Mapping gender and feminist geographies in the global context

Abstract

As a way to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist geography, the journal sought to highlight the status of feminist geography across the globe. This special issue gives an overview of feminist geography as a praxis and an intellectual field across 39 countries. This process has highlighted the contemporary nature of feminist geographical knowledge construction across multiple scales and diverse contexts. What is evident is that with feminist geography spreading beyond Anglo-American countries, what and who defines the field has drastically changed. We suggest that this means paying much closer attention to the unequal plains of knowledge construction while engaging with transnational dialogue that fosters networks of solidarity. The plurality of feminist geographies that exist today enriches the field in ways that are just becoming apparent, we hope that this special issue will contribute to a fruitful and ongoing discussion towards this aim.     

Feminist geographies in Norway from the turn of the millennium

Abstract

Based on an overview of feminist and gender research over two decades, this article reflects on feminist geographies in Norway within a wider political and social context. We identify eight broad, partly overlapping themes of feminist geography: rurality; development policies and practices; entrepreneurship and economic change; migration and mobility; children and youth; sexuality and health; landscape and place; and emotions and autobiography. We find that much of the research has been collaborative, interdisciplinary, multicultural, and transnational. Feminist geographies in Norway are characterized by increasing emphasis on multiple realities and situatedness, and focus on rights and power relations among men and women in all spheres of society, including academia. Yet the gender dimension has tended to focus on geographies of women, with few studies of masculinity. Inspired in part through feminist critiques of research practices in social sciences, a recent development has been autobiographical approaches examining the significance of personal lives and emotions for the research process. We conclude that feminist geographies in Norway are diverse, empirically and contextually informed, and have become embedded within several fields of human geography.     

Feminist geography in the UK: the dialectics of women-gender-feminism-intersectionality and praxis

Abstract

Feminist praxis has always been about both the individual and the collective; one of the revolutionary and utopian promises of feminism is that of being, bringing, and working together. This piece provides a brief account of some of the significant scholarship and collective activities within British feminist geography over the last twenty five years, with a particular focus on the work of the Women and Geography Study Group/Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group. We underscore the importance of intersectional approaches to scholarship and praxis in UK feminist geographies in this period, and in going forward, as well as signalling some of the dialectical opportunities and tensions arising from this approach.     

Searching for feminist geographies: mappings outside the discipline in Poland

Abstract

Feminist geography in Poland does not exist as a sub-discipline of geography. While there are individual Polish geographers pushing for feminist perspectives, most feminist analyses of issues relating to place, space and politics of location can be found within gender studies or feminist sociology. In this sense, feminist geography in Poland cannot compare to Anglophone feminist geography and attempts to incorporate it within such an established field risks being reductive. Instead, in this report, we shift the focus to the scholarship and activism that does exist in Poland, outside of geography. This contribution focuses on shedding light on geographical questions such as the body, the city and gendered geopolitics that have been recurring themes in gender studies, feminist sociology and feminist activism in Poland. We conclude by pointing to the need to mobilise broadly, and internationally, between disciplines with the intention of de-centering dominant knowledges. For feminist scholarship this is particularly important in the context of recent political successes of right-wing forces.     

Gender and geography in the Netherlands: from separation to integration

Abstract

This article reports on the development of feminist geography in the Netherlands in the past forty years. In response to critical feminist students, feminist geography originally developed in a strategy of separation with the appointment of university lecturers specialized in ‘women’s studies’, the introduction of elective courses and research projects, and the creation of national networks. Gender is currently more and more integrated in core geography teaching and mainstream geographical research and separate networks are dissolved. Although feminist geographers in the Netherlands are successful in teaching, publishing and acquisition of research funding, gender issues and perspectives are still not firmly rooted in geography curricula and research programs. Integration is highly dependent on the feminist commitment of individual lecturers and researchers and gender perspectives are at risk of marginalisation or disappearance. Feminist geographers in the Netherlands must still be vigilant to preserve the achievements of forty years of Dutch feminist geography.     

Recognizing and undisciplining feminist geography in the Caribbean

Abstract

The aim of this piece is to provide an overview of the state of feminist geography in the Anglo-Caribbean. In doing so via the metaphor of a gayap, we provide a précis of work that has been completed by feminist geographers across the region; offer an analysis of the historical, structural, and institutional obstacles of why it is not more robust; and propose that it can be seen across the region via an undisciplined and anti-orthodox standpoint. In addition, we review how Caribbean feminist scholarship and praxis contributes to feminist geographies through analyses of how people in the region, particularly women, are contesting, negotiating, disrupting, and responding to prevailing heteropatriarchal ideologies across differing social contexts and political arrangements within the Caribbean.     

Suzanne MacKenzie Memorial LectureConceptually unclad: feminist geography and Aboriginal peoples*

This paper argues that feminist geography can provide some useful lessons in an attempt to increase Aboriginal peoples' representation in geography. It asks the question: How can we use the example of feminist geography to think about a geography that is more inclusive of Aboriginal people? The paper focuses on the issues of content in teaching, drawing on examples from urban and social geography, and on methodological challenges, especially the issue of reflexivity. Feminist geographer Suzanne Mackenzie argued that an emerging feminist geography left the discipline ‘conceptually unclad’, challenging scholars to consider new theoretical frameworks and new perspectives. I argue that emphasising the geographies of Aboriginal people also enriches geography, including feminist geography.     

At the limits of critical geography: Creative interventions into the exclusionary spaces of U.S. geography

Abstract

In recent years, geographers have increasingly called for and enacted more sustained engagements between geography and the arts. This creative (re)turn represents both a renewed interest in recovering interdisciplinary practices within the history of the discipline and a desire to create space for new methods and creative approaches. This article develops in response to two areas requiring further critical engagement and development within the creative (re)turn: questions about the place of identity in creative geographies and the potential for creative geographies to perform critical interventions into disciplinary spaces and identities. I explore and develop these areas of concern alongside a discussion of a critical-creative geographies exhibit, The Critical Futures Visual Archive. Through a presentation of select works in this collection and a candid discussion of the institutional obstacles encountered in curating it, I elaborate upon the challenges and critical potentials of integrating creative practices into geography as a form of feminist praxis.     

Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’

Feminist geographic commonsense suggests that power shapes knowledge production, prompting the long-standing reflexive turn. Yet, often such reflexivity fixes racial power and elides more nuanced operations of difference – moves feminist scholars have, in fact, long problematized. To counter this, we revisit Kobayashi's (1994) ‘Coloring the Field’ [‘Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race”, and the Politics of Fieldwork,’ Professional Geographer 46 (1): 73–90]. Twenty years on, and grounded in our fieldwork in South Sudan and Honduras, we highlight how colonial and gender ideologies are interwoven through emotion. Decentering a concern with guilt, we focus on the way whiteness may inspire awe while scholars of color evoke disdain among participants. Conversely, bodies associated with colonizing pasts or presents can prompt suspicion, an emotive reaction to whiteness not always fixed to white bodies. These feelings have significant repercussions for the authority, legitimacy, and access afforded to researchers. Our efforts thus disrupt notions that we, as researchers, always wield power over our participants. Instead we argue that the positioning of ‘subjects of color’ in the global south, racially and in their relationships with us, is historically produced and socioculturally and geographically contingent. Rethinking the field in this way, as a site of messy, affective, and contingent racialized power, demonstrates the insights offered by bringing together feminist postcolonial and emotional geographies.     

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。     

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.     

‘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.     

Women's,gender and feminist studies in Portugal: researchers’ resilience vs institutional resistance

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of Women's, Gender and Feminist Studies in Portugal, focusing on gender and feminist geographies. Although there is a solid, diversified and mature corpus of feminist reflection in the Portuguese academia, there is a lack of institutional recognition with very few Women's, Gender and Feminist Studies formally organized in curricula or academic degrees. There have been, and still are, many resistances to a formal recognition of Women's, Gender and Feminist Studies as a scientific domain and Portugal is lagging behind in this area. The first and only scientific research centre entirely dedicated to Gender Studies was only created in 2012. The long period of dictatorship that Portugal endured for over 40?years in the past century, has had a major influence in the Portuguese society, preventing social movements, as the second wave feminism, to foster social change in the academia. The current debates at the present time in Portugal concern the widespread use of the concept of gender without an effective epistemological and methodological paradigm shift, and some researchers question the erasure of the word ‘women’ that is being almost always replaced by the word ‘gender’. In this area of study, the intersections of activism and academia in Portugal are noteworthy, and there is a positive contamination that comes through the contact with the feminist empowering movements. The Portuguese researchers’ resilience has proven to overcome the lack of support, both institutional and financial, making it possible to advance Women's, Gender and Feminist Studies.     

Searching for feminist geography in Thailand: mapping trails of inspiration

Abstract

Feminist geography in Thailand is not generally recognized in the academic landscape. Instead, feminist geography is limited to those scholars located in Women’s Studies who have a research or personal interest in the theoretical, conceptual or empirical issues taken up in feminist geography. Although the discipline of geography has been part of the Thai academy since 1935, in both the Thai Geographical Association and its flagship journal, (Geographical Journal), feminist geography has still not made significant inroads into the discipline. However, once Women’s Studies was established, and then expanded its influence, gender and feminism affected every other social science program, including Geography. Even though only a few, if any, students enrolled in feminist geography courses across Thailand, the work that did exist took on a postcolonial form. Thus the feminist geography literature that would introduce (some part of) the theories, concepts and practice of feminist geographers came through both compulsory and elective courses through a postcolonial lens. In this report, we provide a brief history of the challenges around, and progress of, feminist geography across the country through an analysis of key Thai geographical institutional shifts, journal publications and curricular offerings.     

Feminist geographies in Greece: a personal trajectory between ‘local’ and ‘international’

Abstract

Feminist debates in the context of an active women's/feminist movement found their way into the Greek academy in the second half of the 1970s, initially in history. Urban studies and geography were ‘late-comers’ in these debates which took place in different disciplinary environments where geography courses were taught. The article presents a personal account in and through the development of feminist approaches in urban geography, drawing from my teaching and research experience since 1982 in a department of urban and regional planning. This experience has been accumulated as a hard exercise in navigating through the denial and reluctant consent of various levels of administration, students’ changing acceptance, some women’s valuable active support, in the university and beyond, and other colleagues’ opposition or indifference. In this process, recent and longer-term developments have contributed to form a (continuously negotiated and contested) space for feminism, for tolerance, diversity and difference, in which a ‘we’ has been tortuously formed which speaks across worlds, participates in a plurality of communities, communicates in more than one languages and in a plurality of voices between ‘local’ and ‘international’.     

Fighting for recognition: feminist geography in East-Central Europe

In East-Central Europe (ECE), the evolution of feminist geographies began after the end of state socialism. Aiming to identify individual and shared characteristics, this study outlines the development of gender/feminist geography in East-Central European countries. Providing a brief historical overview, the first part of the article substantiates the arguments that i) the evolution of feminist geography in ECE is linked to the post-socialist transition; although the fall of state socialism has removed the political, social and ideological obstacles that prevented its gaining ground, this approach is still considered to be relatively new; and ii) today, development is hindered mainly by conservative mainstream geography, which seems slower in transforming itself than in some related disciplines which have ‘embraced’ gender studies. The topics, methods and theories of feminist geography that have developed in ECE is significantly influenced by the resistance that advocates of feminist geography have to contend with from representatives of mainstream post-socialist geographies. The second part of the article presents the major characteristics of gender/feminist geography in Europe's post-socialist region, while providing an outline of the various methods used in an attempt to earn positive recognition for gender studies. The concluding section maps some lessons to be learnt on the relationship between the production of feminist geographical knowledge and post-socialism.     

A lone ranger: My journey towards becoming a feminist geographer in Nairobi,Kenya

Abstract

Very few Kenyan universities offer modules on Gender or Feminism in their courses. Women are largely under-represented and very few hold senior positions. Due to the few numbers of female faculty, mentorship for young female scholars is lacking. Feminist writing by Female Kenyan geographers in professional geography journals is limited. Collective action among female geography faculty is also largely absent. This is largely due to the lack of feminist advocacy and policies in the universities. My journey to becoming a feminist geographer has received little or no support from the university. I have taken personal initiatives to link up with local and transnational gender associations in order to get insights on current feminist scholarship issues. My lived feminist experience and observations of the struggles of ordinary women in everyday livelihood negotiation have been my main motivation for continuing to do feminist work. Thus, my feminist work has concentrated on women in marginal economic informality. This paper presents my journey as a feminist geographer. It begins with a discussion on the state of feminist geography in three universities in Kenya namely, University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University and Egerton University. This is followed by a presentation of my journey toward becoming a feminist geographer in the absence of a supportive infrastructure. My journey has been inspired by my lived experience. The paper concludes with a call for a concerted effort for feminist advocacy in Kenyan Geography departments.     

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.     

Feminist geographies and participatory action research: co-producing narratives with people and place

Abstract

This review offers thoughts, queries and hesitations regarding articles drawing on participatory action research (PAR) published over 25?years of Gender, Place and Culture. It foregrounds the interconnections and overlaps between PAR and feminist geographies, and considers a continuum of participations-collaborations-actions-knowledges co-produced across a range of interrelated feminist methodologies. I emphasise epistemological commitment as central to PAR, pointing to work in GPC that evidences critical approaches to research process, embedded in feminist perspectives regarding how scholars re-produce the world and/as act/ing in the world, particularly in attending to shifting, situated and complex subjectivities and power inequalities. Working together with participants is vital, through an ethic that centres participants’ voices, as actors in their own lives. Highlighting the emotional and embodied geographies that weave through such research and writing, this review suggests deepening and strengthening interdependences and a feminist ethos of care as researchers, to further foreground diverse stories and voices, work towards social and spatial justice, and co-produce progressive changes with people and place.