"BODY & THE CITY' INTERACTIVE DISPLAY

The embodied practices of dress, movement, and public performance vary dramatically across urban spaces, yet urban studies often reduce these practices to matters of individual preference rather than seeing them as analytically significant. Los Angeles—with its stark socio-spatial segregation—offers a compelling case study where place names don't just designate locations but evoke aesthetic representations of spaces and the bodies that inhabit them. These representations reveal the socioeconomic divides structuring the metropolitan segregation.

My research maps the spatial distribution of feminine body aesthetics throughout Los Angeles, examining how embodied feminine norms are geographically organized and commodified. By centering the spatial dimensions of gendered aesthetic practices, I hope to open new pathways for critical urban geography to question the cultural and economic logics driving spatial production under contemporary capitalism.

Speaker: Alexandre Pires,
PhD Student at Université Paris Cité and Visiting Graduate Researcher at UCLA Latin American Institute.