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To establish architecture’s active complicity in constructing gender,
Wigley cites Alberti’s fifteenth-century treatise On the Art of Building
in Ten Books, a “canonic text” that was “crucial to architecture’s
promotion into the liberal arts and therefore 
into the academy” (332). Introducing his argument by citing the fifth book
of this treatise, he explains that “it contains an overt reference to architecture’s
complicity in the exercise of patriarchal authority by defining a particular
intersection between a spatial order and a system of surveillance which
turns on the question of gender” (332). He goes on to cite other books
in the treatise as well, directly quoting passages that evidence Alberti’s
theories regarding gender. Referring to a particular passage from Book
III, Wigley paraphrases Alberti, telling us that,
In these terms, self control for a woman, which is to
say the production of her identity as a woman, can only be obedience to
external law. Unable to control herself, she must be controlled by being
bounded. Marriage, understood as the domestication of a wild animal, is
instituted to effect this control. As the mechanism of, rather than simply
the scene for, this control, the house is involved in the production of
the gender division it appears to merely secure. In these terms, the role
of architecture is explicitly the control of sexuality. (336)
Wigley goes on to inform us that,
Alberti is everywhere opposed to sensual pleasure, describing
it as “vile appetite,” “lascivious and brutish,” “shameful and immodest,”
“beastial and merciless lust.” Sexual desire is natural in animals but
in humans it is unnatural because it goes beyond the honorable work of
procreation into the degenerate realm of erotic play. (343)
It is out of this opposition to sexuality that Alberti writes into his
argument the need to displace sexuality and purify the body. As Wigley
puts it, “The body now needs to be cleansed. Or, rather, social order has
to be cleansed of the body. Architecture is established as such a purification.
. . Purification must begin with the outer coverings” (344). Later on,
we learn from Wigley that in Book VI, Alberti “describes how to organize
the materials in order to define secure space” (354) so that this purification
can be achieved; above all, Alberti urges the need to cover the building
with a “white skin.” This white skin, Wigley tells us, “is a pure surface,”
“a mechanism of purification.” Wigley then proceeds to read Alberti’s argument
for this white skin as the architectural production of gender division: |
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The feminine materiality of the
building is given a masculine order and then masked off by a white skin.
The skin effaces the transformation from feminine to masculine and maintains
a division, a visible line, between structure and decoration as a gender
division. . .The white surface both produces gender and masks the scene
of that production. (354)
This passage describes nothing more than the subject/object
split necessary to cultural hegemony. The “skin” therefore does indeed
maintain “a division, a visible line,” but this division functions to secure
the image and interests of the dominant class (subject); it does not solely
refer to male domination over females—it refers to a gendered division
between “subjects” and “others.” I agree that “the white surface” produces
gender, but in the sense that it produces gender as hegemonic model, and
dominance (or masculine order) as white. Ultimately, in controlling
the feminine, the white skin constructs whiteness as the visible, fundamental
“structure,” and in so doing, manifests racial hierarchy.
A main implication of Alberti’s theory is that
color is excluded from gender itself, except as a “decoration” that enforces
the “structure” of gender categories; such a platform clearly represents
the phenomenon of gender disenfranchisement. The white skin produces a
“gender” division in terms of what gender is not, which indicates how gender
signifies color as its negative (disorderly) embodiment. Although Wigley’s
reading observes the white skin as a sign of masculine order, it does not
establish any racialized context for this observation. This context nonetheless
establishes itself as it becomes increasingly clear that the “white skin”
produces a theory that links color to sexuality and obscenity.
In the context of Alberti’s discourse, “ornament”
means decoration, or more precisely, color. Ornamentation, or the presence
of color, can call chastity into question. As I have noted, in discussing
Alberti’s ideas about the “threat” of ornamentation as “dangerous” to the
maintenance of “order,” Wigley concentrates fully on illuminating Alberti’s
gender-constructing rhetoric as productive of a male/female order, eclipsing
the racial implications of such rhetoric. He explains that “the threat
of ornament is its sensuality, which distracts the proper eye” (355), and
tells us that these arguments of Alberti’s “reproduce those of Della
Famiglia [another Alberti text] in which ornament is explicitly |
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identified with sexuality” (355). For Alberti, Wigley writes:
The task of architectural theory becomes that of controlling
ornament, restricting its mobility, domesticating it by defining its “proper
place” (bondage to the ground, faithful representative of the presence
of the building). . . The domesticated woman is the mark of man, the material
sign of an immaterial presence. (357)
In this description, and throughout the essay, Wigley maintains that “ornament”
refers to female sexuality, the feminine, and women; I maintain, on the
other hand, that by using such words as “bondage” in a discussion of how
architectural theory’s “white skin” can control ornament-as-color-as-sexuality,
Wigley makes the racial ideology clear, even though he does not speak it.
Whereas the domesticated white woman is certainly the “mark of [white]
man,” so is the domesticated man or woman of color another “material sign”
of this “immaterial presence.” If the control of ornament—as defined by
the associated categories of color, sexuality, the body, and the feminine—is
instituted through the “purity” of white skin, the image of this white
skin can only be made possible by a complex awareness and employment of
a nonwhite skin. In the context of a theoretical discourse explicitly concerned
with constructing a masculine/feminine split conducive to masculine domination,
Alberti is implicitly enlisting the racial other as a color contrast to
the purity and superiority of whiteness/white gender. Racial otherness,
associated with the feminine or female otherness, is centrally located
in the construction of gender.  |
