lystn

Barbara Penner is Professor in the Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture. "[My allegiance] is to feminism and always has been. What’s happened within feminist scholarship is that as the feminist perspective has become less controversial it’s gone underground slightly […] At a recent conference these questions were raised - are we now being too subtle and too implicit about our feminism? […] do we need to once again nail our colours to the mast and be very explicit about our feminism, how that shapes our scholarship, and so on? - that’s quite interesting because it implies that to adopt a certain political position there’s a kind of ethical responsibility to write in a particular way. That’s a kind of live debate - is that self-reflexivity inherent to being a feminist - which implies that there’s a certain rigidity there towards how you should be as a scholar. That moment really interests me - that you’re not just an individual scholar, you’re actually carrying the mantle, and that comes with a certain ethical set of choices that you make about your voice."