Masculinizing & Emasculating in Domestic Space: Comparative Studies of Homebound (1967) and Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Abstract

By comparing the gender division of labor in domestic space in both Homebound (1967) and Anatomy of a Fall (2023), I address the issue of masculinizing and emasculating on the counter gender with a spatial perspective. First, physical mobility decides the prior access to the public sphere as well as the position of the householder psychologically. Also, the typical and conventional vertical structure of "home" in both films visualizes the gender hierarchy and its collapse within the domestic space. The vertical structure embodies the historically inherited phallus worship symbolically. In this sense, it encounters the requirement of a new space structure that claims gender equality. Approaching the ideal model with practice case of functionalism in architecture, I recount the controversy of the radical equality at the geographic level practiced in communist society by architecture and other supporting mechanisms, which drives the interrogation of the essential association between capitalist structure and male subjectivity since the former, including the basic concepts of private property and liberal market-based competition, is designed and extended by the latter in a biologic sense.