Gender, Space, and Religious Privacy in Amsterdam

Silva Perez and Kristensen examine the intersection of gender and religious traditions for the use of space for two distinct religious groups: the Amsterdam beguines, a Catholic community, and the Portuguese Nation, a Jewish community. In the religiously diverse environment of seventeenth century Amsterdam, only the Dutch Reformed Church was officially authorized to have visible places of worship. Unsanctioned religious groups such as the beguines and the Portuguese Nation had to make arrangements to regulate visibility and access to their spaces of worship. Using privacy as an analytical lens, the authors discuss how strategies employed by the two groups changed over the course of the century.

Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender, Space and Mobility in Contemporary Cinema

While the idea of women who stay at home and men who dominate the streets may seem outdated, binary considerations of gender, space, and power still proliferate in contemporary cinema. This open access book adopts a fluid approach to space designed to accommodate wilful, affirmative, and imaginative perspectives of gender on screen. Through close analysis, or micro-analysis, of Messidor (Alain Tanner, 1979), Vendredi Soir (Claire Denis, 2002), Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2012), and Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004), this book looks for light, textures, rhythms, movement, and sound that give shape to affirmative forms, forms that contribute to rewriting bodies and spaces—such as cars, homes, and city streets—that reject traditional gender and power structures. Wilful women drive this book forward, through movement and pauses, imagination and desire, persistence and dissimulation, eroticism, performance and abjection.

An Analysis of Gendering of Space in Historical Hospitals of Anatolia

Medical ethics, clinical practices, as well as privacy considerations affected the gender-space relationship in spaces of healing. Researchers to date have been analysed the historical hospitals of Anatolia in terms of their architecture, planning, art history, history of medicine, and even in terms of their functional systems, but not yet regarding their gendered space segregation. There are also limited studies related to the gender, religion, and secularism in historical hospitals outside of Anatolia. Hence, in this paper, historical hospitals of Anatolia have been chosen as case studies and analysed from the point of gendered perspective including how privacy, religion, culture, and gender issues shaped their architecture and planning. In Ottoman Empire, it is known that among the palace elites, there was limited access of women patients to the male doctors, but documented evidence of female attendants being employed in Ottoman hospitals belongs to later periods. In Ottoman dynasty there were also female patrons constructed hospitals for women and for the general public, demonstrating the power and status of women in the Ottoman palace. In addition, based on travellers’ accounts, old drawings, gravures, and archival resources, it is understood that there were separate units for women in Anatolian historical hospital. Those units included the patients’ rooms, wards, latrines, and even courtyards. The research showed that in Anatolian hospitals as the spaces for physical healing and medical training, gendered-space segregation have been acknowledged, at least to some extent in some certain space arrangements.