If Sexuality and Space can be seen to play a significant role in a process of excavation and foundation building for this current development, if this kind of book has the capacity to both represent and expedite a “crossover” (in terms of literary and cultural criticism becoming interested in architecture and spatial theory), it is particularly distressing to discover that for the most part, race and ethnicity go unconsidered. Although none of the essays venture with any rigor to theorize what these categories might mean to this framework, this failure is most painfully apparent in Mark Wigley’s essay “Untitled: Housing Gender.” 

To initiate my critique of this piece, I want to address any remaining impulse to ask why I criticize Sexuality and Space for failing to address race if it is a text that attempts to engage an architectural discourse on sexuality. In spite of having answered this question already, I will briefly deal with it here as an opportunity to clarify the points in my theoretical arguments that are most pertinent to my discussion of Wigley’s essay. Toni Morrison manifests my angle when she says that “the act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act” (46). 

To this I would add: How is race not acknowledged by an analytic discourse if, in fact, and especially when, its presence is so perceptible? How can discourses on sexuality be thoroughly explored without acknowledging the ways in which these discourses are informed by our racial consciousness? How is it that we can consider sexuality in any framework without engaging a discourse of otherness? And how, in this cultural day, can we engage a discourse of otherness—especially in a sexual paradigm—and not speak of race? My point, however, is not that a discourse considering anything must always be a discourse considering everything. Whereas I do think it is necessary for critical discourses to explore more intensely and responsibly the intersections of different axes of politics, I do not want to be supportive of deleterious conflations of these differences. I am aware that projects focusing on intersectionality must be carefully executed so as not to collapse important issues and categories into each other. This is precisely why, in arguing that race must be central to a discourse engaging sexuality and space, I would defer to the implicit statement Sexuality and Space itself makes in terms of intersectional realities. Its essays demonstrate the power of “separate” questions to cross-cut themselves. 

In other words, the text of Sexuality and Space carelessly embodies a discourse of intersectionality already. The most obvious example of this claim is the extent to which sexuality and gender are confused or conflated in most of the volume’s essays. Why, if the aim of Sexuality and Space, like the aim of the symposium, is to consider the “close relationships between sexuality and space hidden within everyday practices,” does the collection focus so much on gender? Why, if the aim is to ask “how is the question of space already inscribed in the question of sexuality,” do many of the essays (almost automatically) conflate gender with sexuality? Why does much of the criticism in this book fail to explicitly distinguish these as separate analytic axes? 

In spite of a few articles explicitly focused on issues of sexual orientation, the text manifests how different analytic axes intersect without articulating the site or impact of these intersections. In effect, this text evidences the need for explicit, politically responsible articulation of these sites, whether we are interested in the places where different axes merge or the places where they remain distinct. As Eve Sedgwick points out, 

a great deal depends — for all women, for lesbians, for gay men, and possibly for all men — on the fostering of our ability to arrive at understandings of sexuality that will respect a certain irreducibility in it to the terms and relations of gender. (16)