Liminal Space and Identity Formation: A Feminist Spatial Reading through Göteborg

Date

2025-9-01

Author

Vanlıoğlu Yazıcı, Nagehan

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This study investigates how individuals perceive, inhabit, and navigate space in relation to identity formation. The concept of liminality is central to this investigation, representing a transitional stage where individuals exist between different identity positions. Crucially, liminal spaces negotiate identities through processes of transformation, as material, symbolic, and social forces enable and constrain them. Subjects inhabiting these liminal sites experience identity as relational, continually reshaped through encounters with the other and through spatial conditions of rupture and transition. Thus, this study approaches them as thresholds, ambiguous spaces where established norms are unsettled. The research approaches space through a feminist lens that centers performativity and positionality, exploring how spaces invite certain identities, are embodied in everyday life, and are, at times, disrupted or reimagined. This standpoint is activated through a layered methodology combining alternative space visualizations, open-ended questionnaires, field observations gathered in Göteborg. At the thesis’s core is a threefold framework that conceptualizes liminality through spatial, representational, and embodied dimensions. Spatial liminality refers to architectural and urban conditions that disrupt normative flows. Representational liminality emerges through images, plans, narratives that encode systems of inclusion and exclusion. Embodied liminality unfolds through movement, sensory perception and social experiences of those navigating spaces. Through this lens, liminality is a conceptual tool, an architectural question: What if liminality is not a problem to fix, but a space that allows something else to take shape? In reframing space as ongoing negotiation, the thesis offers liminality as a framework for reading, designing, and inhabiting the city anew.

Subject Keywords

Liminal Space, Spatial Identity, Feminist Methodology, Urban Thresholds, Spatial Representation

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116100

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis