Feminizing the City
June 26, 2009 nihal 26 other publications
At the beginning of the Portuguese rule, Colombo was a White, male Christian city. How did it come to accommodate women? Highlighting the contested aspect of gendered spaces, this investigation exposes the principal official policies of spatial control and the power relations that marginalized women in colonial Colombo. It demonstrates how, both European and Lankan women used physical and social-symbolic mobility to subvert these policies and, by crossing assigned spatial boundaries and building coalitions across categorical divisions, how these trans-status subjects defied the socio-spatial order built upon separated but synchronic relationships between public and private spheres. The discussion fouses on the gendered subversion caused by the successive creation of “women’s third spaces,” first nestled within the domestic sphere, later extended into the public sphere by missionary and socialist women.
At the beginning of the Portuguese rule, Colombo was a White, male Christian city. How did it come to accommodate women? Highlighting the contested aspect of gendered spaces,...
