Queer Embodiment and Space

Research • Queer Corporeality • Spatial Politics • Body and Space

This body of interdisciplinary and transmedial work examines architectural treaties and spatial politics from a queer-feminist perspective. Architectural and spatial design ideologies are interrogated through critical spatial practices, a research and artistic strategy pioneered by Dr. Jane Rendell. The works operate at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between public and private, and between art and architecture.

Central to the critical investigation is the male body, which for centuries served as the ideal model for proportions and design, as epitomized by the Renaissance’s Virtruvian Man, Le Corbusier’s Modular Man, and many others. This male-, hetero- and Western-centric anthropomorphism was foundational to modern Western architectural theory, directly linking the subject of the body, its gender and sex, to (queer) spatial politics. Many of the works rely of the arguments and thoughts from feminist architectural theorists like Diana Agrest, among others.

The queer body does not move through space—it tests it. It resists the assumption that space is neutral. It reveals the lie that architecture is passive. Space, like the body, is coded, disciplined, performed.
— Daniel Hill, On Queer Embodiment and Space
In Progress: Architecture Undone
Daniel Hill Daniel Hill

In Progress: Architecture Undone

Work-in-Progress: This project explores how systems of architectural design function performatively in space, creating spatial logics through which power, proportion, gender, and normativity are ritualized.

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Essay: On Queer Embodiment and Space
Daniel Hill Daniel Hill

Essay: On Queer Embodiment and Space

Drawing on lived experience and spatial theory, it explores how queer bodies engage with architecture, publicness, and the everyday choreography of visibility. Rather than simply occupying space, queer embodiment transforms it, revealing how social and physical environments produce, constrain, or allow different forms of being. The essay examines how the body becomes both sensor and sign within space, challenging its implicit norms and proposing new possibilities for presence and belonging.

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