I’m going to attempt an autobiographical survey of gendered issues in the short period since my arrival at Bristol University to study architecture in 1979.
I’m undertaking this survey with trepidation. I’m a man whose subject within architecture has often been the space of striptease, where the power relation is conventionally downgraded into just about the dumbest conception imaginable. So as a consequence, forthwith, and most unfortunately, the term ‘women in architecture’ reads two different ways.
To set the scene, here are three related events:
We are young; it’s a freezing Saturday morning in January 1987 and there’s a man on a ladder pasting a large billboard on to a hoarding above a café next to Browns at the top of Shoreditch High Street. It’s my response to a project for a pet shop, and along the bottom of the billboard (actually a huge painting by my friend Barney) runs the scrawled warning: ‘Remember the answer to an architectural problem is not necessarily a building’. One of the people there is Liza. When it’s all over, Liza storms into Browns and berates the rather startled audience of men watching the resident strippers. Once thrown out, we go off to canoodle somewhere amid the deserted warehouses that are now, nearly 30 years later, luxury apartments, prestigious art galleries, and heaving café/bars.
20 years later, the phone rings and it’s my brother: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes!’ he says. ‘One minute there’s this stripper and then there’s you, bold as brass. I nearly fell off my chair!’ That was in The White Horse (another strip pub) before opening time, just down the street from Browns: TV people. I remember I was wearing a sky blue polo neck jumper and I wasn’t apologetic.
And just recently, Julie returns home from an event at Tate Modern on the subject of ‘Women in Photography’. ‘Why are there never any men?’ she says. Then she opens her mail: it’s a brochure for her retrospective in Hertfordshire. It looks great, except when she notices the small print: ‘Please note: this exhibition contains nude images which some visitors may find offensive’. ‘But that’s you!’ she says. ‘That’s your body that’s offensive!’
By 2015 Julie Cook and I had published two books featuring the spaces of erotic performance: Some Las Vegas Strip Clubs and OM Ltd, about a collective of dancers who ran their own ‘underground’ club in London. We can pride ourselves on being part of a long process in the appreciation of this somewhat sub judice erotic art.
To shift backwards and sideways, there weren’t even any female staff in the School of Architecture at Bristol University when I arrived in 1979. However, by 2014 my head of department and both course directors were female, my commissioning editor was female, and my editor at the AR was gay, along with my teaching partner in history and theory, and the person who asked me to write this paper. And who cares? Certainly not me: as long as good decisions are made, it doesn’t matter who makes them.
However, this dynamic shift occurs beneath a stifling conformity in infrastructure, better known as corporatisation: an all pervasive ideology at odds with the appearance of opportunity in the wider sense or, as one student of mine recently put it; ‘Everybody expressing their individuality in exactly the same way’. We’ve morphed a word for this ideology: neoliberalism. My own architectural history book, Architectural History Retold, is rather apologetic about the lack of female or openly gay participants for the previous 2,500 years, and implies a dramatic catch-up in the last ten, when in reality things have actually got, according to the most illustrious of commentators, a lot worse.
Bristol may have represented the old guard even then, since the lack of female representation (in research) was remarked upon in a RIBA report of 1982, and the department closed in 1983. Back then, the atmosphere couldn’t reliably be termed sexist, but I do remember it as indelibly classist. Despite Bristol’s reputation for Oxbridge rejects and my own middle class upbringing, I was unprepared for this encounter with the seemingly unshakeable British class system. So the patriarchal nature of Bristol’s espousal of modernism only slowly became problematic. Our professor, Ivor Smith, once gave a presentation on the Cotswolds before a day trip. He referred to them as ‘funny…like a woman’s body’ and Julie (Hill) perked up from the audience, ‘What’s so funny about a woman’s body, Ivor?’ I remember Ivor as the epitome of the English gentleman, and Julie’s riposte as a sign of shifting times.
After graduating, I worked in Newmarket for a while. The office was small and the atmosphere was, again, overwhelmingly classist (one client wouldn’t even dismount from his horse). So it was on to London, to PCL. Here, it was immediately clear that the atmosphere was altogether more radical, more serious; you felt it from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. Identity was newly forged: the right haircut, the right shoes, the right habits; Andrea Dworkin’s On Pornography became required reading. Male friends joked that if you read past halfway, you have to become a woman. The patriarchy of my provincial life was undone, in part, by Liza suggesting I visit a particular Soho hairdresser.
My tutors were still all male, but you began to sense their vulnerability.
After my diploma I worked for a while for Trevor Dannatt and began teaching at PCL, by now Westminster. By this time, to paraphrase Terry Eagleton, the sexualised body (rather than the starving one) was high on the agenda: Sean Griffiths (later of FAT) gained his distinction with a very large vagina applied to Trellick Tower; Beate Muller finished her studies with some unnerving pelvic boxes modelled on poles. Wayne Taylor made a giant wall sculpture titled ‘Black Rubber Release’.
I left Dannatt for his opposite: the Clapham office, once shop, of Simon Smith and Michael Brooke. This was an exhilarating experience, summed up by my leaving present: the complete set of 007 videos fresh from HMV.
A frantic period of teaching across schools as diverse as Edinburgh, Leicester, Westminster, Oxford Brookes, and South Bank Polytechnic followed, where postmodernism meant the appreciation of popular culture and no small confrontation with the old guard. Meanwhile, my boss at Oxford was Ann Boddington, while my teaching partner at South Bank was Katherine Shonfield. I finally got a proper job at South Bank, and shortly after went on a field trip that included Las Vegas. Vegas might just have been the greatest place in the world and the perfect home for the terminally alienated, but as per the title of Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar: Essays in Art and Democracy, it also (before talk of neoliberalism) appeared the perfect home of equal opportunity. I kept going back.
Meanwhile, at the RIBA, Desiring Practices would memorably showcase a generation of new American female theorists; Katerina Ruedi’s then husband, Sherry Bates, a teaching colleague at South Bank, admits we bemoaned a good number of these over our lunchtime beers. Reflecting on two pieces I wrote for Blueprint and Building Design at the time (a review of Francesca Hughes’ book The Architect Reconstructing her Practice, and Clare Cardinal-Pett’s exhibition-on Louis Sullivan at the Architecture Foundation) I’m unnerved: they appear both cavalier and rather insensitive. However, they may be understandable if we consider that, while I was unsympathetic to the overwhelming adoption of poststructuralist rhetoric by feminist academics, I was simultaneously stuffing my dollars into stretched g-string elastic.
Thankfully, Katerina appeared to sympathise. She asked provocative questions as to the validity of that poststructuralist rhetoric as well as sending my review of Pett’s exhibition to the protagonist herself with some glee.
Meanwhile, Kath embodied a heady mix of phenomenology, Marxism, and feminism, and I owe her a great deal; among many other things, she brokered my teaching at the AA. I’ve returned to her book Walls Have Feelings (2000), whose themes include female entrapment in Polanski and the roving male in Alfie. Indeed, the boxes we’d made for ourselves were scrupulously analysed (even if I was still shy of mine at the time). However, changing the world was somehow old hat. Marx seemed a far more distant a figure than he is now, there was little economic discourse, and you couldn’t move for Walter Benjamin. The milieu was rather observationally stern, but what I remember best about Kath was her fun when it came to her love of P G Wodehouse and Carry On movies.
Looking back, the character of Sigi in The Odessa File had ensured I’d absorbed the full roster of stripper cliché by the time I’d turned 15. Built over four pages or so, and admitting her context as a Hamburg stripper in 1963 as written by Frederick Forsyth, Sigi wanted to be a champion gymnast until her breasts became unfeasibly large; stripping doesn’t faze her because the house lights blind her to the gaze, and it’s her childish grin (and not her unmistakable all-over charm) that appeals to Peter Miller (the hero), for whom she becomes a love interest second only to his sports car. Miller, of course, views her customers with lofty distain while Sigi feels sorry for them. When she moves in with Miller it is in the abiding hope of domesticating her ‘rich layabout’ with babies and a beautiful home. In this she is both single minded (like Miller) yet supplicant at the same time, making love with a ‘bouncy and healthy enjoyment’ and thanking him afterwards. Such hogwash sustains the conservative wet dream.
It came as a gradual revelation that dancers do not generally complain about dancing or objectification; on the contrary, they own the concept. They complain about the money, working conditions, and the fact that men can be arseholes. Men can be arseholes in so many ways, often without knowing it.
For the dancer, their public is remarkably easily read and stereotypical. There are enough valedictory stories to qualify as a book genre in themselves (I should know: I have two whole shelves of them). These stories are remarkably consistent: stories of women seeking refuge from the mores of an impossibly boxed-in bourgeois working world, with stripping supplying a ready flow of cash.
Over the years I have traded the scopophiliac gaze for the comfort of familiarity and realised that, by and large, dancers represent a serious challenge to patriarchal norms rather than accession to them. Without superiority, how could one acquiesce to demanding a mere pound in the jug? Moreover, this has proved historically the case, with a litany of female performers consistently questioning the theatrical norm and the assumptions of the spectacle. Never assume a dancer doesn’t read the New Yorker or possess an MA.
At first I couldn’t identify myself with those clients that are the stripper’s reality. But then, every punter in every strip club likes to think they are just a bit special. Unfortunately, when punters think they really are a bit special, they tend to become the biggest arseholes. Certainly strip club environments can bring out the worst in those accustomed to male power, leading them to affect the pose of the overly and embarrassingly chuffed. At The White Horse, this is especially the case with groups of city bankers, irrevocably damaged by the streams of privilege, whose social inadequacies are suddenly miraculously revealed. Thus, it appears to me, over years of observation, that the strip club is no place for predators other than the cunning female.
Indeed, perhaps it’s the powerlessness I now enjoy, occupying a strange space as part of the furniture, or perhaps a house plant. Or maybe I just qualify as a fan. Whatever the case, it is very hard for me to see how the commodification of a stripper is any different from anybody else, including me.
The situation was exacerbated when I found myself swapping roles. I had met photographer Julie (Cook) sometime in 1998 via Tim Pyne. I was working with Tim on proposed contents for the Millennium Dome, often from The White Horse. Julie loved the strip pubs immediately; she had total admiration for the dancers, and almost as soon as we got together she began making Baby Oil and Ice with stripper Lara Clifton and a second photographer, Sarah Ainslie. It won erotic book of the year in 2002.
One of her first projects involving me was a stream of photographs of me mounted around the walls of the Slade – some of them very explicit. But before that I’d asked her to take pictures of me to support my writing on Vegas. There is a very telling photograph of me on our first Vegas trip together, sporting my 100% rayon ‘Vegaswear’ holding a ‘Barbie Detective’ toy in the Barbie superstore in Forum Shopping.
That I was becoming her subject only dawned slowly, but by working together and planning things out, we became more focused and, as a consequence, along came Some Las Vegas Strip Clubs, where I carried the photographic equipment, loafed around, and then wrote stuff on the anatomy of the facilities. The differentiation between the various clubs became fascinating. The Library, for instance, out on Boulder Highway, branded as ‘full of gorgeous librarians’ and ‘a real learning experience’ actually turned out to be a form of training centre: ‘Lapdancing 101’. Meanwhile, Treasures looked and felt like Versailles; Jaguars had a peculiar resemblance to the Maison Carrée.
It wasn’t until I met Julie that I’d come across a woman for whom the pleasures of looking (scopophillia) worked both ways. For her the problem wasn’t so much the objectification of women (a concept that, in the contemporary world, appears almost quaint) but why she wasn’t allowed to do the same back.
We soon joined the coterie that was Olympia Moments Ltd; a club that met once a month on Thursdays in private rooms above and below pubs. When I wrote about these events it really did sound like Carry On, but the reality for the dancers was undoubtedly something else: they were making a whole lot more money from private dances on their own terms than they were in the clubs and pubs. Meanwhile any whiff of seediness only abetted the frisson of pleasure, and here the power resided absolutely with the dancers.
It’s peculiar to think that, when the neoliberal political climate eventually collapses (under the inherent contradiction between ‘freedom’ and coercion), these gains in the power relation might be given up; that what Richard Feynman testified to as a ‘social need’ might evaporate. The myriad aspects of fantasy would seem common to all, even if they might be the result of deep-seated adolescent fantasies inspired by thrillers written by Britain’s public school boys. It’s a fact of life that with identity politics, we can feel better about what we are, and that includes a whole gamut of sexual preferences (but not, of course, all of them).
I am not talking about exploitation here. It’s just that the media obsession with ‘sex slaves’ does not reflect our own experience; it represents media conservatism. I was never interested in a Marxism that demanded you throw away your Mötley Crüe records. It’s the economic stuff that relates to value, work, and fairness that matters, even within systems (like Las Vegas) that might ‘cheat you fair’.
Indeed, our stripper friends consistently find opposition, ranging from so-called radicals from OBJECT (who campaign against any objectification of women at all) to Harriet Harman. Freedom was as lost within the line of least resistance carved out by New Labour as it is within the nation’s local councils. Such voices are as easily digestible as they are wrong, simply because no one will listen to those who earn the right to call themselves ‘sluts’ on precisely the basis that no one else is entitled to do so.
For instance, the banning of ‘jugging’ in Westminster might appear progressive in the removal of a demeaning part of stripper work but, given the off-putting nature of entrance fees and even the tradition of the ‘whip round’, this effectively banned strippers from working at all (other than in ritzy nightclubs or shady non-stop erotic cabarets, neither of which are a better alternative). And despite the fact that there was never any ‘trouble’ at Olympia Moments events (in fact landlords and staff, both male and female, conspicuously enjoyed them), the availability of venues miraculously disappeared with the advent of that sanitised corporate colossus, the 2012 London Olympics. This cleaning up of the East End led, sadly, to the retreat of such entertainments into private homes, environments far less secure and ripe for exploitation by a more sinister underworld.
Here the rub for the architect, who is idealistically concerned with the accommodation of many walks of life, is that our underlying programme (rather than the surface appearance) still sucks – especially within the research culture of universities, where any radicalism espoused sits in wild opposition to the superstructure inhabited.
Working with Tim had at least provided this participant with an alternative to the standard academic orbit, and at first Julie and I published freely across all sorts of titles. But as we produced more and more, the question of bona fide research (at our universities) became more and more problematic.
Within tightly defined REF structures, our definition of research now curiously resembles an inverted version of the distinction the Metropolitan Police used to make between pornography and erotica on the basis of paper quality. To put it bluntly, we are asked to publish in relatively poor quality journals that nobody ever reads. A world of multiple referees and no goals.
So in my gloomier moments, I see academic publication as a kind of semaphore between comfortable, knowing initiates, hardly challenging the status quo at all. Meanwhile, ‘writers’ renew themselves on a daily basis for the task of anachronism, where one’s gender is of no consequence whatsoever. Someday soon our society will have to decide whether it wants to be run by box-tickers or not, and the present scenario does not augur well.
At the opening of Julie’s retrospective, Sightlines: Public and Private Lives (2015), curator Matthew Shaul noted that it buried any residual ‘tabloid’ rendition of the stripping subject. I would like to think it is actually middle brow mores that should be questioned. It is middle brow conservative values that rise to the surface in this neoliberal culture: those endless warnings, those fears of offence, indicative of the fact that we hardly notice the hyper-sexualised corporate envelope while enduring the flagrant misuse of language and the gradual shutting down of individual opportunity. Meanwhile Elsevier, the world’s leading publisher of those academic journals, and lifeblood of academic survival, runs higher profit margins than Apple.
(Postscript: The much loved White Horse closed on 30th July 2016).