Plenary Three: The Built Environment

|Plenary Speakers| |Workshops|

This plenary asks us to consider the many functions of the spaces early modern people constructed, inhabited, traveled, and worked in, and further, to examine their implications for gender. In what way were spaces gendered? What are the connections between architectural structures and the objects and subjects they housed? What influence did the material objects women created, displayed, sold, used, and exchanged have on building design? Who plans, commissions, and constructs new structures (not just buildings, but also ships, roads, monuments, marketplaces, etc.)? Do enclosures and their contents confine women or open opportunities to them? What impact do new technologies and products have upon the built environment and upon domestic or public spaces frequented by women? How does attending to women transform such divisions as the sacred and profane, the public and private? How do forms and genres function within art, history, literature, and music as structural entities which gender subjectivity?