ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a diffracting collection of practical and intellectual resources for thinking feminism in architecture and for practicing a feminist architecture in the twenty-first century. It brings together a range of thinkers and practitioners who were first united at the KTH School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, in November 2016, at the thirteenth Architectural Humanities Research Association conference Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, and Technologies. The book considers the diversity of feminisms that runs across, and at times produces contradictions between ways of thinking and practicing a feminist architecture. The task of bringing together diverse thoughts on the feminist project and its, at times, troubled relation to architecture is neither easy nor new. The control of our embodied minds, as individual units, and at the scale of populations, is insidious.