Sex and the City: There Is a Time and Space/Place for Everything
The show Sex and the City has become popular in recent times because of its sexual context. While the show focuses on the lives of the women characters it emphasizes their sexual adventures. In this particular clip, one of the characters, Charlotte is conversing with the other women about what she did the previous night.
Charlotte tells her friends that she had sex with Alexander, whom she had began dating. Charlotte confesses that Alexander called her a "whore" and made her wonder why he would do such a thing. The other women imply that she is a whore because she had sex with a man that she had barely met. This scene from Sex and the City exemplifies the idea that place and space are social constructions (Barker 377).
According to Chris Barker, in Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, space and place share an "absence-presence" relationship,space is the absence while place is the presence, (Barker 376). In this clip from Sex and the City, the place is the cafeteria where the women are eating and the space is the physical absence of a male character. Barker states that "the social construction of space will be gendered... [and that] gender relations vary over space: spaces are symbolically gendered and some spaces are marked by the physical exclusion of particular sexes" (Barker 377). In other words, the cafeteria becomes gendered as a feminine space simply because of the absence of men. Furthermore, the gendering of space also creates a division between private and public places. In this case both Charlotte's home and the cafeteria become gendered places. The house where the sex occurs is the private place while the cafeteria becomes the public space. The home is usually the feminine space whereas the cafeteria would traditionally be considered the masculine space because it is related to the workplace (Barker 377). However, in this scene, the private and the public space are both feminine places.
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice Third Edition. Sage Publications Ltd, Thousand Oaks, CA 2000.
