From STUD to Stalled!: Queer Space 1996–2016

Mario Gooden and Joel Sanders discuss how concepts of queer space have shifted in the twenty-five years since Sanders published his pathbreaking exploration, STUD: Architectures of Masculinity.

Looking at STUD through a twenty-first-century lens, Gooden and Sanders will assess the book’s strengths and limitations. According to Sanders, the principles that shaped its methodology—the notion of performativity and the imperative to analyze and dismantle the architectural conventions encoded in building typologies, standards, and codes—are still relevant today. However, STUD is also a time capsule that was shaped and ultimately constrained by a reductive, outmoded binary conception of gender that was prevalent in both gender studies and queer activism in the mid-1990s. The discussion will explore how Sanders’ work, influenced by trans and disability studies, is now informed by a more expansive and inclusive conception of the intersectional nature of human embodied experience.

Joel Sanders is principal of the New York studio JSA/MIXdesign, as well as director of post-professional studies at Yale School of Architecture. His career has encompassed pioneering scholarship on LGBTQ space, activism on equity and inclusion in architecture, and the design of residential, museum, and academic buildings. 

Mario Gooden is a cultural practice architect and founding principal of Huff + Gooden Architects. His work engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology. Gooden is a professor of practice at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation of Columbia University, where he is the co-director of the Global Africa Lab, and the author of Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity; His multi-media installation The Refusal of Space was recently exhibited in Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.