Default Role
Default Role
Yuan Liu
Women in global cultural contexts have long been constrained by patriarchal ideologies that view care, obedience, and family life as their inherent social roles. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) mentioned that discipline is the self-discipline of people through institutions, discourses, and spaces. The specific manifestations of these disciplines vary in different contexts, but concepts such as the Perfect Housewife in the United States, the Angel in the House in Europe, and the Good Wife and Good Mother in East Asia are all manifestations of male-centered family structures.
As Sophie Gilbert (2025) explores in Girl on Girl, society conveys the same message through various forms of entertainment, encouraging women to self-discipline according to inherited ideals. Modern Chinese society is a typical example. Despite modern living conditions, women are still expected to bear the main responsibilities of childcare, cooking, and emotional labor. The spatial organization of society is integral to the production of the social, and not merely its result. (Massey, 1994, p. 4). Therefore, gender power in domestic spaces is solidified through architectural layout such as the location of the kitchen, and the default role of women is also solidified.
This study focuses on the traditional gender discipline paradigm of a good wife and a good mother, and explores its manifestation in the spatial structure of Chinese families, especially the kitchen, which is the core place for women. Through narrative research and case analysis, the project reveals that residential spaces are mostly designed from a male perspective, and women passively adapt to the established structure, and their subjectivity is compressed. The design experiment attempts to transform the kitchen from an invisible workplace into a collaborative and proactive space by reconstructing the spatial layout, introducing shared spaces, and adjusting the scale of spatial objects, thereby breaking the patriarchal spatial hierarchy and reshaping women’s identity and power relations in the family. The project ultimately aims to explore how space can become a tool to resist gender discipline, and call for the introduction of gender awareness in a wider architectural and design system to promote women’s physical and mental health and social participation.
Space is one of the ways of discipline, Foucault used Panopticon as an example to illustrate this point. The body is organically, biologically “incomplete”; it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities that require social triggering, ordering, and long-term “administration” (Grosz, 1995, p. 104). And the family space became the earliest place to encode, shape, and discipline women.
So how does the family space discipline women? Women workers were cheap; they were prepared to accept low wages, the result of years of negotiating in terms of ‘the family wage'(Massey, 1994, p. 187). Women typically undertake more domestic labor and, therefore, are often located in the service space of the home, reflecting that domestic space is not neutral.
Take the kitchen as an example. Kitchen design default that women are the users from the perspective of spatial logic. The Frankfurt kitchen in the 20th century improved the work efficiency of housewives by reducing the kitchen area. This is also the prototype of the modern integrated kitchen. Although this shortens the working hours of women in the kitchen, it also shows that under traditional concepts, it is inevitable for women to run the household.
This project explores how women can break free from the identity pressure brought by the default gender role discipline of being a good wife and a good mother and re-understand themselves under the modern marriage and fertility system through the strategic reconstruction of the internal space of the family. The project uses key home spaces such as the kitchen, dining room, bedroom, studio and bathroom as narrative carriers, and redistributes housework responsibilities and spatial dominance by breaking the existing family functional divisions to create a family space with gender equality. In terms of design methods, the spatial structure is derived and reconstructed according to the traditional layout, and the furniture and objects in the space that are defaulted to women are observed and collected, and then transformed into objects suitable for men, making men’s family participation behavior active and structured. Therefore, the space is no longer a place for tacit consent to the division of gender roles, but a practice field that stimulates self cognition and gender equality. Women are no longer defined as good wives and good mothers in the family, but are recognized and supported by the space as the main body of life and the owner of multiple identities. The project aims to evoke a family lifestyle with autonomy and collaboration through design, empower women, and encourage men to take more life responsibilities in the family and redefine family space.
Traditional houses further solidify gender roles through space. The door serves not only as a dividing line between inside and outside, but also as a demarcation between male and female spaces. Default female spaces, including the bedroom and kitchen, are hidden in the most secluded areas of the house. The spatial organization of society is an integral part of social production, not just its result (Massey, 1994). Gender power in domestic spaces is solidified through architectural layout (such as the location of the kitchen). The kitchen is a labor space, not a living space.
However, such service spaces are implicitly reserved for women in patriarchal environments. Modern spaces also prioritize the needs of male heads of household. A key assumption underlying kitchen design is that only one worker is needed, and this worker is typically a woman. Therefore, kitchens in apartment buildings are designed based on the principles of adequacy, convenience, and efficiency (Zhou, 2013, 127). This implicitly designated space for women carries the majority of household chores and is relatively small, creating a sense of oppression in spatial form. Based on this, the project disrupts the implicit spatial divisions, inverting the assumed male-female space. Service spaces, such as the kitchen, are placed at the forefront of the space, with the living room positioned behind it. This shift in spatial hierarchy emphasizes women’s spatial agency.
Under the new structure, the kitchen becomes the core of the household’s circulation. No longer solely for cooking, it has become a high-frequency space, likely passed through or used at any time, and a constant reminder of household chores. Using the end of get off work as a time node, spatial narrative is used to deconstruct and embed household chores within the essential pathways. First, the eye is drawn to the wall of household tools directly opposite the door, declaring the visibility and inescapability of household chores. The laundry basket on the left balcony invites the user to conveniently collect laundry, participating in this low-threshold labor and alleviating the invisible labor of women collecting laundry. Furthermore, the revolving door in the kitchen area physically encourages the user to linger and participate. After dinner, entering the living room, the view leads directly to the balcony, where the cleaning supplies next to the sofa form a silent yet constant reminder.
