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Feminist Geographies of Difference, Relation, And FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE, 4 RELATION, AND CONSTRUCTION Deborah P. Dixon and John Paul Jones III Introduction and their associated methodologies: hence the plural ‘geographies’ in the title of this Feminist geography is concerned first and chapter. To facilitate our survey of feminist foremost with improving women’s lives by geography, we draw out three main lines of understanding the sources, dynamics, and research. Each of these holds the concept of spatiality of women’s oppression, and with gender to be central to the analysis, but they documenting strategies of resistance. In differ in their understanding of the term. accomplishing this objective, feminist geo- Under the heading of gender as difference, graphy has proven itself time and again as a we first consider those forms of feminist source for innovative thought and practice geographic analysis that address the spatial across all of human geography.The work of dimensions of the different life experiences feminist geographers has transformed research of men and women across a host of cultural, into everyday social activities such as wage economic, political, and environmental arenas. earning, commuting, maintaining a family Second, we point to those analyses that (however defined), and recreation, as well as understand gender as a social relation. Here, major life events, such as migration, procre- the emphasis shifts from studying men and ation, and illness. It has propelled changes in women per se to understanding the social debates over which basic human needs such relations that link men and women in com- as shelter, education, food, and health care are plex ways. In its most hierarchical form, these discussed, and it has fostered new insights relations are realized as patriarchy – a spatially into global and regional economic transfor- and historically specific social structure that mations, government policies, and settlement works to dominate women and children. patterns. It has also had fundamental theoret- A third line of inquiry examines the ways in ical impacts upon how geographers: under- which gender as a social construction has been take research into both social and physical imbued with particular meanings, both posi- processes; approach the division between the- tive and negative. Not only are individuals ory and practice; and think about the pur- ‘gendered’ as masculine or feminine as a form pose of creating geographic knowledge and of identification, but also a wealth of phe- the role of researchers in that process. Finally, nomena, from landscapes to nation-states, are feminist geography has helped to revolution- similarly framed. In practice, there is quite a ize the research methods used in geographic bit of overlap among each of these lines of research. research. Yet it is still useful to make a dis- Feminist geography, however, cannot tinction in so far as each body of work lends neatly be summed up according to a uniform itself to a particular set of research questions set of substantive areas,theoretical frameworks, and associated data and analyses. FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCEÿÿ43 Recovering the Geographies of Gender Royal Geographical Society in the UK, were not open, as they are today, to anyone inter- Before we get started, it would be helpful to ested in promoting geographical knowledge. set a context for our survey of these three Instead, their members first had to be nomi- theoretical perspectives. This involves think- nated and then elected.These and other rules ing about the discipline’s traditional male- and practices had a filtering effect on mem- centeredness, which we can categorize in three bership by specifying who was considered a ways: institutional discrimination, substantive legitimate scientist. For example, the early oversights, and ‘masculinist’ ways of thinking constitution of the Association of American and writing. We begin by noting that geo- Geographers reserved full membership for graphy,in both the US and Europe, was formed those who had previously published original out of a late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth- research. Yet with few women included in century academic setting that was highly graduate training, most women writers pub- exclusionary in terms of class, race/ethnicity, lished their research in a style and in venues and gender. Early universities were dominated not deemed scholarly. Not surprising, then, is in the main by upper-class white men.Within the fact that of the 48 original members of the Anglo contexts, a small number of women Association of American Geographers, estab- academics were primarily concentrated in the lished in 1904, only two were women: Ellen teaching and helping professions (e.g.nursing). Churchill Semple and Martha Krug Genthe Few were to be found in the disciplines from (who, among the entire original membership, which modern geography was established, held the only PhD in geography, obtained in such as geology and cartography. During the Germany). nineteenth and well into the mid twentieth All told, the male-oriented culture of centuries, a crude form of biological stereo- these academic societies and university depart- typing underlay not only conceptions of what ments had a significant negative impact on women were able to achieve intellectually,but the number and status of women in the dis- also their physical capacity. This was despite cipline. Many women reported a range of the fact that many women in the early years of obstacles and difficulties in negotiating the the discipline – Mary Kingsley is a celebrated field, from a benign paternalism to outright example – were engaged in intellectually stim- misogyny, and from tokenism to blatant ulating and physically rigorous explorations of sexual discrimination.The resistance of male their own. Moreover, women also played a geographers to women conducting indepen- central role in educating geographers within dent fieldwork lasted well into the 1950s: teacher training institutions. geography’s expeditionary legacy continued It was out of this broader, academic to lead some to a nostalgic belief that only climate that ‘expert’ societies arose so as to ‘stout hearted men’ were capable of such establish geography as a specialized, intellec- research (sometimes referred to as ‘muddy tual endeavor.The goal of these societies was boots’ geography). Overall, geography’s to define the discipline as a science (as opposed culture offered few opportunities for con- to lore) by debating theory, the kinds of structive engagement to the vast majority of phenomena to be investigated, and appropri- college educated women, as evidenced by the ate methodologies, and to work within uni- much larger proportion of women found in versities to establish programs at both the the humanities and some cognate social sci- undergraduate and graduate levels. The two ences, such as anthropology and sociology. most influential of these, the Association of Bearing this institutional discrimination American Geographers in the US and the in mind, it is not surprising to find substantive 44ÿÿPHILOSOPHIES oversights in which male-dominated activities focused in turn on a complex of interrelations constituted the norm of geographic research. that gave a specific and interactive character to This presumption is strikingly revealed in the areal divisions, but here the categories to be gender-coded language geographers have integrated mirror the list of productive activi- used in their research. In reading the litera- ties listed above – the only significant addi- ture produced by geographers up to and tions being the physical environment, the including the 1970s, what appears to be a mere distribution of population (typically distin- semantic peccadillo – as in the ‘Man–Land’ tra- guished by ethnicity only), and the (largely dition or the assumption of ‘economic man’ – male) arena of formal politics. And, in the actually reveals an underlying assumption period of spatial science prior to the develop- about what constitutes primary human activ- ment of a social relevance perspective, location ities and who constitute economic, political, theory took this abstraction of the productive cultural, and environmental agents (who, for activities of society to its furthest extent, example, makes history and geography in the deploying the assumption of economic man in book, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the an idealized space and tracing its implications Earth?). So blatantly sexist is some of this for the distribution of economic activities (as writing that geographers’ citing their pre- in assessments of the models of von Thünen, decessors today often liberally pepper their Weber, Lösch, Alonso, and Christaller, as well quotations with ‘[sic]’ – a term used to indi- as various versions of the gravity model). cate that what has just preceded is reproduced As a result, those geographers interested in exactly as written. Though some may regard working on activities such as childraising, edu- this practice as pedantic, it does allow con- cation, neighborhood organization, and social temporary writers the opportunity to expli- welfare (i.e. activities known as ‘social repro- citly distance themselves from sexist (or racist, duction’ as opposed to productive economic etc.) language. ones) did so in a vacuum.Thus, though there More significant than the stylistic substitu- existed specialized study groups within Anglo- tion of ‘man’ for ‘human’ are the ways in American academic societies devoted to which putatively male activities have been the transportation,
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