Placing Masculinities and Geography

Introduction There has been an increasing focus in feminist and pro-feminist inspired studies on examining men, male subjectivities and masculinities in the decade since Gender, Place and Culture began publication. Our aim in this article is to provide readers with a brief overview of some of this recent research, and then to place these works within a critique of the Anglocentric character of geographic knowledge production. The article proceeds in the following manner. We begin with a brief definition of masculinity, in order to stress its temporal and geographical contingency. We follow this discussion with a brief review of some of the research on masculinities undertaken in the past two decades, with a particular emphasis on studies of the social and cultural geographies of masculinity completed in the decade since Gender, Place and Culture began publication. It is important to note that our review is far from exhaustive, but rather, more indicative. Our purpose here is to provide a context for our subsequent critique of a specific scaling of knowledge that constitutes much of the context for the way that work on masculinities is understood in Anglo-American geography.     

VIEWPOINT The Body and Geography

This paper highlights some of the major issues involved in theorising the body. Dualisms such as mind/body, sex/gender and essentialism/constructionism are discussed in order to provide a starting point for understanding the historical privileging of the conceptual over the corporeal in the production of hegemonic, masculinised and disembodied geographical knowledges. The paper also reviews some of the current literature in feminist geography that problematises the mind/body split and makes the sexed body explicit. This literature, I believe, provides fertile ground for further interdisciplinary and geographical inquiry .     

The Geography Closest In - the Body… the Politics of Pregnability

This paper aims to make questions of the body explicit in geography. Constructionist and essentialist feminist approaches to the body are outlined and the distinction that is commonly made between them is prob-lematised. Also problematised is the mind/body split. The Pregnant Woman is used to question the epistemology and ontology of geographical discourse. These epistemological and ontological questions underlie the discussion of the geography of pregnant women's experiences of Centreplace mall in Hamilton, New Zealand. Suggestions for further research in the area of ‘embodying geography’ are offered.     

Neoliberalism and Suburban Employment: Western Sydney in the 1990s

During the past 15 years metropolitan planning strategies of the NSW state government have done little to address the spatial distribution of either employment or labour market equity within the metropolis. In the fast‐growing outer western suburbs, the government has focused on attracting business investment to increase the stock of local jobs and to improve employment ‘self‐sufficiency’— a dominantly neoliberal policy framework. This paper explores a widening gulf between the reality of outer urban change and this policy framework by considering changes in the location of jobs and in the employment experiences of residents in Greater Western Sydney (GWS). Evidence is drawn from census journey‐to‐work data (1991–2001). While holding a majority of manufacturing jobs in Sydney, GWS also experienced continued growth of jobs in service industries during the 1990s. Yet the relative importance of employment in the city's fast‐growth finance and business services sector still lags well behind that of inner and northern parts of the city. The focus on growing the regional stock of jobs has not addressed problems of labour market access faced by residents of particular localities and the goal of employment self‐sufficiency has not delivered greater equity to outer suburban labour markets. A focus on sufficiency of access to employment for residents of GWS draws attention not only to regional stocks of jobs but also to the provision of social infrastructure and state‐provided services to outer suburban populations as they continue to expand.