Space, gender, and architecture in the southern Italian Neolithic

Space may be ‘gendered’ ¹ in many ways. Males and females, or members of other genders for that matter, may carry out activities in different zones, creating ‘behaviorally’ gendered spaces which may be visible archaeologically as specialised activity areas. General zones or specific locations may be ‘cognitively’ or symbolically associated with one or another gender, and even ideologically celebrated as symbols of them. Places may be ‘jurally’ gendered as well, with males or females explicitly excluded from them or required or allowed to visit them. These forms of gendered space need not coincide with each other, and commonly do not. For instance, in Anglo-American culture the kitchen was traditionally a female-associated space, and the garage or workshop a male-associated one. This was an explicit cognitive classification associated with behavioural patterns, but in no way enforced jurally. Churches, in contrast, may be cognitively and jurally gender-neutral but behaviorally gendered, as when the people attending services are predominantly female (while the major functionaries, utilising the especially sacred zones, may be males). Public toilets are jurally gendered zones in the strictest sense, as well as segregated behaviourally, but their transient impersonal nature and the functional identicality of toilets for both genders makes them not especially gendered in the cognitive sense. ² These distinctions have clear parallels in many tribal societies. For instance, ritual structures are often jurally gendered through explicit prohibitions, while general zones of the natural world and spaces associated with activities particular to one gender are gendered through some combination of cognitive associations and/or behavioural patterns.