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Feminism and Social Theory in Geography: An Introduction*

Karen Dias and Jennifer BlechaUniversity of Minnesota

This essay introduces a collection of articles based on papers developed for a Fall 2004 speaker series at theUniversity of Minnesota. The articles address the continued relevance of feminist geography and the uniquecontributions of feminist perspectives in various areas of geographic research. They also point out directions forneeded future research. This introduction briefly reviews the successes of and remaining challenges to feministgeography, including material inequities yet unresolved in two other (nonresearch) ‘‘places’’ of academic life:teaching and the workplace. We discuss the ongoing underrepresentation of women and people of color on ourfaculties and in the front of classrooms. Key Words: antiracist geography, critical theory, feminist geography,marginalization, social theory.

This essay introduces a collection of articlesthat offer some speculations and insights

into the current place1 of feminist geography inthe broader discipline. The articles follow fromthe University of Minnesota Department ofGeography’s Fall 2004 speaker series, Feminismand Social Theory in Geography, including thediscussions and debates that took place in agraduate seminar connected to this series. Weinvited eight senior scholars (Liz Bondi, SusanCraddock, Jennifer Hyndman, Larry Knopp,Mei-Po Kwan, Richa Nagar, Geraldine Pratt,and Gill Valentine) to present papers at our de-partment’s weekly coffee hour and participate inthe graduate seminar led by Arun Saldanha.Lively debates and discussions ensued. In orderto allow the speakers to come together in onevenue for further discussion, we followed up theseries by organizing two panels at the 2005Annual Meeting of the Association of AmericanGeographers (AAG) in Denver. This first panelincluded five of the original eight speakers.2 Thesecond panel consisted of three graduate stu-dents who attended the Minnesota seminar, andthree (relatively) junior feminist scholars.3

The impetus for organizing the speaker ser-ies, conference panels, and this special section of

The Professional Geographer was to provide spaceto discuss a growing concern among manyfeminist scholars: namely, the idea that the workof feminists is no longer needed because it hasalready been integrated into the discipline, par-ticularly through social/critical theory. Thisperspective seems especially pervasive in de-partments without faculty or courses that spe-cifically teach feminist geography, including ourown. We find this attitude troubling given thecontinued lack of diversity in the discipline andthe marginalization of women and minority ge-ographers despite the theoretical and methodo-logical efforts of feminist and critical theoriststo address difference and inequalities. We de-sired to position the series not as a defense offeminist geography (i.e., Is feminist geographyobsolete?), but as an opportunity for establishedfeminist scholars and graduate students to en-gage in a conversation about current challengesto feminist geography and feminism morebroadly in the academy.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, we chose tofurther develop an important discussion onfeminist methodologies specifically, begunat the 2002 Institute of British GeographersMeeting in Belfast. Sarah Jenkins, Verity Jones,

*We would like to thank several members of our department for their support of the 2004 Feminist Speaker Series, particularly our chair at that time,John S. Adams, without whose support the series would not have been possible. Eric Sheppard and Gwen McCrea were key members of the planningprocess. The series was given logistical, moral, and curricular support by Glen Powell, Helga Leitner, and Arun Saldanha. We would also like to thankthe members of Supporting Women in Geography and various faculty members who helped host and welcome our speakers, and the students andfaculty from across campus who attended the series and participated in its conversations. Finally, we are grateful to Tiffany Muller, Eric Sheppard, andArun Saldanha for their helpful comments on this article.

The Professional Geographer, 59(1) 2007, pages 1–9 r Copyright 2007 by Association of American Geographers.Initial submission, November 2005; revised submission, June 2006; final acceptance, July 2006

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.

and Deborah Dixon posed two questions ofcontinuing relevance to the current climate forfeminist geographies:

� Has feminist geography been subsumedunder the broader project of social the-ory? Or does feminist thinking imparta distinct critical edge to geographicanalysis?

� In light of developing and emerging eco-nomic, political, and cultural contextsacross the globe, what are the analyticproject(s) facing feminist geographers?That is, which objects of analysis do weand should we address as significant?( Jenkins, Jones, and Dixon 2003, 59).

The same questions formed the central themesof our series. We asked participants to discusstheir own current research project while ad-dressing these two questions. The articles in thiscollection represent several subdisciplines, in-cluding political, queer, and feminist geogra-phies, as well as geospatial technologies. We donot claim in any way to exhaust the current de-bates in or on feminist geography and its placein the discipline. Rather, we wish to contribute toand encourage ongoing discussions on the topic.

In the graduate seminar associated with the2004 speaker series, a few themes arose repeat-edly as dilemmas that feminist scholars grapplewith, including ways of collaborating acrossdifferences, and how to (and should we?) recu-perate gender as a viable category of analysisdespite deconstructive projects. These ques-tions bear further discussion. In the space of thisintroduction, however, we have chosen to con-textualize the articles that follow by outliningsome of the contributions of feminist geograph-ic theories and methodologies, and addressingpolitical challenges. In particular we address theongoing marginalization of women and minor-ities in academic geography, and the continuingresistance within the broader discipline to takeseriously the insights and contributions of femi-nist and antiracist geographies.

Background: A Brief Review ofFeminist Geographies

McDowell and Sharp (1999, ix) claim that‘‘feminist theories and debates have changedand expanded in an exponential way since they

first became visible in the academy.’’ Accordingto The Dictionary of Human Geography, feministgeographies are ‘‘perspectives that draw onfeminist politics and theories to explore howgender relations and geographies are mutuallystructured and transformed’’ (Pratt 2000, 259).In A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography,feminist geographies are described as sharing aconstant and particular aim ‘‘to demonstrate theways in which hierarchical gender relations areboth affected by and reflected in the spatialstructures of societies, as well as in the theoriesthat purport to explain the relationships and themethods used to investigate them’’ (McDowelland Sharp 1997, cited in 1999, 90).

Despite the significant diversity and hetero-geneity among feminist geographical theoriesand research, several common concerns definefeminist geographical scholarship: (1) Feministgeographies have developed critical discoursesthat challenge and make visible the oppressionof women generally and in the discipline ofgeography particularly; (2) Feminist geogra-phies draw attention to sexism within geographicalinstitutions through practices of teaching, hiring,and publication; (3) Feminist geographies sharea commitment to situating knowledge, highlightingthe myth of objective and value-free researchand emphasizing the partial, context-specific,and interpretive nature of knowledge produc-tion; and (4) Feminist geographies trace theconnections among all aspects of daily life across allgeographical subdisciplines, including econom-ic, social, political, and cultural geography(Pratt 2000, 259). Thus, feminist geographiesshould be seen not solely as a separate subdis-cipline, but as a critical perspective useful to allsubdisciplines, including economic, political,regional, urban, transnational, rural, historical,cultural, and social geographies, and even phys-ical geography and geographic information sys-tems (GIS), though the last two largely continueto insulate themselves against the challengesposed by feminism (Longhurst 2001, 645).Longhurst claims that feminist geography canthus be seen as a ‘‘strong protagonist in a com-plex and mature politics of geographical know-ledge’’ (645).

Although academic feminism more broadlyshares many of these perspectives and goals,feminist geographies make a particular contri-bution through their attention to spatial loca-tion and spatial relations:

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Spatial relations and layout, the differences withinand between places, the nature and form of the builtenvironment, images and representations of thisenvironment and of the ‘‘natural’’ world, ways ofwriting about it, as well as our bodily place within it,are all part and parcel of the social constitution ofgendered social relations and the structure andmeaning of place. The spaces in which social rela-tions occur affect the nature of those practices, whois ‘‘in place’’ and who is ‘‘out of place’’ and even whois allowed to be there at all. But the spaces them-selves in turn are constructed and given meaningthrough the social practices that define men andwomen as different and unequal.

—(McDowell and Sharp 1997, cited in 1999, 91)

In short, feminist geographers have shown thatphysical and social spaces and places have beensocially constructed to reflect and reinforce un-equal gendered social relations. Therefore amajor goal of feminist geography must be to‘‘investigate, make visible and challenge the re-lationships between gender divisions and spatialdivisions, to uncover their mutual constitutionand problematise their apparent naturalness’’(McDowell and Sharp 1997, cited in 1999, 91).

Feminist geography has followed a trajectorysimilar to academic feminism generally, grap-pling increasingly since the 1980s with ‘‘gendertrouble’’ and challenges to identity, experience,4

and representation. The subdiscipline has diver-sified following the ‘‘cultural turn’’ and the in-sights of postmodernism and post-structuralism.Feminists have also increasingly drawn on abroader range of social and cultural theories, in-cluding psychoanalysis, post-structural theory,and postcolonial theory. They have paid in-creased attention to the larger network of het-eropatriarchal relations and differences acrossraces, ethnicities, ages, religions, sexualities, na-tionalities, and transnationalities (Pratt 2000,261–62). Work has proliferated on the construc-tion of gendered, sexed, racialized, and culturalidentities, subjectivities, and bodies in particularspatial contexts (Longhurst 2001, 644). In theprocess, ‘‘feminist geography’’ has become‘‘feminist geographies’’ because of its diversity.

Gender, Place and Culture (GPC), an explicitlyfeminist geography journal, has been tremen-dously successful since its inception in 1993 in‘‘rais[ing] the profile of feminist geographywithin the discipline and provid[ing] a spacefor women’s writing’’ (Peake and Valentine2003, 107). In their tenth anniversary com-

ments, editors Linda Peake and Gill Valentinereflected on the decade’s changes in the journal.They noted a tremendous expansion in the typesand amount of feminist geography work pub-lished (mostly but not exclusively by women),alongside transformations in meaning of thethree concepts that make up the journal’s title:

Gender: Understandings of gender and sexhave shifted due to Judith Butler’s work, whichhas theorized beyond second wave feminist no-tions of the social construction of gender, toshow that sex itself is a social construction andthat gender is performative.

Place: Notions of performativity have also beenapplied to place and space, shifting their under-standings from pre-existing fixed locations to sitesthat are also constituted by performances.

Culture: More theoretical and political under-standings of cultural geography have resultedfrom and contributed to the so-called ‘‘culturalturn,’’ distinguishing this scholarship from moretraditional and conservative Sauerian notions of‘‘culture.’’

—(Peake and Valentine 2003, 107–108)

Thus, feminist geographies have becomemore sophisticated and have played an increas-ing role in some branches of geographic re-search and in methodology. Nevertheless, thesubfield continues to face obstacles. In the nexttwo sections we discuss one problem that we feelis of key importance to the integrity of both thesubfield and the discipline more generally: lackof diversity and representation.

Challenges to the Place of FeministGeography

Feminist geographers have repeatedly raisedthe question of gender and have challenged thediscipline (and the academy in general) to ad-dress political questions about who is repre-sented within geography, both as scholars and assubjects of scholarship (McDowell and Sharp1999). Feminist arguments about the situated orpositioned nature of academic products andknowledge have been increasingly accepted, andthere has also been progress in the understand-ing that men do not constitute the ungendered‘‘norm,’’ with women as the gendered ‘‘other.’’Nevertheless, it has been ‘‘a long struggle togain recognition within geography as a discip-line that gender relations are a central organiz-ing feature both of the material and symbolic

Feminism and Social Theory in Geography: An Introduction (Focus) 3

worlds and of the theoretical basis of the dis-cipline’’ (McDowell and Sharp 1999, 92).

Even as feminist work has certainly begun tohave an effect, several paradoxical problemshave emerged to discount it. First, severalscholars have noted that feminists are often in-adequately acknowledged when their ideas aretaken up by the wider discipline and become‘‘common sense.’’ Peake and Valentine (2003,108) note, for example, that even though femi-nist geography ‘‘is no longer seen as an aberra-tion but has been comprehensively, althoughsomewhat unevenly, incorporated into the dis-cipline,’’ its role ‘‘in shaping debates in geog-raphy, particularly in relation to methodology,has not always been given appropriate credit oracknowledgement by the wider discipline.’’

Second, feminist geography continues to beseen as the only ‘‘place’’ where gender is ad-dressed, therefore the broader discipline is notrequired to engage seriously with or to takeup feminist challenges.5 This perception per-petuates the old ‘‘geography and gender’’ ap-proach in which established masculinist researchtheories and methodologies are only minimallymodified: just ‘‘add women and stir.’’ Addition-ally, many geographers persist in the problematicassumption that feminist geographers focus sole-ly on ‘‘gender’’ and ‘‘women’s issues’’ to the ex-clusion of other axes of subjectivity andmarginalization (McDowell and Sharp 1999).

Post-structuralist insights have posed otherchallenges to feminist geography through decon-struction of gender categories. If the subject andobject of feminist inquiry is dead (because identitypolitics are dangerous and experiential knowledgeproblematic), then anybelief in thecontinued needfor the subdiscipline is impossible or naı̈ve.6 Femi-nist geographers (and feminist scholars generally)often operate within an academic climate of fearand pressure that has led to what Richa Nagar(2002) has termed an ‘‘impasse’’: researchers in-creasingly avoid fieldwork because they can nei-ther be nor represent ‘‘authentic’’ women’s voices.Adding to this impasse, reviewers and readers havecriticized self-reflexive exercises as mere navel gaz-ing and self-indulgence (Kobayashi 2003b).

Finally, as noted at the outset, some geographersbelieve that thework of feminists has (already) beenfully integrated into the academy and the disciplineof geography, its purposes now subsumed withinsocial theory and critical geographies, and there-fore feminist geography is no longer needed.

In addition to these challenges to feministgeography from outside, the subdiscipline stillstruggles with internal challenges such as inad-equate diversity. Peake and Valentine (2003, 108)point out that although feminist scholarship inGPC has been increasingly diverse over the pastten years and has addressed gender issues inmore than twenty-five countries all over theglobe, this scholarship is produced primarily bywhite female scholars based in academic institu-tions in the United Kingdom and North Amer-ica. They point out the lack of a systematic effortto include women from the Global South, whoface many economic, geographical, mobility, andlanguage barriers to participation, as well as alack of interest in participation from women ofcolor who feel that GPC is not necessarily wel-coming (Peake and Valentine 2003, 109). Dif-ferent academic environments, practices,languages, publication requirements, and writ-ing and language styles (such as dense theoreticallanguage) are all further obstacles to the journal’sdiversification (Peake and Valentine 2003, 109).7

The need for more diversity, however, goes be-yond GPC ’s mandate regarding feminist geog-raphy, and signals the inadequate diversity in thediscipline in general. Until the discipline as awhole begins appropriately valuing geographic-ally and racially situated knowledges, feministgeography remains relevant as the primary sub-discipline advocating for their recognition.

Thus there is not only a problem of broaderdisciplinary perceptions of feminist insights andchallenges, but also lingering difficulties withthe material, embodied diversity within feministgeography and the discipline as a whole. What isneeded is not only recognition of the continuingsignificance of the diverse and interlocking em-bodied and emplaced subjectivities of currentfeminist geographical theories and practices,but a committed engagement with these chal-lenges to mainstream theory and methodologiesacross the discipline. We are interested in fur-ther exploring the reasons why and how theseproblems persist in the discipline of geographyand the academy more broadly.

The Places of Geography andContinued Marginalization

Delaney (2002) has articulated three specific‘‘places’’ that constitute the discipline of geog-

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raphy (or any academic discipline): the place ofresearch, the place of teaching, and the work-place. We contend that the insights and work offeminist geography are usually seen as restrictedto the place of research. This perception detri-mentally undervalues the contributions femi-nist geography makes (and should make) to theplaces of teaching and the workplace—consid-erations of pedagogy, the role of teachers andrepresentation of the discipline in the class-room, the composition of departments, and theclimate of departments as workplaces. (For adiscussion of risks of power, feminism, and‘‘Others’’ in the classroom, see JGHE Sympo-sium 1999.) This view also neglects the ways inwhich classroom and departmental places, too,are constantly shaped through complex socialrelations of power (including gender and race)that affect all geographers.

Certainly, in this era of the increasing cor-poratization of the academy, the accompanyingproliferation of discourses of neoliberal marketprinciples, and the increasing privileging of in-dustry training over education, there is a very realthreat to the place of all marginalized fields andthe authority of critical knowledges generally(Longhurst 2001). Although feminist geographyhas made progress over the past few decades, inthe face of this academic climate there is reasonfor concern about its future place in geography(Longhurst 2001, 645). Yet, is the corporate cap-italist climate of the academy the only, or eventhe main, obstacle to the survival of feministgeography? Some scholars posit that there isperhaps a(nother) society-wide backlash againstfeminism (Oakley and Mitchell 1998). While thismay be true, such a general claim fails to tracemore specific and material trends in the mar-ginalization of women and other minoritygroups in the discipline of geography. As Bergand Roche (1997) note, ‘‘places—such as univer-sities—do not exist simply as ontological givens,but instead are produced through complex con-stellations of power-knowledge. . . . The sociallyconstructed landscape of the university is notpower-neutral, it works to support hegemonicgroups’’ (cited in Longhurst 2001, 645).

Women continue to be underrepresented inacademic geography, as faculty and often also asstudents. Change is slow—the growth in facultynot keeping up with the increased numbers ofwomen completing doctoral degrees. Further,women disproportionately occupy the lower

ranks within faculties, thereby being excludedor marginalized in decision making and pos-itions of power within departments and thewider university context (Monk, DroogleeverFortuijin, and Raleigh 2004, 85). Women con-stitute 16 to 17 percent of faculty reported inU.S. studies or 24 percent based on AAG mem-bership data (Monk 2002) and only 12 percentof the faculty in Canada (White 2000).

But perhaps more significant is the ‘‘profoundunder-representation of non-whites within thediscipline’’ (Concerned Group on Race inGeography8). The discipline of geography hasa particularly problematic history that far pre-dates current academic trends, and some arguethat geography’s colonial and racializing pastpersists in the discipline today (Delaney 1998;Kobayashi and Peake 2000; Kobayashi 2003a).Despite the theoretical and methodologicalcommitments of feminists and many other crit-ical geographers to addressing inequalities, anddespite the growing work on the intersectionsbetween race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, andclass, especially among women of color, thematerial reality of minority inequality in thediscipline has not been resolved. Women andminority groups, especially minority women,remain marginalized among the faculty and stu-dents in the discipline (Mahtani 2004). Thesestatistics glaringly highlight that the disciplinecontinues to reproduce the sense that to be ageographer is to be white and male (Monk,Droogleever Fortuijin, and Raleigh 2004).

As Audrey Kobayashi (2003a, 553) argues,‘‘the very fact that geography remains such awhite discipline shows us that . . . colour doesmatter, and until we address the balance, ourknowledge will remain hypocritical dogma.’’What does the whiteness, male dominance, andEurocentrism of geography teach undergradu-ate students about our discipline? How can weattract diverse students without first diversify-ing geography? What are the ramifications forthe climate of geography departments?

Minelle Mahtani’s recent research with mi-nority female faculty and graduate studentsin geography demonstrates that masculinist,sexist, racist, and Eurocentric practices withingeography departments and scholarship rein-force their exclusion and isolation within thediscipline. Minority women experience the de-valuation of their difference, a lack of institu-tional interest in difference and diversity issues,

Feminism and Social Theory in Geography: An Introduction (Focus) 5

covert and overt discrimination and hostility,and outright questioning of their legitimacyas professional scholars (Mahtani 2004, 93–94,97). Based on her respondents’ narratives,Mahtani puts forth three proactive strategiesfor diversifying geography departments andmaking the climate in the discipline more openand welcoming to ( female) minority faculty andstudents. Departments should: (1) implementrecruitment programs to hire more women (andmen) of color; (2) diversify the curriculum toinclude more critical race theorists (not justtheories), nonwhite women and men, and criticaltexts; and (3) implement a formal mentoringprogram to provide avenues for networking andsupport for students (Mahtani 2004, 95–97).Clearly, these strategies would require an ac-knowledgement of and a willingness to addressgaps and inequalities in the places often sidelinedin the discipline: teaching and the workplace.

We argue that the climate for feminist geog-raphy is a wider problem in the discipline thanjust the representation of women. Clearly, thecontributions and challenges posed by feministshave been inadequately taken up by the broaderdiscipline, as is evident in the lack of diversity inthe discipline and the ongoing marginalizationof minorities. Peake and Valentine (2003) arguefor a concerted effort among feminist geogra-phers to encourage and welcome more diversegeographers into feminist spaces, and severalhave already made concrete attempts to collab-orate and create alliances across differences andhave theorized ways to recuperate gender as ameaningful and significant organizing and an-alytical category (Gibson-Graham 1994; Jacobs1994; Pratt 2002; Raju 2002; Valentine 2002;Nagar, Ali, and the Sangtin Women’s Collective2003; Nagar 2006). However, the onus can notfall entirely on feminists (who are still margin-alized themselves) to make all the neededchanges. Significantly, Mahtani’s researchshows that merely adding more minorityscholars—though necessary—won’t entirelysolve the problem if the foundational attitudesand persisting mores of what constitutes geog-raphy (and therefore a geographer) are not sin-cerely addressed. Geography as a disciplineneeds to take seriously the insights and contri-butions of feminist and antiracist geographiesthat stress the need for more diverse voices, bothfaculty and student, if it is to avoid obsolescenceor accusations of hypocrisy.

Feminism and Social Theory inGeography

The four articles collected here provide mul-tiple examples of and arguments for the con-tinued importance of feminist geographicresearch. The authors point to the contribu-tions that feminist geographers (can) make inrelated fields; for example, geographers’ par-ticular focus and expertise on spatiality wouldenrich ongoing discussions in feminist studiesand queer theory. Within geography, they per-sistently call for greater attention to the emo-tional, the embodied, the personal, and theexperiential, noting that too often as geogra-phers we discount and erase the real, daily im-portance of these ways of knowing in favor ofelitist, transcendent, or scientistic habits anddiscourses. The articles also share a hope that byreshaping our theories and technologiesthrough these feminist priorities, we would beless prone to use them in violent, impersonal, orcoercive projects.

Gill Valentine’s (2007) contribution, ‘‘The-orizing and Researching Intersectionality: AChallenge for Feminist Geography,’’ proposesthat feminist geography needs to use the con-cept of intersectionality to theorize the complexrelationship between and within different socialcategories (such as gender, race, class, and sexu-ality), claiming that ‘‘the specific debate aboutintersectionality as a concept has not yet beenplayed out within geography despite its obviousspatial connotations’’ (2007, 13). She provides agenealogy of the feminist debates about the in-terconnections between gender and other iden-tities, including a critique of the earlier attemptsto map difference through geometric meta-phors of oppression. Valentine illustrates howover time these debates led to the recognition ofwhat Andersen and Hill Collins (1992, xii)termed ‘‘interlocking categories of experienc-es,’’ and recognition that social categories couldnot be separated or explained through a singleframework of oppression (patriarchy, racism,capitalism, etc.). Intersectionality captures theoverlapping, enmeshed, and interacting con-nections of social identities, the recognition thatdifference is located ‘‘not in the spaces betweenbut in the spaces within’’ (Fuss 1989), as well asthe situated, performative, and fluid nature ofidentities. Valentine focuses on ways of re-searching intersectionality in practice in order

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to demonstrate how it works as a lived experi-ence. She uses a case study from her research onlesbians and gay men and D/deaf people’s ex-periences of marginalization in the UnitedKingdom to highlight ‘‘the constant movementthat individuals experience between differentsubject positions, and the ways that ‘who we are’emerges in interactions within specific spatialcontexts and specific biographical moments’’(Valentine 2007, 18). Valentine feels stronglythat feminist geographers have much to add totheorizations of the importance of space in theproduction and experience of intersectionality.

In ‘‘Affecting Geospatial Technologies: To-ward a Feminist Politics of Emotion,’’ Mei-PoKwan (2007) critiques the dominant uses andforms of geospatial technologies (i.e., GIS,GPS, and remote sensing) as disembodied andsurrounded by a notion of scientific objectivity.Citing the well-known work of feminists andscience studies that have effectively challengedthis ‘‘god-trick’’ of objectivity (Haraway 1991,196), Kwan argues that feminist efforts areneeded to ‘‘re-corporealize’’ and ‘‘embody’’work in and with geospatial technologies. Kwancites work in three areas where feminist cri-tiques and alternatives have been demonstrated.Two ‘‘academic’’ areas are urban geography andcultural ecology. The various research projectsshe cites all include mixed methods, often GISand in-depth interviews, which bring up fruitfuldifferences in ‘‘ways of knowing’’ and also makefor much richer analysis and discussion. Thethird area of feminist efforts in geospatial tech-nologies is a series of three art pieces that chal-lenge the notion of these technologies asobjective data devices, and instead use their ca-pacities to document self-expression, creativity,and emotion. Kwan’s hope is that by recorpo-realizing geospatial technologies, deconstruct-ing their objectivity, and using them in projectsthat take into account emotion, difference, andidentity, the technologies will be used for life-affirming purposes rather than for anonymousand violent purposes (as in war or displacement).

Jennifer Hyndman (2007), in ‘‘Feminist Ge-opolitics Revisited: Body Counts in Iraq,’’ con-siders the traffic between ‘‘two solitudes’’:feminist geography and geopolitics. Findinglittle appreciation for feminist thought in main-line geopolitics, she nevertheless insists that itindeed brings a ‘‘distinct critical edge’’ ( Jenkins,Jones, and Dixon 2003) to the subfield.

Through reexamining her earlier work on bodycounts in Afghanistan and new thoughts onIraq, Hyndman shows the inadequacy of thedominant frames of geopolitical discourse, suchas the assumption of states as actors and thedeaths of a certain number of civilians as a ‘‘ne-cessary price’’ for military effectiveness. Hynd-man applauds the work of critical geopoliticsinsofar as it questions and destabilizes dominantpolitical discourses and logics. Yet she notes thatsuch work, although critical, can slide into elu-sive theoretical debates that become detachedfrom real people, real places, and real bodies ofdead individuals (in the cases of Iraqi and Af-ghani civilians). Through her discussion of therole of body counts in political discourse, Hynd-man demonstrates the strength of feministcommitments to the personal and the concrete,emphasizing the importance of ‘‘embodied epis-temologies’’ in challenging a ‘‘culture of war.’’

In ‘‘On the Relationship Between Queer andFeminist Geographies,’’ Larry Knopp (2007)calls for a radical queering of the geographicalimagination. He acknowledges the close histor-ical and contemporary—though not alwayseasy—relationship between feminist and queergeographies, as well as the theoretical and ana-lytical foundation laid by feminist geographers.Knopp outlines five main ‘‘underdeveloped’’themes that queer geography is well-positionedto develop: spatial ontologies, the spatialities ofgender, homophobias and heterosexisms, gen-erational cultures, and cultural politics. Thefirst theme deals with how the distinctive con-tributions of queer geography can help us re-think our spatial imaginations ontologically,particularly three fundamental ontological con-cepts in geography: place, placelessness, andmovement. Knopp contends that it is impera-tive not simply to develop queer spatial ontol-ogies in material or abstract theoretical ways,but to develop their emotional and sentimentalmeanings and significance. That is, a queer per-spective ought to be informed as much by em-bodied experience and by theory, because manyqueers’ experiences entail a radically differentrelationship to these notions than that of moresedentary nonqueers. ‘‘Queers frequently aresuspicious, fearful, and unable to relate easily tothe fixity and certainty inhering in most dom-inant ontologies of space and place, due to thevulnerability that accompanies being visible andlocatable’’ (Knopp 2007, 49) and find a certain

Feminism and Social Theory in Geography: An Introduction (Focus) 7

amount of solace in being in motion or nowhereat all. In terms of spatializing gender, homo-phobias, and heterosexism, Knopp addresseshow a queer geographical perspective may con-tribute to exploring transgender spatialities,drag and gender performativity, spatialities ofresistance to gender regimes, the policing ofdesire in public spaces, and the policing of ‘‘per-verse’’ spaces. He also calls for the need to payattention to the understudied and unappreci-ated area of generation cultures and change aswell as to examine how a queer approach mighthelp us better understand the political, cultural,and moral landscapes of the so-called culturewars. Ultimately, Knopp arrives at five goals orvalues that may help us use a queer perspectiveto develop our geographical imaginations to-ward more productive—and less elitist—research and knowledge.

These four articles provide compelling ex-amples of the continued importance of feministresearch in geography, the need for ongoingcollaborative research between various sub-disciplines, and the opportunities for fruitfulfuture research into new terrain. Inroads havejust begun into areas such as geospatial tech-nologies and geopolitics (as well as other sub-fields relatively untouched by feminism), butthis provides room for tremendous new ideasand insights. In subfields where feminist geog-raphy has already made a greater impact, is itbeing given its due? And, in the other ‘‘places’’ ofgeography—teaching and the workplace—isthe material work of feminism done? How welldo the faculty teaching geography reflect thecomplex, ‘‘intersectional’’ diversity of each in-stitution’s (potential) student body? We hopethis Focus section provokes readers to considertheir spaces, experiences, and imaginationswithin geography.’

Notes

1 What we mean by ‘‘place’’ here will be discussed laterin this article.

2 Susan Craddock, Jennifer Hyndman, Larry Knopp,Mei-Po Kwan, and Gill Valentine.

3 Jennifer Blecha, Karen Dias, Alison Mountz, TiffanyMuller, Rachel Silvey, and Mary Thomas.

4 Feminists appealed to experience as a way of recov-ering marginalized identities and the worldviews ofsocial groups excluded from representation and par-ticipation in knowledge production. A focus on ex-perience is meant to operate as an oppositional

theoretical practice by resisting academic depend-ence on the authority of canonical Eurocentric the-oretical texts, as well as critiquing the colonizing andexclusionary practices of both hegemonic academictheory and hegemonic academic feminist theory.The use of experience by hegemonic feminism wascritiqued because it constructed, essentialized, andreified ‘‘the’’ female experience, while ignoring di-verse and non-Western experiences as well as theintersectionality of other forms of oppression. Theidea that experience is an authentic, reliable, ortransparent mirror to reality, however, has now beenwidely critiqued.

5 This scenario is a problem for academic feminismgenerally. Some feminist scholars have argued thatthe institutionalization of Women’s Studies, and thedevelopment of its own faculty appointments,classes, journals, conferences, associations, and soforth, has led to its ghettoization and weakened thepolitical thrust of feminism’s challenges to institu-tional practices across and beyond the academy. (Formore on this, see Brown 1995 [especially pp. 52–76]and 2003.)

6 Often critiques of feminist geographies are based onhow cutting-edge, theoretically sophisticated, or invogue its theoretical repertoire is (or is not), to theneglect of the material and embodied realities of itsgendered, raced, classed (etc.) subjects of analysiswho are supposedly now impossible to represent.

7 In an attempt to bridge these gaps and silences in thenext decade, Gender, Place and Culture will diversifythe languages in which it accepts manuscripts, pub-lish all abstracts in Spanish as well as English, andinvite more diversity on its editorial board (Peakeand Valentine 2003, 109).

8 In 2000 The Concerned Group on Race and Geog-raphy prepared a pledge form, Call for direct actionon race in U.S. and Canadian geography. Letteravailable from Dr. Joe Darden, Department ofGeography, 315 Natural Science Bldg., MichiganState University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1115.

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8 Volume 59, Number 1, February 2007

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KAREN DIAS is a Ph.D. student in the Departmentof Geography at the University of Minnesota, 414Social Sciences Building, 267–19th Avenue South,Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-mail: dias0004@umn.edu(corresponding author). Her research interestsinclude feminist and antiracist geography, feministtheory, and geographies of mental health.

JENNIFER BLECHA is a Ph.D. candidate in theDepartment of Geography at the University of Min-nesota, 414 Social Sciences Building, 267–19th Av-enue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-mail:blec0013@umn.edu. Her research interests includesustainable food and agriculture systems, urban envi-ronmental planning, feminist ecological economics,and animal geographies.

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