a vision that is “always complex, contradictory, structuring and structured, that stands versus the view from above or from nowhere” (Ibid, p. 589).: a sort of multidimensional subjectivity.

I will expose some of the contributions of feminist philosophers: Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Jane Bennet, Rosi Braidotti and Bronwyn Davies. These thinkers provoked me to observe actively and intuitively nonhuman agency and those deemed as posthuman practices in architecture and scenography. According to Haraway, how to see is the scientific question in feminism (Ibid, p.587).

I invite the reader to engage in understanding that space is a vibrant matter, and to picture it as a witty agent and not as a resource. Jane Bennet claims that the most critical driving force behind the nonhuman turn is how it might help us live more sustainably, with less violence toward various bodies (Bennet, 2015, p. 235). This ethical call ought to make sense to architects or scenographers who would like to expand their relation to space into a more-than-human approach.