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.     

Alice Munro’s Narrative Historicism: “Too Much Happiness”

Alice Munro’s “Too Much Happiness” relates the final years of its subject Sophia Kovalevsky (1850–1891), a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician, writer, and subsequent feminist icon. Munro’s narrative here does not always fit with her earlier fictional practice. By examining Munro’s earlier work, and glancing at a later sequence of narratives with regard to her uses of historical matters, this discussion outlines the generic implications of “Too Much Happiness” and their effect upon our estimation of the remainder of Munro’s fiction.     

The Whips of the Liberal Unionist Party in the House of Commons

This note provides the most complete list of Liberal Unionist whips in the house of commons, thus contributing to our understanding of the history of the party in parliament over the entire period of its existence from 1886 to 1912, and charts the extent of the responsibility of the party whip for the organisation of the party outside the house of commons, which peaked during the tenure of Lord Wolmer as whip from 1888 to 1892. The note concludes by observing that the division of labour regarding organisation implemented in the Conservative Party in 1911 mirrors that adopted by the Liberal Unionist Party in 1892, and that this was likely the result of Wolmer, now 2nd earl of Selborne, serving on the committee that recommended the 1911 reforms.