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Gender Agenda Newsletter : A third space
Gender Agenda Newsletter : A third space

The Hindu

time4 days ago

  • Entertainment
  • The Hindu

Gender Agenda Newsletter : A third space

Have you been following the conversation around third spaces and the lack of them in India? In the last week, we've encountered several instances of queer people and women — both communities that rarely access third space — creating opportunities and experiences for others like them to access spaces of culture, art, and fitness. A heartening development, indeed. Like Prashanti Ganesh, the founder of Ladies Club, an all-women's gym in Chennai training women to lift heavy and get strong. In this story, she says there is a dramatic spike in the number of women occupying the gym floor — women who seek weight-lifting to get strong, no longer just to lose weight. Through the process, she has fostered the growth of an enriching fitness community, where there is coffee, romantic Tamil music, and deadlifts by women who hit 125 kilograms. There are no mirrors and weighing scales. People from 16 to 65 with different body types work out here. So what is thirdspace? Edward Soja introduces us to three spaces in his book Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996). This article states that a material space where one can touch, measure, and map (like roads and buildings) is the first space. The second is controlled by those with power, including urban planners, governments, and developers. The third space is where people actually live, remember, resist, and build meaning. It is shaped by emotion and identity. In Hyderabad, Nique Singh Ningthoujam, a trans musician, is putting his voice out there to prevent erasure. His concerts are free so that there are no barriers to entry. A similar notion had informed the Dayamma Theatre Festival a cultural festival that celebrates queer people from the margins through plays, cabaret, and record dances. Srijith, the curator of the festival, says that it was essential for the festival to be free because stages in consulates tend to be deemed privileged. 'It is rare for the queer community, especially trans people, to sit in such large crowds, truly being themselves. An entry fee cannot be a barrier,' he says. A 2021 global survey by market research and consulting firm Ipsos, four out of 10 urban Indians reported feeling lonely and friendless at most times, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Hangout spots (attis or addas) where people usually speak, have shrunk, as most conversations are now online. But many of these addas, usually cinema halls, performance venues, and tea shops, have mostly been inaccessible to women and queer folk, especially those from marginalised communities. If they are, they are only so during the daytime. A 2,000-year-old traditional art form, Koodiyattam has always seen women perform as female characters. Yet, the stage and plays have been largely male centric. In recent years, there have been many firsts for women in this cultural space. Mricchakatikam, a play written in the fifth century, rarely performed by women in the lead, saw Koodiyattam exponent Kapila Venu play the role of an intelligent, generous, cultured, and wealthy woman. 'In my portrayal of her, I want to emphasise her independence and power,' says Venu, speaking of claiming space on a stage that has not always put women in the lead. I've experienced gender euphoria at two of these four feminist third spaces: the gym and the trans theatre festival. The camaraderie and joy of feminine cackling is one that I deeply cherish and would love more of. I'd like to create a petition for more such spaces. Any co-signers? Wordsworth Mankeeping: The labour that women take on to accommodate men who feel a loss of their social networks. While men may believe that unburdening on women is a natural part of their relationship, most women call it work. Mankeeping often includes reducing the burden of men's isolation from families due to their declining social networks and heterosexual bonds. Toolkit Take a look at Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall by Stephanie Burt, a Harvard University professor. Each of the 51 poems sheds light on the transformation of queerness over the decades since 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots, which marked an important chapter in the history of the gay rights movement both in the U.S. and across the world. In this interview ( with The Hindu, the author says, 'the more visible more of us get, and the clearer it gets — to cisgender people, to straight people, to people in or near positions of power — that we're just living our lives, that we can't go back, that we're not a threat to them.' Ouch! 'If a friend rapes another friend, then how will the government authorities provide protection in such cases? Do you want to deploy police in educational institutions? Police cannot be in every corner.' Trinamool Congress MP Kalyan Banerjee on the rape of a law college student in Kolkata. Women we meet Aruvi is a 30-year-old trans woman teacher who speaks of computer programming to college students and industry freshers. She also is part of Kattiyakkari, a theatre company. This Pride Month, at the Alliance Francaise of Madras, she performed her play Body/Boundaries, adapted from an essay by Professor Susan Stryker, a trans person who retired from the University of Arizona's Gender and Women's Studies department. 'Stryker compares the trans body sympathetically to Frankenstein's monster. Trans people often get the sense, at some point in their lives, that they would feel more comfortable in a body that looks, feels, and behaves differently. For many of us it is a nameless pain, until we see that we can set ourselves free by transitioning,' Aruvi says. She hopes to take Body/Boundaries to many more venues and live out her childhood dream of being a teacher.

Thirdspace: how spaces are experienced and remade
Thirdspace: how spaces are experienced and remade

The Hindu

time11-06-2025

  • General
  • The Hindu

Thirdspace: how spaces are experienced and remade

Have you noticed how in cities, we see places like Chinatown, Afghan Street, or Bengali corners? These are not the official names of those places, but the moment you enter them, you notice how different they are from the formal city around them. They are culturally vibrant and largely built by and for communities that don't belong to the region or country where the city exists. Such spaces, rich with life and meaning but unaccounted for in maps, are best understood through the concept of Thirdspace. Thirdspace tells us that space is not just something we live in; it's something that lives in us. Shaped by emotion, identity, power, and resistance, it urges us to see how places such as street corners or protest sites are far more than physical locations. They are lived, remembered, and reimagined. This concept was introduced by Edward Soja in his book Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996), which builds on the influential work of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974). Soja expands Lefebvre's idea of spatial triad into what he calls the trialectics of spatiality — a way of seeing space through three interrelated dimensions: Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace. Trialectics of spatiality A city can be measured by its buildings or population density. That's one kind of spatial understanding. But if you think about who planned the city, where certain communities live, and how zoning laws shape who belongs where, you're entering another kind of understanding. Finally, if you ask people how they live, remember, or resist in those places, you will have, yet again, a different understanding of space. Firstspace (the perceived physical space) refers to the material space we can touch, measure, and map. It includes roads, buildings, parks, rivers, and railway tracks; everything you can record with data. While it seems neutral or objective, it is anything but. The physical placement of slums at city margins or the clustering of communities by religion or caste reflects histories of power and inequality. Firstspace is the focus of statistics, maps, and urban planning. And while it tells us what is there, it doesn't always explain why or for whom it was built. Secondspace (the conceived ideological space) is how space is imagined and controlled by those with power, including urban planners, governments, and developers. This space is created in blueprints, master plans, zoning laws, and design philosophies. It reflects ideological visions about what space should be. For example, a city plan may declare a neighbourhood as a 'commercial zone' or mark certain areas as 'unsafe.' These decisions are not just technical, they reflect values, biases, and priorities. Colonial maps, gentrification projects, and housing segregation are all examples of Secondspace at work. Thirdspace (the lived and experienced space) is where people actually live, remember, resist, and build meaning. It blends the physical (Firstspace) and the imagined (Secondspace) and goes beyond them. It's not something you can fully map or plan. Think of a government-assigned refugee colony, perhaps originally called First Main Street, where Afghan migrants live. It was not designed to be anything more than a housing zone. But over time, it transforms into a cultural hub — for instance, a street market during Eid, a place of music, food, and memory. The community itself brings meaning to the place and transforms it. That transformation, that layering of emotion, identity, and politics, is Thirdspace. Space and identity Thirdspace resists easy definition because it's always changing. It's where everyday lives play out in all its contradictions. It is also where marginalised communities, women, and migrants, assert their presence and resist dominant narratives. Thirdspace gains even more significance when we add the lens of identity, particularly race, class, and gender. Feminist thinkers like Bell Hooks, Doreen Massey, and others have shown us how space is gendered and politicised. Who is allowed in public parks after dark? Why are urban layouts often built around male mobility and safety? Bell Hooks speaks of the margin not as a place of exclusion, but as a space of resistance and imagination. Feminist perspectives stress intersectionality, urging us to see how gender, race, and class interact within lived experience. Through this lens, Thirdspace becomes a powerful way to understand not just how space is used, but who is erased or included in that usage. Space in the urban Although Soja focused primarily on urban contexts, Thirdspace is not exclusive to cities. It can be found wherever people live, resist, and negotiate meaning. A village square, for instance, may serve as a physical space for gatherings (Firstspace), a symbolic centre of tradition and hierarchy (Secondspace), and a site where local customs, gender roles, generational conflicts, and collective memory intersect (Thirdspace). Here, people meet not just to conduct rituals, but also to contest them, reinterpret them, and forge new relationships. However, Soja emphasises urban contexts because cities are not only where tensions between the three spatialities become the most visible, it is also where they are most resisted. Urban spaces are sites of intense planning, regulation, surveillance, and segregation, making them ideal grounds to study how the 'experience' of space often diverges from its physical form. Cities are also where diverse populations collide, informal economies thrive, and where protest and public culture becomes visible. These layered realities are precisely what Thirdspace seeks to capture. Think of Greenwich Village in New York. On one level, the village has an 18th-century street pattern and is designated as a historical district, which imposes strict regulations on renovation and physical alterations (Firstspace). It is also home to two major colleges, and urban planners and architects could have long imagined it as a historical and educational hub (Secondspace). Finally, with the presence of the Stonewall Inn, widely recognised as the birthplace of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, the area carries deep emotional, symbolic, and cultural significance. It is associated with hipster culture, Pride, and histories of resistance. (Thirdspace). Urban theory often leans too heavily on what can be mapped. What Thirdspace brings in is experience. It asks urban planners to understand how space is felt, not just designed. It values murals, street protests, informal markets, things that don't show up in satellite images but define the urban experience. Resisting non-places To understand Thirdspace better, it helps to compare it with Marc Augé's idea of 'non-places.' Non-places are the product of supermodernity — airports, malls, highways, and hotel rooms. These are spaces designed for functionality and transience. You pass through them, but they do not become part of your identity. There is no memory or belonging. They feel sterile, interchangeable, and emotionally vacant. In an airport lounge, no one asks your name. In a hotel lobby, the furniture looks identical regardless of the hotel being in Kochi or New York. These spaces are designed for movement, not memory; they value efficiency over attachment. Soja's Thirdspace is in many ways a resistance to this flattening. It insists that even in the most alienating environments, people bring meaning. A shopping mall may be a non-place, but when local youth gather there to hang out, share music, or protest against a brand store that funds genocide, it becomes a Thirdspace. Their presence adds friction to the flow, subverts the design, and fills the space with memory, identity, and sometimes, dissent. Thus, Thirdspace not only becomes a critique of non-places but also presents itself as their potential antidote. Thirdspace remains relevant wherever space is lived, contested, and reimagined, as it allows us to see beyond binaries. In a time of migration, digitisation, and polarisation, it offers a lens to see how we build belonging, memory, and resistance, perhaps in the most unexpected of places. It reminds us that space is never neutral. It is made and remade, and that while it may be planned by the powerful, it is lived and reshaped by the people who live, remember and resist within it. And in that living, there lies the possibility of transformation. Rebecca Rose Varghese is a freelance journalist.

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