Space Invaders

Inclusive and excluding spaces

I recently visited Rotterdam and had a powerful experience observing how some spaces seem inclusive and other spaces exclude.  In and around the wonderful architecture of the Markthal food market, I enjoyed a diverse experience, mingling amongst the wonderful food stalls were people of diverse ethnicity, cultures, nationalities and ages. A group of teenage ‘goths’ mixed happily alongside Muslim men and women;   families with children eating next to groups of young women of Asian descent hanging out together, whilst elderly women enjoyed their shopping at the fruit stalls. The diverse food offerings from Netherlands, Turkey, Spain, Italian, Middle East, China, Japan, Korea, India, France reflected the human diversity in the market.

 I ate my Korean bibimpap in the market and then cycled across town to the Rotterdam Philharmonic to listen to a delightful classical concert. The difference in terms of diversity was dramatic.  The beautiful concert hall was a ‘white space’, all of the audience and musicians were white, the only exception were two women violinists with Asian ethnicity.  At the interval I looked out the window onto the street to see a different and diverse space on the streets below.

I recalled Nirmal Puwar’s book Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (2004) that eloquently describes how spaces we live and work in, exclude those bodies that are not regarded as normative in a particular space.  In my book Leadership a critical text, I wrote:

“We particularly notice ‘otherness’ when difference transgresses normal spaces. My own experience alerts me to this as I have transgressed normative gender boundaries at different times in my life.  As a young man,  working as a general nurse at a time when it was a 95% female profession, and later as single parent walking into mother and toddler groups in the early 1980s as the sole male figure.  My experience of this was that I was not treated as ‘me’ but as an ‘object’ either to be feared – a threat that might contaminate the homogeneous group (I was asked to leave nursing lectures on women’s anatomy, and was not allowed to work on female wards) – or in the mother and toddler group treated as an exotic sexualized object to be flirted with, or an object of pity to be ‘mothered’.  Women obviously feel like space invaders in many work situations, such as in an all-male boardrooms.  Puwar cites Winston Churchill’s reaction to Nancy Astor, the first woman MP to enter the House of Parliament:

I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge. (Winston Churchill cited in Vallance, Women in the House, 1979; in Puwar, 2004: 13)

Those who feel entitled to be in a space generally will not recognize the absence of ‘the other’ until, like Winston Churchill, they are awakened by difference being thrust upon them by a space invading ‘other’.

For the ‘space invader’ there is a discomfort, an anxiety, and also an aliveness from knowing that a transgression is taking place.   The minority person/s entering this space will often feel objectified and ‘fixed’ as Fanon so brilliantly describes in Black Skin, White Masks . Fanon writes about arriving in France in 1950 as a black man from Martinique, a French colony, and describes his experience of transgressing boundaries and the effect of the ‘gaze’ of the other:

“The movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense that a chemical solution is fixed by a dye … sealed into that crushing objecthood the look imprisoned me.” 

A space invader is often someone with a visibly recognisable difference, from their skin colour, ethnicity, gender, disability or religious affiliation.   Feeling like a space invader can also come from a non-visible difference such as class or sexuality diversity. 

When I entered university for the first time in my mid 30’s to do a Masters, I was too overwhelmed to enter the library for the first 6 months.  This intimidating space of knowledge was not my space, I was the working class boy who failed school and didn’t get to higher education. The space itself screamed at me ‘What are you doing here… get out!’ When I went to my fist academic conference to present a paper from my Phd, I was mistaken for a waiter by another academic.  My black tee shirt and my hovering around the back of the conference room by the canapes was a result of feeling like a space invader; I didn’t feel entitled to join this elite gathering.   Sometimes the experience of being a space invader is due to an internalised social life script: “you’re not welcome or deserving to be in these places”.  Sometimes a disapproving look, or a performance of over-welcoming the ‘exotic stranger’ will reveal to all, that a ‘space invader is present!’

Moving into different spaces and transgressing into new spaces can also be a liberating experience, liberating for both the minority and majority groups if the transition is managed well.

Having a visible difference such as ethnicity, gender or physical disability can mean the person being treated like a ‘space invader’ is repeatedly exposed to being objectified, whereas someone with a non-visible experience may sometimes be able to hide from the experience. Also in different cultural spaces, there are different levels of acceptance and rejection, depending on what the difference you bring into a space is, and how threatening this might be.

To quote Fannon again on how the gaze of white people fixed him as an object:

“I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships…”

Whist things have moved on since the 1950s, the experience of being fixed by the gaze of the other, when you are a minority entering a majority space will be familiar to many.

Space Invaders in Organisations

Our organisations replicate wider society, and there are spaces which are not welcoming to those who don’t fit into what is considered the norm. 

Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University writes in this Guardian article

Black people now inhabit all levels of the class and occupational structure. They attend the best schools, pursue the professions of their choosing, and occupy various positions of power, privilege, and prestige. But for these people, in the shadows lurks the specter of the iconic ghetto – it is always in the background, shaping the dominant white society’s conception of the anonymous Black person as well as the circumstances of Black people in all walks of life.

One of the most important issues when dealing with diversity, inclusion and equity  is to look at the spaces in the workplace and ask:

·      Who inhabits which spaces?

·      Who is excluded and why?

·      What happens if the space is transgressed by ‘the other’

·      What happens when a woman walks into a boardroom full of men?

·      What happens when a black person enters an all-white establishment?

·      Does the ‘other’ have to be assimilated?

·      Do they have to learn to be like the majority group, women executive proving their maleness, or black executives their whiteness?

·      Is there a negotiation and co-existence tacitly agreed whereby the ‘other’ conforms to the norm?

·      Or does an outsider become an ‘exotic other’ performing ‘otherness’ for the majority as their only way to find acceptance in an excluding space?

·      Does the rhetoric ‘we are inclusive’ match the reality?

What spaces have you experienced in your work that are open and welcoming to diversity? 

Does your organisation have spaces that exclude, that make people who are a minority feel like they are space-invaders?

What can be done in your workplace?