Books for Life Considers Grand Central Station as a gendered space
I was recently at a New York City Post Office waiting in line and staring at the various certified tags and overnight express options when I noticed the Selective Service pamphlet. It reminded me of the one male friend that I had in High School and his struggle to fill out his Selective Service paperwork on time and the subsequent calls that followed once he did. My favorite was the Marine recruiter who offered socks for a meeting and then offered ROTC as an alternate option once he found out that my friend was college bound. Considering the Post Office, or a Post Office, as integral part of the institutional stratification that reproduces the norms associated with gender makes sense. The Post Office is the government, the government is the enforcer of norms in the form of law and the law is determined by the power in our society. What I experienced in line at the Post Office when I encountered the Selective Service pamphlet was the reproduction of the segregation of the military. Women are not required to register for the draft. The Post Office is in this sense a male gendered space, just as it would have been if voter registration cards were available when only men were legally able to register to vote.
Placing government institutional representations aside and further considering the idea of gendered space provides an alternative to explore the stratification of gender bias. Last month in what is now a ubiquitous reference, the then new CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, requested all of the employees of Yahoo who were had been working from home to work in the office. Citing the idea that although productivity is generally statistically high when people work from home, but innovation is low she made the case that her company would have to be working from the office in order for Yahoo to be competitive. What followed was a complete representation of the home workspace as a female gendered. Many people commented that Yahoo was being unfair to women who were trying to balance work life issues. “The irony is that she has broken the glass ceiling, but seems unwilling for other women to lead a balanced life in which they care for their families and still concentrate on developing their skills and career, “ said Ruth Rosen, a professor emerita of women’s history at the University of California.(New York Times) A private sector gendered space is harder for me to see than a public one. Because the norms that are asserted and reproduced are less specific and more socially embedded it seems like a dotted line rather than a straight bold line. It is there (or here in the case of Yahoo) all the same. Home is considered Women’s space and is associated with the care and sustenance of a family. A female association is transferred to anyone working from home and the idea of a work life balance is the topic for debate. I am single without children and would love to work from home.
And so the notion of private sector gendered space leads me to Grand Central Station. As is the case with the Yahoo work from the office not from home, the value of the outcome is directly tied to the means of production and the space in which the production takes place. What about the spaces that are adjunct and feed into the success of the outcome of the means of production? Acker asserts in the article, Is Capitalism Gendered and Racialized, that gendered practices are duplicated through capitalism. Assuming that Acker is correct and that we accept capitalism as our main organizing force and that Capitalism is male gendered, then we must also accept that things that are essential and adjunct to Capitalism are male gendered. Grand Central Station is one of the things that we must accept as male gendered because it is a major transportation hub for workers in the capitalist system.
Do you accept this? What additional spaces in New York City do you think are male gendered?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis is a fascinating way to look at architecture and structure! Your characterization of the Post Office is spot-on. In regard to Grand Central, I do see your point about the maleness of transportation-to-work (i.e., leaving the comfort of home, striking out on the "hunt"), but I think it may be more accurate to attach this maleness to the trains, as opposed to the station.
ReplyDeleteGrand Central, with its warmth and sheltering commuters from the "cold" (i.e., the mother shielding workers from the soulless industrial complex outside of the building), and its assisting the conveyance from one train to another (similar to the stereotypical housewife who cooks, cleans, and keeps the home so that her husband can concentrate solely on his work), not to mention the obvious sexual image of the (phallic) train entering the (yonic) station seems to me a much more female-gendered space.
@ThroughTheDin Thanks for the comments regarding my post. Although I do see your points regarding the way the station can be both male and female, I was approaching Grand Central Station excusively as an adjunct to Capatalism and as a mechanism to bring workers to the means of production. By extension of that relationship, if Capatalism as Acker makes a case for is male gendered, then the station would have to be as well.
ReplyDelete