Naturalised dis/ability and disputed gender in critical places

From social to functional categorisation of public space

Abstract

This article examines how people experience and discuss public places that categorise users by dis/ability and gender. Adopting a constructionist perspective, we investigate discursive and spatial practices that reproduce or contest categorisations, discriminations, and privilegings. Our analysis focuses on three public debates around disrupted spatial norms: the introduction of ‘all-gender’ toilets in Hong Kong, legal action against women’s parking spaces in Germany, and disputes about the design of bathing facilities in Sweden. The data comprise newspaper articles, online comment threads, blogs, and fieldnotes.

Methodically, we combine a discourse analytical approach with social semiotics. We study linguistic nominations of people and places and relate them to Hansson’s (2020) notion of ‘critical places’ and Garland-Thomson’s (2011) concept of ‘material anonymity’ to capture how embodied subjects encounter space as enabling or obstructive and excluding. Across the three cases, dis/ability is constructed as a binary categorisation linked to (in)accessibility and treated as largely unproblematic: specially designed spaces for disablised people are presented as necessary and non-controversial. By contrast, gender is debated as a categorisation in itself. Binary gender norms are challenged and defended, and attempts to reconfigure gendered critical places – such as non-gendering toilets, re-signed changing rooms, or women’s parking spaces – elicit confusion, resistance, and hostility.

The article’s contribution is to show how dis/ability categorisation tends to be naturalised and stabilised, while gender categorisation remains publicly negotiable and intensely contested in public space, and to use this asymmetry to outline possibilities for designing shared spaces organised around functions rather than social categorisations.