This paper interrogates architecture as a spatial instrument through which gendered power regimes are constructed and sustained across cultural contexts. Moving from the ocularcentric monumentalism of contemporary European architecture to the inward-looking typologies of Islamic–Iranian tradition, it reveals how built form embodies intertwined logics of visibility, exclusion, and control that are entangled with patriarchal epistemologies. Drawing from phenomenology, feminist epistemology, and deconstructive theory, the paper positions architecture not as a neutral artefact of culture but as a performative apparatus of gendered subject formation.
The first part revisits the Western lineage of ocularcentrism, from Plato’s privileging of sight to Renaissance perspective and its modern echoes in glass-and-steel verticality. Through the phenomenological thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Juhani Pallasmaa, this visual dominance is reinterpreted as a disembodied detachment that subordinates multisensory presence to visual mastery. Yet while Merleau-Ponty re-centres perception in the lived body, his formulation remains ostensibly neutral and universal presuming an ungendered, abstract subject that elides sexual difference and perpetuates a masculinised epistemic standpoint. The phenomenological body, reclaimed from Cartesian abstraction, becomes another site of erasure where gendered particularity dissolves under the illusion of universality.
This critique of neutral embodiment finds its architectural counterpart in the “inward-looking” typology of Islamic–Iranian architecture. Both paradigms translate gendered power into spatial order: where Western ocularcentrism externalises control through the commanding gaze, Islamic–Iranian introversion internalises it through concealment. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of the “Other” and Derrida’s différance, the paper reads these configurations as mirror manifestations of the same patriarchal logic the universal and the secluded as two faces of a single gender-entangled spatial regime.
Engaging feminist epistemologies and queer phenomenologies from Irigaray, Grosz, Butler, Haraway, and Ahmed, the paper advances a cross-cultural critique of how space naturalises gender hierarchies. It contributes to feminist spatial theory by revealing architecture as a shared topology of domination and possibility one that, once queered, can reimagine difference as the generative ground of embodied and equitable spatial futures.
