Introduction: young people,gender and intersectionality

There are close connections between feminist geographies and young people's geographies with their shared interests in challenging inequality, questioning power relations and in conducting ethically sensitive and nuanced research. The introduction to this themed section synthesises some of the key developments in youth geographies and the contributions that feminist geographers have made to this field. Following this, we explore how the articles in this themed section are valuable additions to the evolving body of work on youth, gender and intersectionality.     

Introduction: towards trans geographies

Gender geographies have focused on normatively gendered men and women, neglecting the ways in which gender binaries can be contested and troubled. Trans people question hegemonic conventions that link sexed bodies, gender roles and lives. This collection spans a range of theoretical fields in this context, including trans theories, queer engagement, feminist geographies, gender geographies and sexualities geographies. It offers empirical investigations of trans lives, while addressing the often theoretical use of ‘trans’ to render gender fluid, incoherent and unintelligible. As a whole this themed section questions geography's presumption of man/woman and male/female.     

Introduction: global perspectives on gender–water geographies

This introduction summarizes the work featured in the themed section of Gender, Place and Culture titled ‘Global geographies of gender and water’. It brings into dialogue scholars investigating a variety of gender–water relationships at different scales, including: poisoned waterscapes; fishing practices; and the implications of neoliberal water policies. The authors featured purposefully engage with the multi-faceted ways in which experiences, discourses and policies of water are gendered, and how gender is created through processes of access, use and control of water resources. In bringing these articles together, we have consciously aimed to support inclusive, feminist collaborative work and to prioritize diversity.     

Intersectional feminist and queer geographies: a view from ‘down-under’

Despite rapid growth of geographies of genders and sexualities over the past decade, there is still a great deal of homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism within academic knowledges. A queer and feminist intersectional approach is one way to highlight gendered absences, institutionalized homophobia and transphobia. To understand the diversity of genders and sexualities, feminist and queer geographers must continue to talk about, for example, genders (beyond binaries), sex, sexualities, bodies, ethnicities, indigeneity, race, power, spaces and places. It is vitally important to understand the way that genders and sexualities intermingle in community group spaces, rural spaces, and within indigenous spaces in order to push the boundaries of what feminist and queer geographers understand to be relevant sites of queer intersectionality. Reflecting on the production of queer and feminist geographical knowledges ‘down-under’ may prompt others to consider the way place matters to intersectional feminist and queer geographies.     

Militarisation as diffusion: the politics of gender,space and the everyday

Drawing together the work of five feminist scholars whose research spans diverse sociopolitical contexts, this themed section questions militarisation as a fixed condition. Using feminist methodologies to explore the spatialised networks and social mechanisms through which militarisation is sustained and resisted, ‘gendering’ militarisation reveals a complex politics of diffusion at work in a range of everyday power relations. However, diffusion acts not as a unidirectional movement across a border, but as the very contingency which makes militarisation – and transformation – possible. Through connecting the empirical and theoretical work on militarisation with feminist geographies, the authors in this collection highlight the influence of military thinking and institutions, not as static structures, but instead as productive sites.     

Violence on bodies: Space,social reproduction and intersectionality

Abstract

Social categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, caste, and class have been analyzed by feminist geographers, who collectively argue that as individuals we experience and live the effects of these social categories simultaneously. Violence as a result of living these categories is not specific to certain spaces or contexts. Nor can violence be imagined as only social – it is also political, economic and institutional. Silvia Federici’s work can assist feminist geographers in understanding how this violence plays out in various contexts. Federici's detailed archival searches and empirical analyses of bodies and reproduction show parallels with contemporary forms of direct and structural violence of the state, patriarchy, and capitalism through unequal power relations and unequal life chances. Refining the scarce scholarly acknowledgement of women (and men) who are exploitable or labeled as irrational and vulnerable, and of human and non-human populations that have been relegated to the realm of surplus and expendable bodies – explain how the organization of capital facilitates and, indeed, relies on violence. In support of this argument, the authors in this collection seek pathways within Federici’s ground-breaking works Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero, which could enrich existing works in the discipline. The contributors reflect on how these particular books have been pivotal to feminist thought generally and their own research, analysis, and pedagogical practice specifically. Through their disparate studies the contributors have intertwined the geographies of structural, institutional, and/or state-sponsored violence with themes arising in Federici’s work.     

Feminism and Health Geography: twin tracks or divergent agendas?

Feminist geographies of health and illness have emerged over the last 10 years, marking an increased interest in the highly gendered nature of health, health care and caregiving. Yet work in this area remains relatively sparse. This article examines parallels and divergences between feminist and health geography, which frame the context of feminist geographers doing health work. Interconnections between the two subfields where there is most exchange relate to the admission of experiential knowledge in a ‘reformed’ medical/health geography, and work engaging critical theory—particularly that of the body. The positioning of health geography in the shadow of medicine brings ambiguity to the issue of transformative politics; institutional conservatism vies with an opportunity to bring feminist work to the interstitial space of social science and critical medicine.     

Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geography – a bigger tent than just feminist geopolitics – is indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of ‘earthliness’ offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of ‘conventional’ feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable ‘solution’ offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government’s racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, ‘feminist political geography’ offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.     

‘But this is not geography…! of ontological circumcisions and writing feminist geographies from India

Abstract

Feminist geography still remains at the margins of human geography in India. The space occupied by the subfield, the nature of research and the skepticism routinely encountered by feminist geographers ‘doing gender’ in India all point to this marginal status. Drawing upon detailed status reports, personal communications and everyday encounters with patriarchy in the academy, this essay uses an autobiographical lens to address the pervasiveness of misogyny and the politics of gendered parochial and caste-based gatekeeping to make sense of the peculiar but marked ‘ontological circumcision’ of feminist geographies in India. ‘Coming out’ as a feminist geographer and writing gender from such locations is political and should be read as a resistance to these caste-ridden, male dominated and inherently misogynistic contexts.     

Tender grounds: Intimate visceral violence and British Columbia's colonial geographies

Ongoing colonial violence, I argue in this paper, operates through geographies of Indigenous homes, families, and bodies that are too often overlooked in standard geographical accounts of colonialism. Contiguous with residential school violence and other micro-scale efforts to eliminate Indigenous peoples, colonial power continues to assert itself profoundly through intervention into and disruption of intimate, ‘tender’ (Stoler, 2006), embodied, ‘visceral’ (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy 2008; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010), and biopolitical (Morgensen, 2011a) geographies of Indigenous women and children. Drawing on feminist and decolonizing theories, along with the concept of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011), I offer in this paper a grounded account of spatial forms of governmentality in ongoing colonial relations in British Columbia, Canada. I critique dominant geographic inquires into colonialism as being primarily about land, natural resources, and territory. These inquiries, I suggest, risk perpetuating colonial violence in their erasure of Indigenous women and children's ontologies, positing this violence as something ‘out there’ as opposed to an ever-present presence that all settler colonists are implicated in.     

Sexualized violence and the gendered commodification of the animal body in Pacific Northwest US dairy production

This article draws on a case study of bovine life in the US dairy industry to observe the power relations and violent networks of commodification involved. I use the terms gendered commodification and sexualized violence to understand the lives of animals in the industry and the discourses that are employed to reproduce its practices. Focusing on sex and gender, concepts which have long been classic in feminist geography, this article explores the sexually violent commodification of both female and male animals in dairy production. In addition to the ways in which both are exploited for their productive and reproductive capacities, male animals are also discursively conceptualized as perpetrators of the violence against the females. This article engages with geographies of the body and animal geographies in order to extend geographies of the body to other-than-human bodies and in order to feature the body more prevalently in animal geographies. This attention to the animal body ultimately reveals the pervasiveness of sexual violence and the consequences of gendered commodification for both nonhuman and human others.     

The imperative of struggle: feminist and gender geographies in the United States

Abstract

The groundbreaking work of feminist and gender geographies has substantially advanced the nature of inquiry in the United States. In centering gendered ways of knowing, geographers have reframed disciplinary analyses of landscape, place, and space by troubling the normativities associated with lives, politics, and location. Though undoubtedly thriving, the visibility and impact of feminist and gender geographies have been confronted by history and changing political contexts. This essay extracts challenges to conceptualizing and doing feminist and gender geographies in the United States. By linking national freedom struggles to the current political climate and by reviewing the landscape of U.S. higher education, the essay asserts that scholars engaged with feminist and gender geographies can find utility in reflection, and by doing so, can resist contemporary disciplinary challenges to theory and practice.     

Gendered,spatial and temporal approaches to Polish intra-European migration

This themed section brings together five articles focusing on distinct urban sites: Berlin/Munich, Oslo/Bergen, Belfast, Bologna and Barcelona. While there has been extensive research on Polish migrants in cities such as London, this themed issue presents a unique opportunity to explore the experiences of Polish women and men across a range of different cities. In so doing, these articles address key questions concerning implications of the specific structures and opportunities of localities where Polish migrants settle for their gendered everyday life experiences. In providing a short introduction to the themed sections, we begin by introducing some of these questions and consider the ways in which the section can contribute to on-going debates about how migrants experience and navigate place in gendered ways. We argue that gender relations and dynamics are significant to processes of migrant adaptation within particular cities. The ways in which migrants navigate their new locations are shaped not only by institutional structures but also by gendered, classed and racialised power dynamics enacted in and through those spaces. By examining the experiences of Polish migrants across various city spaces in different national contexts, we consider how migrants may adopt particular strategies to negotiate these specific ‘spaces of encounter’.     

Views and Commentaries: What Difference Does Feminist Theory Make?

This discussion explores what difference a feminist perspective makes in our understandings of the past in two ways. The first section examines to what extent feminist research questions were asked in the preceding papers by Lu Ann De Cunzo, Eleanor Casella, and Susan Piddock. The second section shows what difference feminist theory has made in asking new questions that have produced new gendered understandings of the global historical context of these papers. As a whole, this discussion shows how feminist theoretical approaches change our understanding of the lives of historic women and men in nineteenth century reform institutions within their larger gendered cultural context. While the introduction to this volume presents the broader ungendered historical context, this discussion focusses on the gendered cultural context that was foundational to the gender relationships embodied in the arrangement of architectural spaces and material culture at the sites in the preceding three papers.     

Introduction

This editorial theorizes the emotional entanglements that constitute spaces of fieldwork. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's notion of sticky and circulating emotions, we develop the concept of emotional entanglements as a way to engage with the methodological implications of the emotional turn in geographic research. Beyond providing empirical evidence for research on emotional geographies, we argue that an attention to emotions in fieldwork has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity and positionality. In addition, a critical engagement with emotions can offer novel epistemological techniques for studying the politics of knowledge production and the landscapes of power in which we, as researchers, are embedded. As the papers of this themed section demonstrate, analysis of emotional entanglements in research pose critical questions with regard to power relations, research ethics and the well-being of research participants and researchers alike. They also make visible how the power relations of sexism, racism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism permeate and constitute the emotional spaces of the field. We use the notion of emotional entanglements as a way to situate the five articles of the themed section and to highlight the contribution of each paper to debates about the emotional field.     

Parenting,care and the family car

This paper draws on driving ethnographies conducted with heterosexual parents in a regional centre in New South Wales, Australia, to illustrate the doing of family care in the mobile space of the car. Our analysis employs a narrative ethnography used by geographers working in materialist more-than-human feminist perspectives. In doing so, we advance writing in the gendered geographies of care and car dependency by exploring mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in driving their children. We engage with work which challenges the epistemological and ontological orthodoxies that once dominated transport and family studies in order to better tackle car dependency in the Anthropocene by understanding how parents ‘do’ family somewhere-on-the-move. Parents’ care for and about kin is lived and felt through the sociality of driving somewhere together. We conclude with insights for theory and policy.     

Embodied Discourse: On gender and fear of violence

This article advances an interpretation of gender and fear of violence based on feminist post-structuralist theory. The authors explore the interweaving of 'embodied discourses', 'investments' in subject positions, and emotion. They illustrate their discussion through an exploratory analysis of the ways in which a sample of male and female university students describe their experiences of physical and sexual danger in urban space. The authors interpret the accounts they offer in terms of multiple subject positions embodied in the context of gendered power relations. In so doing they offer a fresh perspective on the geography of women's fear.     

‘Peace begins at home’: Geographic imaginaries of violence and peacebuilding in northern Uganda

While there is an acknowledgment of the importance of geographic and historical context in contemporary feminist scholarship on the relationship between domestic violence and warfare, there remains an assumption that mainstream narratives will tend to separate these forms of violence or, if connections are acknowledged, warfare will be given primacy. Based on ethnographic research in northern Uganda, I demonstrate how the presence of Orientalist narratives of violence in peacebuilding programs disrupts these assumptions by not only drawing connections between domestic violence and warfare but prioritizing domestic violence. I argue that these narratives of violence, and their associated geographic imaginaries, contribute to uneven geographies of intervention – geographies in which racialized bodies and intimate spaces are associated with war and thereby seen as appropriate sites for peacebuilding. By engaging with peacebuilding programs as sites of geopolitical negotiations in which variously scaled actors are vying for position in the post-war landscape, I argue that the tendency for peacebuilding programs to focus on a singular site of intervention – ‘the Acholi home’ – says less about the centrality of this site to the creation of peace than it does about the centrality of this site in maintaining the networks of mutual legitimization amongst peacebuilding partners.