The spatialities of intersectional thinking: fashioning feminist geographic futures

In this article, we highlight the inherent spatialities of intersectionality and its pivotal importance for feminist geographic thought. Intersectionality was, at its inception, already a deeply spatial theoretical concept, process and epistemology, particularly when read through careful and serious engagement with Black Feminist Thought and the writings of radical women of color. We do so here, revisiting Cooper, Crenshaw, Collins and other key scholars to demonstrate that the interlocking violence of racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism have always constituted a spatial formation. Drawing on feminist geographic thought from the 1990s onwards, we highlight the influence of intersectional thinking on our discipline particularly concerning how racial, gendered and classed power operates in place and through space. These pieces have inspired and driven our work, and we extend them here, recognizing newer scholarship that extends and enriches feminist geography through a postcolonial intersectionality. We close by arguing that intersectional thinking is indispensable to feminist geography. Working in solidarity, across and through the interrogation of difference, with agreement and discord, we encourage a deeper feminist geographic engagement with intersectional thinkers, contributing to more critical (and hopeful) futures for our scholarship.     

The domestic residue: feminist mobility and space in Simryn Gill's art

Feminism, now nearly half a century old, is still fractured by two divisive forms – the desire to emancipate women from masculinist power structures, and the affirmation of woman's sexual difference. However, as Teresa de Lauretis and Gillian Rose argue, for feminism to remain relevant, it must also be attentive to the fluid hegemonic conditions of power, and thus, strive to evolve new ‘forms’, which emphasize feminism's political mobility. Developing this proposition, this article discusses how a new critical feminist mobility may be detected in the work of Sydney-based Malaysian artist Simryn Gill. Born in Singapore in 1959, and hailing from a migrant Punjabi family who first settled in Malaya in the 1920s, Gill constantly travels between her home in Sydney and her family bungalow in Port Dickson, a small coastal town in Malaysia. I will discuss how Gill's feminist perspective may be mapped through the artist's shifting spatial contexts by looking at three spaces – the gallery, the domestic interior and the tropics. Through these spaces, I will explore how the artist occupies the dual roles of ‘woman’ and ‘women’, thus demonstrating the changing and fluid energy of a mobile feminist stance. Gill's art valorizes the domestic sphere as a recurring theme with this subject being central to her self-definition in the public sphere. Yet, her treatment of domesticity is distinct in its furtiveness, a tactic, which I argue, enables a feminist agency that is politically mobile, and capable of engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and citizenship.     

新文化地理学视角下的女性主义地理学研究

在文化地理学研究向新文化地理学转向、女性主义运动蓬勃发展、女性主义理论在跨学科过程中日益完善的背景下,西方女性主义地理学从女性经验、性别权利、女性内部差异入手,提供了以女性主义视角分析地理学问题的新的发展领域,并发展出质疑与抵抗男性权威话语的学科范式。本文依循女性主义地理学中对身体、工作、空间和国家/民族等主要议题的探讨,梳理西方学者的研究进展,以期对本土研究提供有益借鉴。     

Composing our careers: Susan Hanson's contributions to geography and geographers

Susan Hanson's career exemplifies the notion that our lives are compositions rather than predictable, linear trajectories. In this essay I argue that Susan's career is an empowering example of a collage of woven-together life experiences, substantive research interests, feminist values and progressive professional practices. I illustrate these ideas through three compositions that I trace throughout Susan's career: networking gender; caring geography; and reproducing geography. Susan's work connects and validates the diverse elements of our lives through her scholarship, her commitment to feminist values and her disciplinary leadership.     

Feminist Geography 30 Years on – They Came,They Saw But Did They Conquer?

Feminist geography emerged in Australia in the 1980s, spurred on by the local Women's Liberation Movement and inspired by the academic activism emanating from England, Canada, and the United States. Producing critical evaluations of male‐dominated geography departments, curriculum, and journals, feminist geographers proceeded to stake claims in each of these spheres while also substantially revising the content of geographical research. There were significant interventions into urban, social, cultural, and economic geography and in environmental discourses, as well as into the gendered research process. Having arrived, identified, and addressed these issues, the discipline was critiqued and transformed over the 1980s and 1990s. Crucial to the strength of this critique were key individuals, the Gender and Geography Group within the Institute of Australian Geographers, and the role played by journals such as Geographical Research and the Australian Geographer in providing spaces for feminist work. However, as the new century dawned, the agenda changed and the anger and urgency dissipated as the broader and university contexts altered. It was a period of consolidation, as feminist insights and approaches were focused on key subject areas – such as the home, identity, and sexuality – and became more mainstream. However, is this work and the presence of women in the academy an indication of success or of co‐option? This paper will trace these various shifts – from the arrival to the mainstreaming of feminist geography – and analyse what might be read as a retreat from feminist politics and practice within the discipline in Australia. I will conclude by re‐stating the case to advance a new feminist agenda in the face of continuing gender inequality within the academy, in Australia, and across the globe.     

The Abstraction of Care: What Work Counts?

Nurses provide essential health care labor, but their work, a mix of caregiving and clinical expertise, is often undervalued and unacknowledged by health care administrators and the policies and practices that govern health care more broadly. Based on interviews with nurses working in the New York metropolitan area and through pairing feminist political economy with literature on abstraction and politics of the possible, I show that the ways in which nurses’ work is measured creates a value hierarchy of tasks. Examining various tools of measurement, I argue that methods for measuring work are rooted in an historical and continuous hierarchy of what counts as work and what has value. For nurses, these processes obscure the essential care work they perform. I argue that bringing an explicit politics of social reproduction to the politics of measuring and accounting for work makes visible necessary and often‐obscured tasks, spaces, and social relations.     

Destroying the Joint and Dying of Shame? A Geography of Revitalised Feminism in Social Media and Beyond

Has feminist geography really lost all relevance? This paper examines what the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought and practice, especially in Australia, means for geography. We illuminate the trajectory of the feminist revitalisation in new media and beyond through developing a spatial analysis influenced by Rose and Fincher. Notions of paradoxical space and issue publics inform this reading of two pivotal moments in the feminist revitalisation: first, the creation of Destroy the Joint, a campaign launched and maintained in Facebook and Twitter spaces; and second, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech against sexism and misogyny in Parliament in October 2012. Both these moments, coming from political and public spaces, received worldwide interest, and we critically examine the context and ramifications of these instances while situating the institutional processes surrounding them within the growing feminist revitalisation. In so doing, we argue that these Australian‐based cases indicate a growing feminist movement that is open and multiply focused, connecting personal politics to public campaigning, and achieving material impacts. We conclude that developing a feminist geography of new media is a challenging task, as these spaces circumvent and renegotiate traditional spatial dimensions – including scale and place – through their dynamic networks. It is, nevertheless, a task worth doing.     

THE VERTIGO OF HISTORICAL ANALYSES IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD

In this anthology, Joan Scott reconfigures her understanding of feminist history and thus contributes to a long overdue theoretical discussion on how we can write feminist history in a globalizing world. She traces both the history of gender history and the history of feminist movements. Scott's main source of inspiration is the French version of psychoanalysis following Lacan. In a further development of her pioneering 1986 article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” she points out that gender is neither a mere social construction nor a somehow biological referent (such as “sex”). Integrating the constructive criticism of her approach elaborated prominently by Judith Butler during the 1990s, Scott argues instead that gender is a historically and culturally specific attempt to resolve the dilemma of sexual difference. Sexual difference, for its part, is also far from referring simply to physically different male/female bodies. Sexual difference is, for Scott, a permanent quandary for modern subjects, a puzzle to which every society or culture finds specific answers. My reading of her book concentrates on two main questions that run like a thread through her considerations: First, how can we bridge the gap between a subject and a group? Second, how can we overcome binary oppositions and/or fixed categories and entities—a challenge that becomes even more important every day in a rapidly globalizing world. I broadly discuss the benefits and shortcomings of the pivotal role Scott ascribes to fantasy. Although the concept of fantasy is powerful and striking, particularly with reference to the concepts of “imagined communities” and “invented traditions,” coined by Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, I find the Lacanian tone to be less convincing.     

Spatial Displacements: Transnationalism and the new social movements

This paper looks at connections between transnationalism and the new social movements in the USA. Drawing on feminist and 'queer theory' critiques of totalising 'lesbian-feminist' and 'radical feminist' arguments, as well as on the neo-Marxist analyses of transnationalism, I argue that it is possible to theorise transnational 'flexible accumulation' in terms of gender, race and sexuality as well as class. I analyse David Harvey's argument about the role of the 'spatial fix' and 'temporal fix' in post-modernity. I compare Harvey's approach to the analysis of post-modernity with Mike Davis's more local/global analytic. I contrast their approaches with the ways that the notion of displacement can be applied to the deconstructive reading of narrative and representational texts. I conclude with an analysis of the way transnationalism is displaced, as multiplanetary capitalism, in C.J. Cherryh's science fiction. Cherryh links the construction of spatialities to ways of constructing gender, species, and sexualities, as well as to changes in the mode of production. Her heroines, too, as translators, knowledge brokers and political intriguers, are centrally involved in the crisis of accumulation in the novels' fictive universe. In this way, Cherryh's fictions, and her heroines' actions, produce an implicit theorisation of accumulation, based on gender, and sexuality, as well as class.     

Rethinking the place of emotions in the field through social laboratories

The insights of feminist science and technology studies (STS) into the constructed and situated nature of knowledge have proved crucial to informing feminist geography. Since the rise of emotional geographies, feminist methodologies no longer simply reflect on questions of positionality, partiality, and power relations, but also on the role of emotions in the field. In this article, we argue that a feminist STS perspective has much to offer when thinking about the way emotions are engineered, controlled, and negotiated in research processes. Our engagement with what we call ‘social laboratories’ – i.e., spaces in everyday life where (experimental) research is conducted with human beings – advances debates in feminist geography, as these laboratories crystallize the emotional entanglements feminists encounter in the field. Looking at economic experiments in Ghana and fertility clinics in Mexico, we discuss the difficulties of doing feminist fieldwork in these experimental research spaces. We argue that the constant negotiation of emotions and ethics is crucial to access, assess, and do fieldwork in research settings that do not adhere to feminist ideals, but nevertheless have gendered effects on women's and men's lives. Rethinking ‘the place of emotions in research’ (Bondi 2005, in Emotional Geographies, edited by Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, 231–246, Aldershot: Ashgate) through social laboratories forges instructive links across feminist/emotional geographies and social studies of science.     

Can't I be seen? Can't I be heard? Black women queering politics in Newark

What does it mean for a black female to negotiate urban space? How is her body read, her politics enacted, and her agency understood and interpreted? How do black women use their bodies and identities to challenge structural intersectionality in US cities? To answer these questions, I explore how black women embraced a set of oppositional spatial practices to resist the intersectional effects of misogyny, homo/transphobia, racism, and poverty in Newark, New Jersey. I reconstruct the creation of the Newark Pride Alliance, a local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer coalition that mobilized in 2003 and 2004, after the death of Sakia Gunn. Exploring migrations between ‘black women,’ ‘black queer’ and ‘black feminist,’ I examine how black women respatialized social capital and enacted resistance. Through semi-structured interviews and frame analysis, I explore how black women forged new relationships between queer youth and black vernacular institutions, and created political spaces in which honest engagement of issues of gender violence, poverty, and power could take place.     

Rethinking relational economic geography

Recent theoretical and empirical work in economic geography has experienced what might be termed a 'relational turn' that focuses primarily on the ways in which socio-spatial relations of economic actors are intertwined with processes of economic change at various geographical scales. This phenomenon begs the questions of whether the 'relational turn' is simply an explicit reworking of what might be an undercurrent in economic geography during the late 1970s and the 1980s, and whether this 'turn' offers substantial advancement in our theory and practice. In this paper, I aim to evaluate critically the nature and emergence of this relational economic geography by revisiting its antecedents and conceptual frameworks. This evaluation opens up some significant conceptual issues that are further reworked in this paper. In particular, I argue that much of the work in this 'relational turn' is relational only in a thematic sense, focusing on various themes of socio-spatial relations without theorizing sufficiently the nature of relationality and its manifestation through power relations and actor-specific practice. This paper thus illuminates the nature of relationality and the multiple ways through which power works itself out in 'relational geometries', defined as the spatial configurations of heterogeneous power relations. As a preliminary attempt, I first conceptualize different forms of power in such relational geometries and their causal effects in producing concrete/spatial outcomes. I then show how this relational view can offer an alternative understanding of a major research concern in contemporary economic geography – regional development.     

Towards a feminist geopolitics

The intersections and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few. The notion of a feminist geopolitics remains undeveloped in geography. This paper aims to create a theoretical and practical space in which to articulate a feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics is not an alternative theory of geopolitics, nor the ushering in of a new spatial order, but is an approach to global issues with feminist politics in mind. 'Feminist' in this context refers to analyses and political interventions that address the unequal and often violent relationships among people based on real or perceived differences. Building upon the literature from critical geopolitics, feminist international relations, and transnational feminist studies, I develop a framework for feminist political engagement. The paper interrogates concepts of human security and juxtaposes them with state security, arguing for a more accountable, embodied, and responsive notion of geopolitics. A feminist geopolitics is sought by examining politics at scales other than that of the nation-state; by challenging the public/private divide at a global scale; and by analyzing the politics of mobility for perpetrators of crimes against humanity. As such, feminist geopolitics is a critical approach and a contingent set of political practices operating at scales finer and coarser than the nation-state.     

国内外女性主义地理学研究述评

后现代思潮背景下,性别研究在人文科学领域越来越重要。性别不只是关于个体身份的自然属性,更是一种映射社会变革、社会不平等和反抗特权的社会关系。本文梳理国内外女性主义研究的相关文献,具体从女性主义地理学理论渊源、西方女性主义地理学和中国本土女性主义地理学等三方面对女性主义地理研究进行综述。较之于国外同行,国内女性主义地理学研究仍显单薄,多数是采借和沿袭西方的相关理论进而通过特定案例加以印证（佐证）,某种意义上是对西方同行的回应性研究。未来的我国女性主义地理研究,需要关注三个问题：从我国传统文化女性发展理论中吸取营养;聚焦女性日常生活世界领域的实践逻辑;女性作为能动者的个体和自组织的集体智慧需要引起注意。     

Gender and Feminist Geography in Colombia

Abstract

The article explains how gender and feminist geography as a transversal analytical category to geography have been introduced recently in Colombia. At the beginning of the XXI century, in the geography department of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the first undergraduate thesis to focus on the relationship between gender and processes of social construction of space was presented. Since then, the contributions of geographers and researchers from a feminist geographic perspective have contributed to the feminist geographical debates from their own trajectories. The contemporary geographical landscape in Colombia is linked with the transversal debates on feminisms and gender in social sciences, social movements and Latin-American feminisms. This networks and connections allows today a diversity of themes from the deconstruction of hegemonic spatial representations in different contexts, gender and conflicts related to territory and body, to some new approaches to technologies and virtual social interactions and their connotation in the construction of non-normative spatialities.     

2. CONSTRUCTIONS OF “HOME,”“FRONT,” AND WOMEN'S MILITARY EMPLOYMENT IN FIRST‐WORLD‐WAR BRITAIN: A SPATIAL INTERPRETATION

In First‐World‐War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters.     

Writing from the margins: Marina Carr's early theatre

This article analyses Marina Carr's first four plays: Low in the Dark (1989), The Deer's Surrender (1990), This Love Thing (1991) and Ullaloo (1991). It aims to show how Carr seeks to eschew the mimetic conventions of what can be seen as a dominant, patriarchal theatre establishment, marking (and possibly maintaining) her marginal position as a theatre-maker at the time. I argue that Carr, at this point in her career, was engaged in distinctly feminist theatre practices. Materialist feminist discourse provides a useful framework for understanding what the emergent dramatist was trying to achieve and the meaningful possibilities of her work. A study of this phase of Carr's career, encompassing all four works preceding The Mai, has not been offered in research on the dramatist to date. In addition to expanding the history of feminist theatre practice in Ireland, it promotes an enriched understanding of Carr's theatre as a whole.     

The intimate politics of secularism and the headscarf: the mall,the neighborhood,and the public square in Istanbul

The headscarf continues to be a highly charged political issue in Turkey where it is often understood through the prism of the opposition between so-called Islamists versus secularists. My work brings together feminist scholarship on the politics of everyday space and recent rethinking of the categories of secularism and religion. I begin by situating this politicized debate in the everyday material contexts of the public square, the street, and the mall. By introducing popular culture (notably the film Bü?ra) and my own fieldwork on the veil, I argue that the headscarf represents the intersection of politics of place and individual agency in a way that renders ideological debates contingent on everyday practices. Reducing the headscarf to a sign of Islamism fails to take into account the ever-shifting meanings of this object across time and space. The differences within and between the everyday urban sites I examine reveal much more complex, often contradictory, and discontinuous geographies of secularism and Islam. This analysis reveals a multiplicity that belies attempts to delineate clearly bounded spaces, subjects, and ideologies, one that is intimate and political.     

Thinking Arab women's spatiality: the case of ‘mutanazahat’ in Nablus,Palestine

This article aims to develop our understanding of Arab women's spatiality. It highlights the effect of the embedded culture and the physical environment on shaping women's urban experiences. Drawing on feminist geographic and planning theory, this article develops an analytical framework to think women's spatial options and behaviours. The remainder of the article presents empirical research on two outdoor public spaces in the city of Nablus, Palestine, and analyses the use of these spaces by Nablusi women. It is concluded that three factors – space audience, spatial opportunities and space organisation – affect their perception of space, which in turn shapes and constructs their spatial options and behaviours.