The construction and deconstruction of women's roles in the urban landscape

This chapter examines the evidence in lhe urban landscape for the social construction of women's roles. The methodology combines radical feminist theory with the post-modernist technique of deconstruction. Radical feminist theory locates the oppression of women in the power structures of capitalism and patriarchy. These power structures constitute the dominant hegemony in contemporary Australian society, which constructs spaces to reflect and reinforce its own ideologies. These underlying ideologies are often masked by different layers of meaning in the landscape. The study area is the city of Wolloogong in New South Wales. The urban landscape of two contrasted areas of the city is critically examined. The mall in the central city is a landscape created in the 1980s by and for powerful societal structures. In contrast, the northern suburb of Bellambi, a landscape of public housing, is marginal to the dominant hegemony of capitalism and patriarchy. In both landscapes, the roles of women are deliberately constructed. This chapter attempts to deconstruct those landscapes by examining the layers of meaning contained within them.