BODYSPACE
BodySpace brings together some of the best-known geographers writing on gender and
sexuality today. Together they explore the role of space and place in the performance of
gender and sexuality.
The book takes a broad perspective on feminism as a theoretical critique, and aims to
ground notions of citizenship, work, violence, ‘race’ and disability in their geographical
contexts.
The book explores the idea of knowledge as embodied, engendered and embedded in
place and space. Gender and sexuality are explored—and destabilized—through the
methodological and conceptual lenses of cartography, fieldwork, resistance, transgression
and the divisions between local/global and public/private space.
Contributors: Linda Martin Alcoff, Kay Anderson, Vera Chouinard, Nancy Duncan,
J.K.Gibson-Graham, Ali Grant, Kathleen M.Kirby, Audrey Kobayashi, Doreen Massey,
Linda McDowell, Wayne D.Myslik, Heidi Nast, Gillian Rose, Joanne P.Sharp, Matthew
Sparke, Gill Valentine.
Nancy Duncan is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Geography at
Cambridge University.
BODYSPACE
destabilizing geographies of gender and
sexuality
Edited by NANCY DUNCAN
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1996
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Collection and editorial matter © 1996 Nancy Duncan.
Individual chapters © contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
BodySpace: destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality/edited by Nancy
Duncan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Feminist theory. 2. Feminist geography. 3. Masculinity (Psychology)
4. Sex role. I. Duncan, Nancy.
HQ1190.b63 1996
305.42•01–dc20 96–589
ISBN0-203-97407-7Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-14441-8 (hbk)
0-415-14442-6 (pbk)
CONTENTS
List of contributors vi
Acknowledgements viii
INTRODUCTION 1
(Re)placings
Nancy Duncan
Part I (Re)readings
1 FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE 13
New knowledges, new epistemologies
Linda Martín Alcoff
2 SPATIALIZING FEMINISM 27
Geographic perspectives
Linda McDowell
3 RE: MAPPING SUBJECTIVITY 45
Cartographic vision and the limits of politics
Kathleen M.Kirby
4 AS IF THE MIRRORS HAD BLED 57
Masculine dwelling, masculinist theory and feminist masquerade
Gillian Rose
5 RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION 75
Heidi J.NastAudrey Kobayashi
Part II (Re)negotiations
6 GENDERING NATIONHOOD 97
A feminist engagement with national identity
Joanne P.Sharp
7 MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY 109
Doreen Massey
v
8 RENEGOTIATING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND 127
PRIVATE SPACES
Nancy Duncan
9 (RE)NEGOTIATING THE ‘HETEROSEXUAL STREET’ 145
Lesbian productions of space
Gill Valentine
10 RENEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL/SEXUAL IDENTITIES OF 155
PLACES
Gay communities as safe havens or sites of resistance?
Wayne D.Myslik
11 ON BEING NOT EVEN ANYWHERE NEAR ‘THE PROJECT’ 169
Ways of putting ourselves in the picture
Vera ChouinardAli Grant
Part III (Re)searchings
12 ENGENDERING RACE RESEARCH 195
Unsettling the self-Other dichotomy
Kay Anderson
13 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK 209
Masculinity, metaphor and space
Matthew Sparke
14 REFLECTIONS ON POSTMODERN FEMINIST SOCIAL 231
RESEARCH
J.K.Gibson-Graham
CONCLUSION 243
Nancy Duncan
References 247
Index 271
CONTRIBUTORS
Linda Martín Alcoff teaches Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Syracuse
University, USA. She is the co-editor, with Elizabeth Potter, of Feminist Epistemologies
(Routledge 1993) and the author of Real Knowing: New Versions of Coherence Epistemology
(Cornell University Press 1996).
Kay Anderson is Senior Lecturer at University College, University of New South
Wales, Australia, where she teaches Cultural and other Human Geography courses.
Since publishing work on race relations in Canada and Australia, she has examined
women’s political activism and is currently developing her research on animals and
zoos in a study of nature’s domestication in Australia.
Vera Chouinard is Associate Professor of Geography at McMaster University,
Canada. Her research areas include: women, law and the state, cooperative housing
policies, state regulation of community-based legal services, and disabled women’s
struggles. Her recent publications include: ‘Geography, law and legal studies: which
ways ahead?’ Progress in Human Geography (1994).
Nancy Duncan is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Geography at
Cambridge University, UK. Her research interests are in political and cultural
geography. She is co-author with James Duncan of Suburban Pretexts: Deconstructing
History, Localism, and Nature in a Westchester County Town (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins
University Press).
J.K.Gibson-Graham is the pen-name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham,
industrial geographers who work on conceptions of capitalist society and their
implications for gender and class politics. Gibson teaches in the Department of
Geography and Environmental Science at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia,
and Graham teaches in the Department of Geosciences at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst, USA. After working together for 15 years they adopted this
joint writing persona in 1992, in a playful attempt to forge new individual and
collective subjectivities within their collaborative relationship. They recently published
The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (Blackwell 1996).
Ali Grant is completing a PhD at McMaster University, Canada, on ‘Geographies of
oppression and resistance: contesting the heterosexual regime’.
Kathleen M.Kirby has taught English and Women’s Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Syracuse University and the University of New Hampshire,
vii
USA. She is author of Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity
(Guilford Press 1995).
Audrey Kobayashi is Professor of Geography and Director of the Institute of
Women’s Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. Her research and
publications are in the field of gender and racism, human rights and immigration.
Doreen Massey is Professor of Geography at the Open University, UK. Her most
recent books include Space, Place, and Gender (Polity 1994), Spatial Divisions of Labour,
(2nd edn, Macmillan 1995), High-Tech Fantasies (with P.Quintas and D.Wield,
Routledge 1992), Geographical Worlds (ed. with J.Allen, Oxford and Open University
Presses 1995), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization (ed. with P.Jess,
Oxford and Open University Presses 1995).
Linda McDowell teaches Urban and Social Geography in the Department of
Geography at Cambridge University, UK. Her main interests are in the changing
nature of work and in feminist theory. She is co-editor of Defining Women (with R.Pringle,
Polity 1992) and author of a forthcoming book on merchant banking, Capital Culture.
She is also co-editing a forthcoming book entitled Space-Gender-Knowledge with Joanne
Sharp.
Wayne D.Myslik is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Syracuse
University, USA. His research interests are in Social and Cultural Geography with
particular reference to race and sexuality.
Heidi J.Nast teaches in the International Studies Department at DePaul University,
Chicago, USA. She has published in the areas of sexuality and the state and feminist
cultural geography. She has worked in both the United States and West Africa.
Gillian Rose teaches feminist and cultural geographies at the University of Edinburgh,
UK, and her research interests concern the politics of producing geographical
knowledges. She is author of Feminism and Geography (Polity 1993) and, with Alison
Blunt, co-editor of Writing, Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies
(Longman 1994).
Joanne P.Sharp is a Lecturer in Geography at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her
primary research interests are in political and cultural geography. She is co-editing the
forthcoming collection Space-Gender-Knowledge with Linda McDowell.
Matthew Sparke is an Assistant Professor in Geography and International Studies at
the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. His intellectual interests concern the
intersection of social and cultural dynamics of identity formation with the economic
and political geographies of late twentieth-century capitalism. His work is informed by
feminist, Marxist and post-foundationalist theory, and he is committed to research that
examines the practical negotiation of social change in Canadian and US communities.
Gill Valentine is Lecturer in Geography at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she
teaches courses on society and space and qualitative methods. Her research interests
include: geographies of sexuality; children and youth culture; and food and foodscapes.
She is co-editor with David Bell of Mapping Desire (Routledge 1995).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume for their thoughtful essays. I am
grateful to the Department of Geography and the Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse
University for sponsoring the symposium entitled ‘Place, Space and Gender’ out of which
this volume evolved and to David Robinson who originally suggested the idea of holding
such a symposium. I would also like to thank Jim Duncan for encouraging me to work on
this project even though it took time away from another book I was supposed to be
working on with him and for involving me in his seminar on Feminisms in Geography
which laid the ground work for the symposium. Joanne Sharp and two reviewers of the
manuscript offered many valuable comments on an earlier draft which contributed to an
improved final product. I also wish to thank Tristan Palmer, my editor at Routledge, for
his encouragement and support.
I gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce copyright material from Antipode and
Aperture.
INTRODUCTION
(Re)placings
Nancy Duncan
Feminists are presently exploring the far-reaching implications of a new epistemological
viewpoint based on the idea of knowledge as embodied, engendered and embedded in the
material context of place and space. This requires not amendments or additions to
allegedly universal (but in actuality masculinist and often Eurocentric) discourse, nor a
reversal, but a ‘strategic transformation’ (Alcoff, this volume). The contributors to this
volume wish to help push this project forward through a reconsideration and re-
politicization of such geographical concepts as space, place, the local and the global, sites
of resistance, cartography, fieldwork, the transgression of boundaries, and the public/
private division of space. Thus, as the title suggests, BodySpace intends to ‘place’ gender
and sexuality (in both corporeal and discursive terms) squarely on the academic agenda by
emphasizing place, space and other geographic concepts that are useful in contextualizing
and situating social relations.
Adopting a broad perspective on feminism as a theoretical critique, and a political
perspective which aims to destabilize and transform gender relations and hierarchies, the
contributors to this volume recognize that daunting as this project may be in itself, it
cannot be carried forth in isolation from other equally compelling progressive projects. As
Alcoff and Potter (1993:4) have stated:
We find a strong consensus among feminists today that both the term and the
project of feminism itself must be more inclusive than a focus on gender alone
permits. If feminism is to liberate women, it must address virtually all forms of
domination because women fill the ranks of every category of oppressed people.
Indeed the ontological status of woman and even of women has shifted for
academic feminists in light of influential arguments showing that women, per se, do
not exist.
Questions of subjectivity, sexuality, masculinity, ‘race’, class, disabilities and nationalism
thus figure prominently in the chapters that follow.
The first section of the book raises broad epistemological questions that are then
explored in the next few chapters which address such issues as citizenship, work,
disabilities and sexual minorities. Many of the same epistemological issues raised in the
first section are then taken up again with regard to researching or ‘doing’ geography in the
2 NANCY DUNCAN/
final section on engendering race research, masculinity and fieldwork, and postmodern
feminist field research.
Universal categories of reason and knowledge as well as history and power are in fact
reflections of gendered practices marked not only by gender but also by differences within
gender. This gendered dualism of mind and body has spatial corollaries in other dualisms
such as interiority/exteriority and public/private distinction. This latter distinction in
turn depends upon other gendered dichotomies such as immanence/transcendence. Thus,
while the public sphere has been seen as the sphere of universal reason and transcendence
of the disembodied, disinterested Cartesian observer, in fact this model observer can be
shown to be (implicitly) a white, bourgeois able-bodied male, and, in fact, as will be shown
in several of the essays below, a heterosexual male.
Many feminists today believe that the goals of earlier generations of feminists who
sought greater access for themselves and other ‘Others’ to this elite, male-dominated
public sphere need to be reformulated. We now recognize that there can be no pure
public spaces in which the liberal ideals of equality, impartiality and universality are
achieved. In liberal theory the necessary homogeneity could only obtain if subjectivity
(which is seen as stemming from particularities of bodily difference) were excluded and
objectivity thus attained. Those marked by differences deriving from their sex, skin
colour, old age, sexuality, physical incapabilities or other variations from the posited
‘norm’, do not qualify for full participation in the liberal democratic model. The
materiality of our bodies is seen to exclude us from participating in an ideal of reason
which ‘knows no sex’, no embodied differences. As Donna Haraway (1991:184) puts it:
the imagined ‘we’ are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a
body, a finite point of view, and so an inevitably disqualifying and polluting bias in
any discussion of consequence outside our own little circles…
Iris Marion Young argues that the ideals of liberal political theory such as formal equality
and universal rationality and impartiality express ‘what Theodor Adorno calls a logic of
identity that denies and represses difference’. This repression, she argues, relies on: ‘an
opposition between public and private dimensions of human life, which corresponds to an
opposition between reason, on the one hand, and the body, affectivity, and desire on the
other’ (1987:63). The ideal of universality and impartiality, as Young and others have
argued, is based upon a model of an individual abstracted from any real context—an
individual as Young puts it, who has ‘no particular history, is a member of no
communities, has no body’ (1987:60). Those who come closest to the abstracted ideal
human are able to dominate the public sphere. In fact even those who are included must
separate their allegedly sexually neutral minds from their bodily needs and desires, these
normally to be serviced in private spaces by others who are consequently less autonomous
(Brown 1995:156–65).
The reason why women tend to be among the excluded and why women who have
managed to be admitted to active participation in the public sphere have usually done so
according to implicitly male rules, has to do with the mind/body dualism. This dualism
and its spatial counterpart—the public/ private division—can be shown to be an
INTRODUCTION: (RE)PLACINGS/ 3
important structuring principle upon which characteristics commonly associated with
masculinity and femininity are arrayed. Thus public reason is associated with a supposedly
neutral observer. The problem with this model, as a number of the essays below argue, is
that this neutral standpoint is a fiction. Furthermore, politically and ethically it may be
suspect even as an ideal that societies might strive to closely approximate. It is based on a
false assumption of homogeneity that erases very real differentials in power and thus tends
to conserve structured inequalities (see Young 1987). It is also based on a fiction of
coherence and spatial and social centredness that erases cultural alterity, hybridity,
marginality, distance and deterritorializing global processes.
The epistemological frameworks of various social sciences need to be transformed to
accommodate an inclusion of women not as a special case deviating from the norm, but as
one of many different groups in an open and heterogeneous universe. With respect to the
collection of information and the generation of knowledge claims, Elizabeth Gross (1987:
191) has argued that:
it became increasingly clear that it was not possible to simply include women in those
theories where they had previously been excluded, for this exclusion forms a
fundamental structuring principle and key presumption of patriarchal discourses.
Many patriarchal discourses were incapable of being broadened or extended to
include women without major upheavals and transformations. There was no space
within the confines of these discourses to accommodate women’s inclusion and equal
participation.1
Many feminists favour the concept of situated knowledge as a substitute for
decontextualized, disembodied, ungendered, ‘objective’ knowledge. Since the
contributors to this volume are either geographers, or influenced by the geographical
literature, they find this concept especially compelling for its inherently geographical
claims. They welcome the current academic climate in which there is a widespread
movement to recontextualize theory and a renewed interest in empirical work that pays
close attention to geographical and historical specificity. In this regard, however, Gillian
Rose (this volume) provides an important cautionary statement about geographers’
insistence on grounding spatial metaphors and calls for a feminist deconstruction of the
controversial distinction between metaphorical or discursive and so-called ‘real’ space.
She argues that: The “real”, “experienced”, “concrete”, “social”, “actual”, “geographical”
are not the same things, and nor is any one consistently aligned with a non-real opposite’
(Rose, this volume).
Situated knowledge or standpoint theory, terms often associated with the work of
Donna Haraway (1991) and Sandra Harding (1986, 1991, 1993), can be seen as offering a
considerable challenge to the universalistic pretensions of mainstream epistemology.
Situated knowledge is knowledge that is ‘located’ by researchers who self-critically attend
to the cultural, geographical and historical specificity of the conditions of production of
those knowledge claims.
This view has been defended by Sandra Harding who argues that greater objectivity is
achieved when one positions oneself acknowledging the impossibility of impartiality and
4 NANCY DUNCAN/
disinterestedness. If one is a member of a dominant group, one can empathetically ‘start off
thought’ from the lives of marginalized people (see Harding 1993). Harding contrasts this
epistemological perspective with four other grounds for knowledge, ‘God-trick,
ethnocentrism, relativism, and the unique abilities of the oppressed to produce
knowledge’ (1993:57). While social scientific knowledge is necessarily contextual, it
conventionally presents itself as a View from nowhere’. Harding argues that conventional
science may succeed in erasing the biases of particular scientists, but it sets up no
procedures for removing the biases shared by the community of scientists or for seeking
out observers whose standpoint and interests differ significantly. Harding (1993:57)
states, ‘thus culturewide assumptions…are transported into the results of research’.
Contrary to what is commonly thought, relativism, ethnocentrism and an assumption
that the oppressed occupy an unassailable moral high ground (that they alone can produce
unbiased objective knowledge) are not the only alternatives to this conventional ‘God-
trick’ (see Harding 1993). In other words, contra relativism, there is no radical alterity;
although cultural and gender differences may not be assimilable, they are not
incommensurable either.
As David Harvey (1993) suggests we need not assume that ‘none of us can throw off
even some of the shackles of personal history or internalize what the condition of being
“the other” is all about’. In fact the attitude that we cannot be empathetic, he argues,
would lead to an essentialist, exclusionary politics. ‘Starting off thought’ from the point of
view of the oppressed or marginalized does not trade on the notion of authenticity; it is
more like doing the hard work of ‘earning the right’ (Spivak 1988) and the ability to speak
about others. Hegel’s master/slave dialectic assumes that the oppressed can better
understand the nature of power relations (in part) because they have less stake in
apologizing for the status quo than do the oppressors. However, as Hartsock (1983:284),
Harding (1993:62–9) and Harvey (1993:108–9) suggest, one need not be a member of a
subaltern group to create a subversive science from the perspective of that group.
If social researchers are to situate their knowledge claims in a socially progressive
rather than solipsistic or self-authorizing way, consideration of the social, spatial, political
and historical situation, and limitations of one’s knowledge claims must become an
integral part of the research process. Whether experience or empathy (usually both) are
involved, difference is articulated and situated producing explicitly rather than covertly
biased research. This way both intellectual rigour and progressive goals are more likely to
be accomplished.
Social relations, including, importantly, gender relations, are constructed and
negotiated spatially and are embedded in the spatial organization of places. One of the
primary aims of this book is to address questions of space and place in order to show how
the implicitly universalized claims of social scientists can be specified and qualified by
paying close attention to differences. These differences are not only gender differences,
but cultural and historical differences within gender, including sexuality which itself
appears to be as variable historically and culturally as does gender. These multiple
differences can in part at least be explained by looking at the construction of identities in
diverse places—interconnected sets of places ranging in scale from the local to the global.
INTRODUCTION: (RE)PLACINGS/ 5
As Judith Butler (1992:1–16) and many other feminists have argued, gender is a
permanently contested concept. ‘Woman’ and ‘man’ are unstable categories which are only
loosely and contingently related to sexuality. Heterosexuality is being increasingly
denaturalized as a result of the efforts of gays, lesbians and bisexuals, as well as by those who
reject hetero—or homosexual orientation as the basis for a stable identity or identity
politics.
According to Butler gender is a cultural performance—the effect of a set of contested
power relations based in ‘such defining institutions’ as ‘phallogocentrism and compulsory
heterosexuality’ (Butler 1990:viii). Butler proposes a performative theory of gender that
disrupts the categories and correlations between bodies, sex, gender and sexuality. The
authors of the essays in this book show in various ways how such performances and
contests around power relations take place in lived space. Spatiality constrains, enables
and is constituted by forces that both stabilize dominant relations of gender and sexuality
and that unsettle the relations between them.
In her essay for this volume Linda Alcoff states that reason has been defined in
opposition to what have traditionally been considered feminine characteristics and that the
mind-body dualism is a central feature of the masculinist formulation of reason. She
outlines four major premises of a new feminist theory of reason: that the mind and body
are not separable, that mind has therefore never been separate from the body, that our
dominant ideals of reason are reflections of embodied ways of being, and that we
therefore have to rethink the many assumptions which pervade social science that are
based on the mind-body dualism. She points out that because bodies are sexually specific
and sociocultural, all knowledge claims which have been premised on the ideal of a
disembodied, gender-neutral universal human being must be radically rethought. Alcoff
then proceeds to provide examples of how the epistemological frameworks of various
social sciences might be transformed to accommodate an inclusion of women not as a special
case deviating from the norm, but as one of many groups in an open and heterogeneous
universe.
Linda McDowell’s essay follows with an argument for situating feminist theory through
the use of spatial concepts that refer to space, place and displacement: time-space
distancing, fragmentation and intermixing such as migration, discontinuous multinational
realities, a third space and interstitial ‘in-between’ places2 where ‘the West and the rest’
often share the same spaces contesting coherent identities as a result of colonial, post-
colonial and increasingly globalized economies. McDowell proposes the concepts of a
‘global localism’ and ‘a geometry of multiple difference’ which, as she argues, recognizes
the unevenness of the disruptive impact of interconnected global capitalism on particular
localities, knowledges, and place-based identities.
Kathleen Kirby focuses on cartography, placing what she names the Cartesian
‘mapping’ subject into historical, cultural and gendered perspective. Mapping space as a
signifier of control is contrasted with bodily immersion and the sort of hybrid spaces that
McDowell discusses. Kirby argues that Enlightenment rationalism developed the notion
of a dominating, self-contained, masculine ego who maps out the world around himself
and, in the process of charting paths and drawing boundaries, tends to exclude or
marginalize non-dominant others who are more immersed in their environment and more
6 NANCY DUNCAN/
aware of their embodiment. Kirby’s argument adds a new dimension to Jameson’s
characterization of postmodernity and the cognitive mapping he sees as required to
negotiate one’s way in the postmodern world. The contemporary environment appears to
him uncomfortably fluid and increasingly difficult to keep at arm’s length. She points out
that the newness of this uncomfortable feeling of immersion and embodiment in place and
space may be related to Jameson’s gender as well as his bourgeois whiteness. As she says
‘women, the working class, and people of the Third World create a material environment
for Western men, so they are able to expel it from their consciousness’. Women and
others who are less able to control their environment, but are more responsible for its
production and reproduction, have long been used to the feeling of overwhelming
immersion. Such a breakdown of masculinist mapping power characteristic of the
postmodern world (if Jameson’s experience is in any way generalizable) may then lead to
what Kirby (this volume) foresees as the promise of the postmodern: ‘its tendency
towards flux and revision; its porousness of division; the fluidity of its boundaries. The
inclusive transformations we imagine might require eradicating, radically, the ordering
lines of our culture, and our selves’.
Gillian Rose explores what she calls ‘spatialized performances’ that produce gender and
argues that other performances can destabilize gender. Her paper is an engagement with
Irigaray as ‘a theorist of the spatial’ in which she sets up a dialogue with Irigaray about the
relation of space and gendered identity and then performs it for us, her readers. She
discusses the creation of new forms of space based on ‘all enveloping’ notions of ‘between’
and ‘around’— spaces that are supportive and enabling in contrast with notions of
‘distance and separation’ that affirm an individualistic ‘master identity’. Rose’s notion of all-
enveloping space resonates with Kirby’s postmodern space, as does her view that one of
the important tasks of feminism is to subvert more bounded and proprietary space of the
master subject.
Heidi Nast and Audrey Kobayashi discuss Jonathan Crary’s (1993) theory of the history
of vision with an eye to engendering this history. They show that the universalized
observer that Crary takes to be a subject position produced by nineteenth-century
discourse around vision is in fact much more specific than that. Following Crary and
drawing on the work of Caroline Merchant (1983) and other feminists such as Susan
Bordo (1987) they embody this subject, insisting that this body is a sexed body. They argue
that corporealized ‘differences’ are integral rather than incidental to the history of vision.
In the second section the project of embodying, engendering and embedding is
continued in six chapters which explore further many of the same concepts discussed in
the first section. Each of these chapters focuses on somewhat more specific issues:
citizenship, work, domestic violence, marginalized sexual identities and disabilities.
Joanne Sharp’s essay considers the articulation of gender with national identity and
citizenship. Sharp argues that the nation and citizenship are produced and reproduced
through the repetition of symbols that reinforce and naturalize national identity. She
critically re-examines and engenders Benedict Anderson’s classic analysis of nationalism as
an imagined community. By deconstructing the narrative of bonding between individuals
and the nation, Sharp shows that the rhetoric of this bonding reveals that it is implicitly
differentiated by gender.
INTRODUCTION: (RE)PLACINGS/ 7
Focusing particular attention on gender and nationalism in Eastern Europe, Sharp looks
at the spatiality of gendered identities at various scales and in institutional sites from
private domestic spaces to the space of the nation-state and beyond into the realm of
international relations. She argues, following Foucault and in agreement with a point that
Alcoff makes in her essay, that political relations of power and resistance operate at all
scales and certainly not just in the public sphere. Such a perspective on power as
dispersed, inhering in informal as well as formal political practice, is integral to the
transformative feminist project as it is conceived in this book.
As Doreen Massey points out, one of the most important themes of contemporary
feminism is the critique of the dualistic thinking which characterizes much of modern
Western society (on this see Lloyd 1984). Massey says that many of these dualisms
structure gender relations, even those dualisms that at first sight may seem to have little to
do with gender. The most valued side of these dualisms is usually characterized as
masculine and the less valued—feminine.
In her chapter, Massey examines the way two particular dualisms structure masculinity
in particular and gender relations more generally, in the context of high-tech industry.
The first is the dualism of Reason and non-Reason. This is closely related to another
dualism—that of transcendence and immanence. Transcendence refers to progress, the
making of history, scientific breakthroughs and the like. Transcendence is most often
associated with men, especially privileged and talented men. Immanence is associated
with embodiment, reproduction, servicing others and what Massey refers to as ‘static
living-in-the-present’. Although immanence is obviously the less socially valorized pole of
the dualism, one can see the similarity between it and the experience of being enveloped
by one’s environment which Kirby and Rose revalue from a feminist perspective.
In my own chapter I make a call, similar to Kirby’s, for a spatial revolution or a
deterritorialization that would undermine boundaries between public from private spaces,
thus (re)politicizing both private and public spheres and corresponding spaces. I first
outline the always already unstable distinction between public and private spaces and the
relation of these to public and private spheres. The public and the private constitutes one
of the gendered dualisms which the feminist project outlined in this book seeks to
destabilize. I then attempt to show the effects of this spatially structuring binary that is
employed to exclude, control, confine and suppress gender and sexual difference
preserving traditional patriarchal and heterosexist power structures. I explore the
implications of spatially constituted gender and sexuality and show how the spatial
practices of marginalized groups such as abused women and sexual minorities (lesbians,
gays and sex workers) help to undermine the deeply rooted public/private spatial
distinction. I then argue the case for a spatial revolution—a deterritorialization that would
open and revitalize the public sphere making it more accessible to oppositional social
movements and at the same time expose the contradictions of privacy.
Gill Valentine seeks to further politicize the question of heterosexist public spaces
through her discussion of sexual dissidents: lesbians who perform acts of subversion and
resistance that aim to renegotiate the (hetero) sexuality of everyday streets. She
emphasizes the political aspects of the performance of lesbian sexuality that disrupts binary
gender identities which naturalize heterosexuality. She shows how compulsory
8 NANCY DUNCAN/
heterosexuality constructs space and how lesbians can destabilize and renegotiate the way
spaces are used.
Wayne Myslik concentrates his attention on spatial strategies to cope with violence and
the fear of violence against gays in public places. He indicates that gay men tend to
monitor their behaviour in public in order to conform to the heterosexist illusion that
sexuality is found only in private spaces. As Valentine discusses (this volume and 1993)
the heterosexuality of public spaces that is alienating for gays tends to be naturalized
almost to the point of invisibility for heterosexuals. Myslik shows that much of the
violence against gays is perpetrated by ‘average boys exhibiting typical behaviour’. Gay-
bashing may not be the norm, but there is some evidence to show that most of those who
commit this type of crime show no other criminal tendencies. Furthermore, he argues
that they have been socialized within American society to express their heterosexual
masculinity through dominance and aggression. Their attacks on gays both confirm and
perform their heterosexuality for their peers. The attacks also play a role in policing and
disciplining public behaviour, to force it to conform to the societal illusion of
disembodied, desexualized public spheres and spaces.
Myslik goes on to discuss an interesting counter-intuitive finding of his own research in
the gay community of Dupont Circle, Washington, DC.Dupont Circle can be described
as a queer space because of the presence of gays who define it as a safe, non-alienating
place where they do not feel the need to closely monitor their behaviour so as to avoid
offending heterosexual norms. He found that such queer spaces are considered safe by
gays even though they are specifically targeted areas of heterosexist violence. Apparently
the sense of community spirit, emotional support and the vision of Dupont Circle as a site
of cultural resistance against heterosexist norms of public behaviour overcomes fears of
harassment and violence.
The chapter by Vera Chouinard and Ali Grant demonstrates how an ‘unmarked’
perspective based on assumptions about the human norms of able-bodiedness and
heterosexuality produces spatial arrangements that unnecessarily handicap those who do
not fit the ideal type. People who are marked by physical ‘disabilties’ have spatial and
built form needs that do not match the norm, that is the implicitly privileged, young,
healthy, male norm. All human beings have limited mobility and physical abilities. So-
called disabilities and ‘special’ environmental needs, however, are defined and measured
by the extent that these vary from this norm. Our public spaces potentially could be
accessible to a much broader range of needs than they are at present. Instead the tendency
is to ‘blame the victim’ by assuming that the disjuncture between the built environment
and the environmental needs of the individual is due to the individual’s inability to meet
the ‘normal’ standard. If social and political values were more enlightened it would be
assumed that the problem lay in spatial frameworks that neglect to fulfil the needs not
only of minorities such as the physically ‘disabled’, and the elderly, but the less valued
members of society including all types of women.
They go on to show that this unmarked perspective equally normalizes the hegemonic
heterosexuality of most environments. Such normalization makes lesbians either invisible
or—if they choose to signal their sexuality—they must be constantly under the
exhausting pressure and responsibility of political struggle over the definition of space. As
INTRODUCTION: (RE)PLACINGS/ 9
long as lesbians and the disabled remain invisible, radical geographical explanations of
oppression will remain unnecessarily homogeneous and insensitive to differences among
those who are marginalized and oppressed.
In the last section three authors provide reflections on research that does not pretend to
be conducted from a disembodied, universalistic point of view. Kay Anderson discusses
engendering ‘race’ research and critically reflects on her own previous research in
Vancouver’s Chinatown (1991) in which she feels that she had insufficiently crosscut the
issues of gender with those of ‘race’ that had been the primary focus of her attention. Her
brave reappraisal of her own book is an instance of critical self-reflexivity all too rare in
academia. She provides an example of the difficult task of conceptualizing the intersection
between gendered and ‘racialized’ positionings that necessarily disrupts modernist notions
of ‘racial’ self-Other categories undifferentiated by class and gender. Like many of the other
authors in this volume, Anderson emphasizes the multiple and fluid identities of the
subjects of her study.
Matthew Sparke critically reflects upon the heroic masculinity of the spatial practice of
field research. He investigates the implications of military analogies in masculinist
conceptualizations of the field in geographical research, its ‘gaze’, and appropriative
arrogance. He self-critically positions himself as a male feminist researcher studying the
experiences of workers in an industry that predominantly hires women. Sparke wishes to
(re)place conventional (read masculinist) concepts of fieldwork with a more dynamic and
politically progressive notion of fieldworking in what he follows Kim England (1994) in
calling ‘the world between ourselves and the researched’.
J.K.Gibson-Graham’s chapter focuses on replacing modernist research methods with
epistemologically challenging (and politically charged) postmodernist approaches that
deconstruct essentialized notions of ‘woman’. Necessarily multiple, fragmented and
decentred subjectivities posited by such a deconstructed concept of woman are difficult to
represent; as she puts it, ‘the objects of our research dissolve before our eyes’. The
challenge is to destabilize the overly disciplined subject positions which currently inform
prevailing attitudes towards the Australian mining town women she studied. She states
that the liberal discourse of the ‘client/individual/pathologized individual’ and the
socialist discourse of the ‘proletarian/militant/supporter cum leader’ both deny the
multiplicity of subjectivities actually existing among the women in mining towns. The aim
becomes one of helping to create alternative discourses that would provide more
interactive, dialogic and politically enabling ways of interacting with—and understanding
the identities of—the mining town women.
In a conclusion I attempt once again to tie together some of the principal themes that
run throughout the book. I also point to a few areas of potential danger in the focus on
difference and situatedness rather on identity and universality. Nevertheless, I
enthusiastically endorse the project of empirical research and reflection based on the idea
of always already contested relations of gender and sexuality which are embodied,
engendered and embedded in place and space.
10 NANCY DUNCAN/
NOTES
1 Along with Young’s reference here to women I would add others marked as ‘Other’.
2 On third space and ‘in-between spaces’ also see Bhabha (1994).
PART I
(RE)READINGS
12
1
FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
New knowledges, new epistemologies
Linda Martin Alcoff
New feminist work in geography has (at least) two disciplinary discourses within which it
participates: geography and feminist theory. This chapter offers an overview of feminist
theory concentrating on those aspects that have been particularly relevant to work in the
social sciences. And feminist theory in turn needs to be understood in its relationship to a
larger historical context of academic enquiry, in order to reveal something about both its
past and future. Needless to say, in taking an incoherent amalgam of diverse work and
artificially producing a coherent historical narrative called ‘feminist theory’ I have
necessarily left more things out than I can cover. I have decided to focus more on ideas
than on specific people, on critiques of reason and methodology more than on substantive
explanatory theories, and on Anglo-American theory more than any other. So what
follows is decidedly only a part of the story.
THE CRITIQUE OF REASON
By the end of the eighteenth century, philosophy had discovered, with the help of Kant,
that reason, knowledge and in fact philosophy itself was limited by the intellectual and
perceptual attributes of man, that our reasoning capacity provides as much a reflection on
us as a window onto the world. Indeed, as John Donne might have put it, human
knowledge works more on the model of a drawing compass, whose fixed foot leans and
hearkens after, but remaining always connected to the foot which strives to reach beyond.
Man organizes and shapes his world, conferring on it meaning and intelligibility, and thus
man is a constitutive condition of all knowledge. Philosophers continue to struggle with
the implications of this idea, perhaps the most important of which is that, as Martin
Heidegger said, the world which is the object of our enquiry is a world whose reference
points all point to us, a lived world, and not a world in itself, or a world indifferent to
human projects and concerns.
In the nineteenth century, with the help of Hegel, philosophy began to understand that
knowledge and reason are also embedded within and marked by history, and thus
temporally located or indexed, and unable ever to surpass completely the horizon of their
historical era. Neither philosophical puzzles nor their solutions have a timeless reach, and
in fact many resolutions develop only through the historical evolution of social change.
Marx identified a further fundamental qualifying condition for philosophy in material
14 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF/
power, which he defined as forms of labouring practices and relations of production.
After Marx, reason and knowledge were understood to be mediated by class, situated in
particular economies and permeated by an ideology that obstructed the self-criticizing
project Kant had initiated. After Marx, philosophy could no longer be entrusted to
discern and correct its own errors; it required external critique from other disciplines in
order to reveal its ideological content.
Nietzsche and Freud also contributed, of course, to the undermining of the rigid
demarcation between abstract reason and the desiring body, with Nietzsche arguing that
the body is a fundamental source of all human thought and argument and Freud arguing that
the rational ego maintains its autonomy over a-rational desire only temporarily.
In the (late) twentieth century, I believe it will in the future be said, philosophy began
to discover that its categories of reason and knowledge are marked by sexual difference.
Feminists have argued that these concepts of reason and knowledge, as well as those of
man, history and power, are reflections of gendered practices passing as universal ones.
What feminist theory has inserted into the critical project of our era is the sexually
specific body, as a mediating element of knowledge, a constitutive component of reason,
and a condition of the right to know. Let me emphasize from the outset that this is not to
say that women have our own innate reason, or that truth is relative to one’s gender, but
that, in other respects no less important, reason is indeed ‘male’.
To say that ‘reason is male’ is more than simply to say that men have been biased
against women’s capacity to be rational. It is to say that reason has been defined in opposition
to the feminine, such that it requires the exclusion, transcendence and even the
domination of the feminine, of women and of women’s traditional concerns, which have
been characterized as the site of the irreducibly irrational particular and corporeal.
Moreover, as Genevieve Lloyd has pointed out, ‘femininity itself has been partly
constituted through such processes of exclusion’ (see Lloyd 1984 esp. p.x; see also Le
Doeuff 1987, esp. ‘Long hair, short on ideas’). The woman who reasons, declared Kant,
might as well have a beard. It is our irrational, intuitive and emotional characteristics that
both define us as female and make us capable of affirming men’s ‘essential’ superiority.
MALE MINDS/FEMALE BODIES
The major factor in this masculinist formulation of reason has been mind-body dualism.
From the time of Plato, reason was thought to enable the soul to reach a ‘pure, and
eternal…immortal and unchangeable’ realm where truth dwells among the ‘divine…and
the wise’ as Genevieve Lloyd puts it. ‘The senses, in contrast, drag the soul back to the
realm of the changeable, where it “wanders about blindly, and becomes confused and
dizzy, like a drunken man, from dealing with the things that are ever changing’” (Lloyd
1984:6). To achieve knowledge, Plato concluded, ‘the god-like rational soul should rule
over the slave-like mortal body’. In the Phaedo he states it even more strongly:
We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we
must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by
itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and
FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE/ 15
upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are
dead, and not in our lifetime.
(Plato 1961:49)
Such a view, in various manifestations, has been present throughout the history of
Western philosophy, through Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Bacon, Descartes, Rousseau,
Hume and even Kant.1 And needless to say, it was men alone who could hope to
transcend the realm of the body, with its everyday commitments, its pedestrian passions,
and its emotions shadowing the route to the Real. Women, preoccupied with the cares of
the particular, more regularly reminded of their fleshly limitations, could never ascend to
the plane of the universal. As Rousseau put it, ‘The male is only a male now and again,
[but] the female is always a female…everything reminds her of her sex’ (quoted in Bell
1983:199). Therefore, he advises, ‘Consult the women’s opinions [only] in bodily
matters, in all that concerns the senses. Consult the men in matters of morality and all
that concerns the understanding’ (ibid.: 197). Kant, for his part, introduces interesting
spatial metaphors, locating reason in the ‘public space of autonomous speech’ (Lloyd
1984:67). He defined enlightenment as precisely men’s ability and willingness to use their
own reason in a public space, defined in opposition to a private one. For the private
space, inhabited by women and children, is dominated by particular concerns and by
inclinations toward others based on feeling rather than universal principle. It is only in
public, the realm to which free men have exclusive access, that a universal reason can be
exercised and developed. In this light, consider the dictates of the scientific method,
which require intersubjective testability of hypotheses and public confirmation.
Knowledge exists in public, and not in the private, domestic environments associated with
women.
The maleness of reason was thus, paradoxically, both supported and concealed by this
evaluative hierarchy of mind and body. When the feeling body was split from the knowing
mind, only of service to the mind as a brute recorder of perceptual images, bodily
differences could not be seen to play any constitutive role in the formulation of reason.
The body was conceived as either an unsophisticated machine that took in data without
interpreting it, or it was considered an obstacle to knowledge in throwing up emotions,
feelings, needs, desires, all of which interfered with the attainment of truth. The real
epistemological action was always thought to occur in the mind, which, if it could
overcome the distractions of the body and discipline it to the yoke of reason, alone had the
potential to achieve knowledge.
Though reason was portrayed as universal and neutral precisely because it was bodiless,
this schema worked to justify the exclusion of women from the domains of the academy,
of science, and from generally being accorded epistemic authority and even credibility,
because women were well known to be much more subject to bodily distractions,
hormonal cycles, emotional disturbances and the like. Thus Schopenhauer, in all
seriousness proposed that ‘in a court of law a woman’s evidence…should carry less
weight than a man’s so that, for example, two male witnesses would carry the same
weight as three or even four female’ (quoted in Bell 1983:279). Even Simone de Beauvoir,
writing the inaugurating treatise of feminist theory of this century, agreed with the claim
16 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF/
that women were more prone to corporeal intrusions than men, and her (in)famous
solution was for women to refuse marriage and motherhood.
The female, to a greater extent than the male, is the prey of the species …in
maternity woman remained closely bound to her body, like an animal. It is because
humanity calls itself in question in the matter of living—that is to say, values the
reasons for living above mere life—that, confronting woman, man assumes
mastery. Man’s design is not to repeat himself in time: it is to take control of the
instant and mould the future. It is male activity that…has prevailed over the
confused forces of life; it has subdued Nature and Woman.
(quoted in Lloyd 1984:100–1)
As long as the body and the realm of the domestic were seen as obstacles to reason,
cognitive achievement and, indeed, freedom, women who sought equality had to establish
an ability to transcend the body and its distractions. So even in 1970, Shulamith Firestone
was advocating test-tube reproduction in order to free women’s bodies from the material
ties that oppress us. And some career feminists still today pursue a strategy of showing
that women in management can be just as cold, detached and unfeeling as men. It is
precisely for this reason that Genevieve Lloyd argued in 1984 that a feminist project
determined to gain for women the realm of the ‘mind’ will never work to overturn male
supremacy. We cannot simply remove women from the sphere of the ‘body’ and claim
for ourselves the sphere of the ‘mind’ and ‘reason’ when these latter concepts have been
constructed on the basis of our exclusion. Such a strategy would only participate in the
violent erasure of women, continuing the valorization of the masculine as the only gender
that can achieve full humanity. Thus Lloyd (1984:107) warned that,
the confident affirmation that Reason ‘knows no sex’ may likewise be taking for
reality something which, if valid at all, is so only as an ideal … If there is a Reason
genuinely common to all, it is something to be achieved in the future, not
celebrated in the present.
The academy today continues to be dominated by this conceptualization of knowledge and
reason. Knowledge requires public confirmation, universality and a demonstrable
transcendence of emotion and commitment. Knowledge must be capable of being
expressed as an immaterial abstraction, beyond the irreducible concreteness of the
particular, and can only be achieved in the public domain, among men, primarily through
the aggressive interplay of adversarial discourse. Knowledge does not occur in private, it
does not occur within the context of loving relationships, and it cannot occur where
research is guided by political commitments.
By the early 1980s, feminist theorists thus began to recognize that they needed to
develop a better account of the relationship between reason, theory and bodily, subjective
experience. To paraphrase Rosi Braidotti, we need to
FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE/ 17
elaborate a truth which is not removed from the body, reclaiming [our] body for
[ourselves]… [We need] to develop and transmit a critique which respects and
bears the trace of the intensive, libidinal force that sustains it.
(Braidotti; 1991:8)2
If women are to have epistemic credibility and authority, we need to reconfigure the role
of bodily experience in the development of knowledge.
In light of this, a new conception of reason has begun to be developed within feminist
theory. This represents an ambitious undertaking, which is still in its early stages, but it
starts from the following premises: (a) the mind is not in fact separable from the body; (b)
from which it follows that the mind has never been separated from the body; (c) from
which it also follows that our dominant conceptions and ideals of reason have been
connected to bodies, have been expressions of bodily concerns or needs and reflections of
embodied ways of being, and have had other interesting relations to the body that we have
yet to discover; (d) and which also suggests that we need to rethink the entire opposition
that has been drawn heretofore between reason and its ‘Others’, Others which all, in one
way or another, have to do with the body: as rhetoric, irrationality, dreams and so on.
The project to ‘reinsert’ the body is not, of course, totally new. Marx inserted the
labouring body into philosophy, Nietzsche reminded us of the body that feels and needs,
and Freud insisted that the desiring body is a ubiquitous element in all human thought and
practice. Feminism simply pointed out that these bodies are both sexually specific and
sociocultural, that they are inscribed by power, and that the Kantian ‘man’ who
conditions all knowledge is, indeed, a man, and not a woman.
RECONSTRUCTING REASON
I mark the development of contemporary feminist theory as beginning from this point,
where sexual difference as a bodily, material, corporeal manifestation becomes a player in
the critique of reason. I understand feminist theory today as pursuing the implications of
this claim, and the effects of sexual difference on the methodologies and existing
knowledges in every academic discipline, as well as exploring what a new vision of
knowledge might look like without mind-body dualism, without a pretence to neutral
universality or an erasure of sexual difference. I know that such statements may raise the
red flag (or is it the red herring?) of essentialism, or be taken to imply that feminism is
thus committed to the eradication of reason in favour of a celebration of its Others
(maybe a Wicca fest in the forest). But I am not proposing a reasoned defence of
irrationalism, nor advocating that a female reason should replace the male one. The
feminist critique I have been describing holds out for the possibility of that future
reconstruction referred to by Lloyd that would repair the split between reason and its
material basis, though whether this can be accomplished with a universalizable reason left
intact is still up for debate. Feminist theory is pursuing this possibility by advancing two
complementary projects: first, a reactive project to critique existing theories and notions
of theory itself, as well as to identify the ways in which sexual difference has both
constituted and been constituted by existing knowledges, and, second, a constructive
18 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF/
project to develop alternative theories and theoretical norms, not simply as a reversal but
as a strategic transformation.3 Both projects are pursued in the chapters included in this
volume.
FEMINIST FORAYS
These projects of course evolved historically, and not just out of the critical philosophical
traditions from Kant onward that I traced out earlier. In the 1970s women began to
inhabit the US academy in numbers previously unthinkable. Before that time, daughters
were rarely given as much money for their education as sons, much less the
encouragement and support a graduate education requires, and it was not illegal for
graduate programs to discriminate against women in handing out fellowships and
assistantships. Thus the first female philosophy professor I ever had, in the second year of
my graduate work, was there only after having overcome the trauma of having a
fellowship taken away from her because, as her graduate director told her, spending
money on a woman was a waste. Before I could finish my own degree, I had had a
professor try to undress me in a hallway, had another professor tell me I should be at
home with my children instead of at school, and was refused an incomplete I requested
for missing two weeks of class due to the children’s chickenpox, on the grounds that my
children should not interfere with my graduate work. In those days women who were
able to enter the academy by hook or by crook knew they were an unwanted, alien
species, there subject to good behaviour, and only to the extent they could establish a
superordinate proficiency at the traditional disciplinary procedures and standards. To
challenge the presuppositions of those standards was a luxury available only to the more
secure.
But in the 1970s, things began to change. Not only were women entering academic
professions at a brisk pace, but there was also a women’s movement both on the campus
and outside of it, agitating for women’s rights and critiquing male supremacy. Armed
with the power of increasing numbers as well as social ferment, women in the academy
began doing different kinds of academic research, research that included women, focused
on women’s lives and validated women’s experience. What followed was an explosion of
research, the development of women’s studies programmes across the country and a fresh
take on stale topics which infused new life in many areas of study.
Feminist forays into the social sciences thus began with the desire to develop more
adequate theories about women, to uncover the hidden history of women, an
anthropology of women, a less biased psychology of women. But it quickly became
apparent that women’s experiences could not in fact be included in pre-existing
theoretical frameworks. For example, in political science, ‘politics’ was defined as what
occurs in government, as influenced by business and labour unions. Given this definition,
women could not be included as significant political agents. Feminist political scientists
then had to redefine politics itself to include anything concerning relations of power and
privilege; on this definition, ‘personal’ relations in the home came into view, as did
schools, religious institutions and other places in which women played a significant role
(see Keohane 1981).
FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE/ 19
A similar story occurred in economics. It was not until the 1960s that economists began
to perceive the long-standing wage differentials between men and women as a problem
worthy of analysis. But the traditional variables used in neo-classical economic theory
could not account for such differentials, since they were not based on a difference in
education, length of employment, productivity or the profitability of women’s work vis-à-
vis men’s. Thus market forces as conventionally defined were not the key factor producing
women’s lower wages, which suggested further that, if market forces had not determined
women’s lower wages, then market forces could not be relied on to increase them. The
study of women’s wage differentials thus called into question laissez-faire economic
theory (see Barrett 1981).
There were many research areas concerning women’s lives in history, sociology,
psychology and anthropology that had never been explored, most often because role-
based male and female activities were taken to be gendered by nature and therefore in no
need of explanation. And female-specific activities such as gathering were consistently
devalued and treated as unimportant in the evolution of culture or the development of
society. Women’s activities were assumed to be guided by natural instinct, subject to few
alternatives, ultimately uninteresting, and thus unnecessary to analyse. So women were
not studied, and as a result many of the key concepts used in these disciplines were
entirely based on data collected from male experience: for example the concept of the
adult healthy body was based on the stability of adult male bodies, which automatically
rendered pregnancy a ‘disability’ since such radical bodily transformations never beset the
adult male body unless it became diseased. And the normative concept of a person used in
psychological profiles was based on male psychological characteristics, which produced a
standard that identified women as ‘overly’ dependent and emotional, and therefore very
often ‘crazy’ and dysfunctional. And such key concepts as class, race, community,
socialization, social control and social conflict were conceived in terms of male
relationships and activities, with the result that in anthropology, for example, accounts of
class and state formation neglected to mention the role, opinions or actions of women,
and in sociology, social conflict was analysed as if women played no role at all.
Thus feminist researchers in these fields quickly surmised that the inclusion of women’s
lives and activities was going to exact a price, that it was going to affect the work of their
discipline in its entirety. We could not simply ‘add women and stir’: the studies of
women change fundamentally the way in which every discipline must delimit its subject
matter, its methodology and its very self-understanding.
GENDER IDEOLOGY
Feminists also began to argue that what needed to be done was not simply to study
women, but to study men in a new way, such that gender roles and sexual relations would
be problematized, in order to explore how gender systems are constructed and to
question the naturalness of gender itself as a binary opposition. I have avoided defining these
terms—‘gender’, ‘sex’ or ‘sexual difference’—because their definition is precisely one of
the fundamental topics still heavily debated. Despite the disagreements, however,
feminists are in consensus that these terms need to be de-naturalized, that they need to be
20 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF/
understood, in other words, as capable of being other than as they are or appear to be in
today’s societies. And feminists are also in agreement that gender ideology permeates
deeply into every other ideological system, discourse, institution and set of practices. One
need not study women or gender roles to find gender ideology. I have already begun to
suggest how that is the case in respect to reason; I will try to show more ways in which it
is the case in a moment. But first I want to briefly explain some of the ways in which
feminists today are accounting for gender ideology.
Any careful reading of Marx will show that, for him, ideology is not simply a set of
ideas: it is a form of practice, or a system of practices, which are connected to systems of
social meanings and commonly held beliefs. It is not a set of practices determined by
nature, but one that arises within particular social and historical events. And it is a practice
that involves domination and exploitation, even while it obscures the mechanism and
sources of that domination.
Gender ideology, on this model, is that set of practices which organizes, regulates and
defines relations between men and women, including sexual activity, reproductive activity
and gender-based roles of all types. But, more surprisingly, gender ideology also works to
produce gender, or masculinity and femininity. Anthropologist Gayle Rubin, building on
Lévi-Strauss, developed a theory that sexuality is not determined by anatomical genitalia
but works to transform biological sexuality into ‘sex as we know it—gender identity,
sexual desire and fantasies, concepts of childhood’ as well as economic and social roles
(quoted in Flax 1990:144; see also Rubin 1975). Similarities between the sexes are
repressed; sexual desire is channelled exclusively toward members of the opposite
gender; and female sexuality is constrained so that men can exchange and distribute
women among men. Rubin also borrows from psychoanalysis in order to describe ‘the
residue left within individuals by their confrontation with the rules and regulations of
sexuality of the societies to which they are born’ (quoted in Flax 1990:145).
In this sort of analysis, then, gender is placed squarely in the category of culture. It is
not nature that must be transcended to achieve liberation; rather, it is a cultural system
that we ourselves have set into motion. Gender systems are not the legacy of nature; they
are the legacy of a power struggle.
Most feminist theorists today adopt something similar to Rubin’s account, in which
gender identity and sexuality are taken as social constructs rather than natural attributes,
however remediable. Why, then, you might wonder, did I begin this chapter claiming
that sexual difference should be taken as having as fundamental a status in marking reason
and knowledge as history and power? Given Rubin’s analysis, it would seem that, unlike
history and power, sexual difference is something we must strive to overcome rather than
reify as a standing feature of human life.
This points us to one of the most important current debates among feminists, and
another of the ways in which current feminist theory differs from its initial, early 1970s self-
understanding. Rubin’s theory, though widely influential, was criticized on the grounds
that the sex/gender system she invokes retains too naturalistic an account of biological sex
itself. As Jane Flax (1990:146) puts it, Rubin’s opposition between the realm of the
biological/natural (sexuality) and the social/cultural (gender) ‘may itself be rooted in and
reflect gender arrangements’. Conceptualizing the biological realm as natural conceals the
FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE/ 21
way in which, even at the infantile stage, biological development is relational and
therefore social, and subject to socially produced alteration. The point is not to replace
the word ‘nature’ everywhere it appears with the word ‘culture’, which would reverse
the opposition without subverting it. The new phenomenologies of embodiment written
by feminists such as Iris Marion Young and Sandra Bartky reveal that embodiment,
meaning here simply human lived experience, is simultaneously natural and cultural. An
overemphasis on culture implies infinite plasticity; human experience belies that claim. To
see every feature of human experience and practice as simultaneously natural and cultural
is to see that every arena of human life is imbued with social meanings and subject to
cultural analysis and criticism.
Sexual difference, then, must be inserted within history as well, rather than assumed as
a universal which transcends historical location. There are differing accounts of sexual
difference: differing accounts of its meaning, its origin, its degree of plasticity, its
implications for theory. But the point I am trying to make is that few if any feminist
theorists today continue to uphold the earlier feminist belief that we can now begin to
theorize a ‘genderless’ world, or to produce theories as if their founding assumptions and
methodologies were gender-neutral. Feminist theorists have found that the very terms by
which we articulate our own political goals—freedom, selfhood, empowerment, truth—
have been constituted through concepts of sexual difference just as we saw that reason has
been. The fact is that sex and sexism are much more deeply rooted in our society, our
language and our ways of thinking than we initially understood.
I want to develop this point further by way of returning to my narrative about the work
of women in the social sciences. Women theorists who were trying to study women or
subjects having to do with gender initially faced an institutional dilemma. In order to gain
approval within the reigning dictates of the academy, they had to demonstrate a capacity
to be ‘objective’, that is, neutral researchers, detached from their objects of study. This
required them, in effect, to disavow being women. On the other hand, they could
maintain an identification with their subjects, women to women so to speak, but then lose
their credibility and along with it, their grant funding, promotions and even their jobs. This
recurring dilemma, which was repeated throughout different departments, led women
theorists to see that demanding the inclusion of women was insufficient. And this
development within the academy correlated to a corresponding development outside it:
where the demand for equality began to give way to the demand for autonomy and self-
determination. If the demand for equality implied an acceptance of given standards and
sought an equivalence with a given norm, the demand for autonomy retained the right to
reject that norm.
So what I have called the move toward a recognition of sexual difference can also be
called the emerging struggle for both a political and a theoretical autonomy for feminist
theory and enquiry, a demand which manifested itself in the academy as a deeper
methodological critique of the roots of sexism and patriarchal assumptions in all existing
domains of knowledge. A practical motivation for this was the fact that rational arguments
were not working, either in the streets or in the universities, to significantly empower
women. It was clear (to us at least) that male supremacy was an irrational practice, based
on desire, emotion and wishful thinking more than fact or logic, but (some) men would
22 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF/
get quite histrionic if their dominance was challenged even with the most patient, careful
and well-documented of arguments. And they would even claim that reason was on their
side.
Feminists then, as I have said, realized that the battle would not be won by remaining
on the plane of reason, at least not as it was traditionally understood. We were then
motivated to look for alternative accounts of how reason is structured: from discourse
theory, structuralism and post-structuralism; as well as accounts of the so-called ‘Others’
of reason: from psychoanalysis to rhetoric and literary forms of analysis. Feminist
theorists were motivated to uncover the workings of sexism and patriarchal assumptions
wherever they were at work, and to problematize gender as a contingent rather than
necessary system of practices that permeates every other system of practices in our
society. The point was not to uncover the root of male evil, but precisely to discover why
even well-intentioned men, as well as women, had difficulty combating and even at times
perceiving the effects of misogynism. I want to outline just two more of these deeper
ways in which sexism operates before I conclude with a brief look at some of the new
problems feminism faces currently.
FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY
First, feminist work in epistemology. The very terms ‘feminist social science’ or ‘feminist
science’ were perceived, of course, as oxymorons: one cannot have feminism as a political
commitment connected in intrinsic ways to scientific research without violating one of the
central dictates of the empirical method. Political commitments and values could only be
either irrelevant or work as obstacles to the achievement of objectivity and truth. Out of
this conflict feminists began to work in epistemology.
Most epistemologists and philosophers of science of all stripes have today given up on
the notion that knowledge occurs primarily through an individual’s passive observation of
reality, the sort of picture Adorno characterized as ‘peephole metaphysics’. What’s wrong
with this epistemological account is precisely its metaphysical picture of the knowing
process: an isolated individual, encumbered only by a language which is thought to be a
neutral medium, observing nature as if through a keyhole or from an observation post.
This view has been characterized as a sort of observatory model of science, predicated
upon taking astronomy as the paradigm case. The astronomer must of necessity rely on
observations at a distance of phenomena over which she or he has no control and no ability
to manipulate. But this is, of course, a very restricted model of enquiry, and in fact
ungeneralizable. The more likely general model would be something like a laboratory, in
which collectives of hierarchically related individuals engage in projects in humanly
created spaces, projects which are themselves determined by a variety of forces beyond
any single individual’s choice. On this model, knowledge is the product of cooperative
human interaction with an environment. And it quickly becomes obvious that the nature
of that interaction—its inclusiveness, the degree and nature of its democracy and
reciprocity, the quality of its cooperation—will have a substantive impact on the
knowledge produced.
FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE/ 23
To see why this has such a substantive impact, add to the above claim the fact that there
are metaphysical and normative background assumptions operative in (and even
indispensable to) all forms of enquiry. Feminist work has expanded on this to say that the
collection of assumptions and values any given individual works with is not happenstance
but can be connected in interesting ways to that person’s social, cultural and political
identity or location, and that most of the operative assumptions and values in enquiry are
therefore group-related. This is the meaning of the often misunderstood feminist claim
that there exists a relationship of partial determination between theories and the social
identity of theorists (i.e. their gender, race and class, for instance). It is important to note
that in its general form this claim places no necessary primacy on gender over culture,
race or other such categories as the principle component of identity.
To accede to this claim (that there exists a relationship of partial determination between
theories and the social identity of theorists) does not require us to hold that scientists or
philosophers as a group have intentionally promoted their own privilege or have been
uniformly unwilling to use the available unbiased methods of argument. For example, in
Helen Longino’s account of theory-choice in her recent book Science as Social Knowledge
(1990), an account which applies in its general terms to any form of enquiry, she argues
that background assumptions which contain metaphysical commitments as well as
contextual values enter necessarily into the process of justifying claims to know. The
influence of these assumptions and values cannot be restricted to the so-called ‘context of
discovery’ because they have an important impact on the formulation of hypotheses,
which hypotheses are taken to be plausible, the kinds of analogies and models which get
seriously entertained, and the determination of the kind of evidence considered necessary
or sufficient to justify theories.
When cultural and social particularities affect enquiry in such intrinsic ways, and when
group-related background assumptions and normative commitments that are operative in
science become restricted to a small subset of the population, the resulting effects on
scientific theories should come as no surprise. So we have theories about the genetic
determination of rape, molecular biology models based on corporate management
structures, and theories that trace women’s resistance to male dominance to PMS. There
should be no surprise here. The problem is not that researchers are not following the
dictates of the scientific method. The problem is that the reigning scientific method
cannot reveal—much less incorporate—critical reflection on group-related assumptions.
When the entire research group shares a set of assumptions, it becomes invisible. The
demand for political neutrality, then, works to repudiate precisely those commitments to
the democratic inclusiveness of enquiry which could improve science’s ability for self-
correction (see Harding 1991).
FEMINIST READING STRATEGIES
Neither science nor reason works entirely through logical entailments between factually
based claims. Part of the way in which models and hypotheses are judged as worthy of
experimental pursuit involves coherence, analogy and metaphor. And surely the most
ubiquitous metaphor of all involves gender. Even in English, which does not gender its
24 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF/
nouns in the way that French and Spanish do, there are many gendered associations:
mother earth, boats, ships and hurricanes are female, as is the sea, justice and so on. And
there are dozens of cliché phrases in the academy such as ‘the penetrating argument’, ‘the
thrust of an argument’, a ‘rigorous critique’, ‘erect a defence’, a ‘seminal work’. If one is
in doubt that phallogocentrism exists, one need only read Saul Kripke, the influential
philosopher of language, for whom the ultimate, fixed, and essential meanings of words
are always determined by what he calls ‘rigid designators’.
Metaphors help to elucidate meaning through making an association between two
different things; they thus perform an act of mediation, which changes the term thus
mediated. Hegel argued that, in the master/slave dialectic, the slave’s subjectivity is
mediated through labour, that in creating a new object a new sense of self is produced in
the slave. Moreover, the slave’s recognition of the master’s status as master mediates the
master’s own sense of self, and thus the master’s relation to himself. De Beauvoir carried
this idea forward to male/female relations: a man is made to feel stronger, larger, more
intelligent, when paired with a relatively smaller, weaker, dependent woman. In this way
mediation transforms the self, and gender dimorphism is selected for in the species.
Metaphors in language can also perform such an act of mediation, by structuring an
unstructured conceptual domain. We say of an idea or a fashion: ‘It’s hot!’ thus
transferring the semantic relations between hot and cold to those between ideas or
clothing styles. Hegel himself structures the relation between men and women through
the analogy of animals and plants. Guess who gets to be the tomato.
The concept of woman mediates the relations between man and his Others —other
men, nature, his own self. This is not a reciprocal relation: women are defined in
reference to men, as helpmates, wives, mothers, caregivers of men. Men are not defined
to the same extent by their relations to women. Thus men do not figure as metaphors so
often. Eva Feder Kittay (1988; see also 1987) has developed a typology of such gendered
metaphors. First, man locates himself in his domain in relationship to woman in her
domain, but always according a greater value to the male activity. Thus Socrates the
philosopher portrays himself as a midwife, but bringing forth universal truths rather than
particular babies. Second, man locates himself in his object world through a relation to
women. Thus the city of Babylon is said to be the great whore, there for man’s delight and
temptation, and nature is, of course, a woman, trying to hide her secrets under her skirts.
And third, and most obvious, woman mediates the relationships between men,
establishing their status vis-à-vis other men; the beautiful model on the arm of a high-
powered man is there for other men to see. Gang rape too is an act establishing bonds
between men via the domination and subjugation of a woman.
Kittay concludes from this that woman’s usefulness as metaphor depends on the
difference and lesser status of our activities. Our empowerment and our equal
participation in male domains will make us less useful for the mediating function. In part I
bring this up to flesh out some of the ways in which Longino (1990) argues that models
and metaphors which carry political implications work within enquiry to make arguments
persuasive, hypotheses plausible, and to provide a coded discourse which can make us
comfortable (or not) with other enquirers. Kittay’s analysis also can help us understand
FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE/ 25
why what might appear as trivial linguistic conventions (the subject of what today is called
the pc wars) can have significant political meaning and effects.
But this analysis of metaphor should also reveal that depictions of women, of our
nature, our role and our feminine essence, have the power of holding in place an entire
social system of relations and practices: hierarchical relations between men, practices
involving our environment and the very concept of man itself. Here perhaps, is the key to
understanding the resistance feminism has encountered.
IMPERIALISM WITHIN
If Western knowledge and reason have been marked by the social location of its theorists
and its institutional location within the academy, feminist theory has likewise been marked
and limited by its location largely within the West. ‘Woman’ is itself not a coherent
concept. Just as woman works to mediate man, so too do race and culture mediate gender
to produce various formulations of femininity which do not add up to a coherent whole.
Gender or sex cannot be taken as more central to concepts of the self than race; this may
be true at some historical moments and not at others, but gender cannot be taken as
conceptually primary. Which group of women’s experiences should be taken as the
paradigm case from which we generalize to the whole? Feminist theory has committed
analogous errors to androcentric theories in insidiously privileging the position and
experiences of academic European American women.
Western feminist knowledges of non-Western women often define those women not
as constituted by their social context, but as prior to that context. Non-Western women
are lumped into a monolithic category, defined in terms of their victimization, and rarely
seen as self-interpreting beings that resist male supremacy. Today Western feminist
theory is struggling with the development of new theoretical constructs which will not
reinstitute such imperialist concepts as the ‘historical progression of cultures’ nor use non-
Western women to mediate the self-identity of Western women and produce pleasing
reflections of them as liberated, enlightened and in control of their lives.
And within Western feminism itself the debate continues about how to negotiate
between constructing woman as victim, in light of the reality of male domination and
violence against women, and constructing woman as freely choosing agent. How can the
victimizations of women be brought into the light without reifying women’s victim status
or denying women any agency over their own lives? Katie Roiphe and others who attack
feminist theory from the outside (for allegedly seeing all women as victims) may be
surprised to learn that this debate has been going on within feminism for a good ten years,
sparked initially by feminist historians’ work on Nazi women and slave-owning women:
women who, however socially constrained their lives, had to share responsibility for the
brutal victimization of others. Feminists today are struggling to develop new concepts of
the self which can make sense of these complexities, and to produce social ontologies
which are not based on the manichean binarisms of victim/victimizer, oppressed/
oppressor.
However, unlike Roiphe, the critics of Western feminist theory which have identified
its colonialist baggage, theorists such as Aihwa Ong, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, bell
26 LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF/
hooks and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, are not calling for Western feminism to disappear
but for it to develop a greater self-consciousness about the dangers of its own institutional
and cultural location. They have called for feminist theory to theorize heterogeneity in
place of binaries, so that the complicated relationships between men and women of
oppressed races and nationalities might be more accurately described; to see women as
self-interpreting subjects, and ‘resist the tendency to write our subjectively defined world
onto an other that lies outside of it’; to change the patronizing project of ‘what can I do
for them’ into a more egalitarian ‘speak to, learn from’ relationship which recognizes that
others’ world-views are not merely to be corrected (Ong 1988). Imperialism cannot be
overcome by producing more descriptive works on ‘Other women’, or by cataloguing the
exotic. Rather, feminism must explore the systems by which it itself produces
‘Otherness’.
THE ETHICS OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
Within European feminism, Luce Irigaray’s work is perhaps most emblematic of this new
direction for feminist theory. Her project is to create a theory and an ethics which can be
grounded for the first time, not on sameness or universality, the ability to apply a method
or a principle to all, or to maintain a pretence of neutrality, but a theory and an ethics that
is based on difference at the most fundamental level (see, for example, Irigaray 1993).
Such a requirement follows necessarily from the repudiation of mind-body dualism, since
the recognition of a rich corporeality, unable to be abstracted from its particular
specificity, demands the recognition of irreducible difference.
To recognize sexual difference as a constitutive component of reason and knowledge,
then, involves an acknowledgement of the relation between the knowing subject and the
object known, and of theory’s own materiality, power and desire. A universalism of
theory, no less than a universal notion of woman, must be replaced by the notion of
theory as a situated enquiry with a particular aim and a specific temporal and social reach.
But feminist theory today seeks not to create a new theoretical norm, but to create new
possibilities for discursive space, where women can be accorded the right to know. What
I hope to have done with this chapter is to open a discursive space for the feminist work which
will follow in this volume, a space within which academic work of a new type, of a
different type, can be heard and thought within the academy itself.
NOTES
1 Linda Bell has compiled their views on women, as well as most others in the philosophy
canon, in her excellent anthology, Visions of Women (1983).
2 See also Grosz (1993:187–216). For a feminist rejoinder, see Lovibond (1994: 72–86). For
a mediating view between these, see Alcoff (1996).
3 This description is taken from Elizabeth Gross, ‘What is feminist theory?’ (1987: 190–204).
2
SPATIALIZING FEMINISM
Geographic perspectives
Linda McDowell
ON THE DEFINITION OF SPACE AND PLACE
In these postmodern, post-positivist, self-reflexive times, when ideas about positionality,
location, borders and margins are the hot words on the lips of every social and feminist
theorist (Where is she coming from, man? as we used to say in the less gender-correct
1960s), it may seem curious to be writing about the need to spatialize feminism or
feminist theory (there is also a larger doubt that perhaps comes with the terrain of
geography—is this what we really do: ‘spatialize’ others’ theory—add that particular
focus, that added extra, that turns something into geography? But let’s leave this
disciplinary anxiety aside, at least for now). In contemporary theoretical debates this use
of locational terminology is largely metaphorical, referring to the displacement of
androcentric, ethnocentric ‘grand narratives’ from centre stage to the margins as the
voices of those multiple Others, subjugated peoples of the Third’ World, women, people
of colour, those peoples labelled as mad, bad and perverse reveal the particularity of the
‘universal’ claims of Western theorists. It is now widely argued that the location—the
standpoint—of the theorist makes a difference to what is being claimed.
But this metaphorical displacement and dislocation is paralleled by and connected to a
reshaping of the ‘real’ world as flows of capital and labour disrupt associations between
nations, states and borders. In a relentless search for profit, transnational corporations
roam the globe overturning traditional ways of living and proletarianizing ever larger
numbers of peoples, women in particular, who are often forced to move geographically,
from the countryside to the town, from town to metropolis or capital city, from the Third
to the First World, from the margins to the centre. Although these patterns are not new
—untold numbers of people have moved over the centuries in response to famine,
‘natural’ disasters, slavery, economic hardship or war, but at the end of the twentieth
century the scale and magnitude of dislocation and movement is such that it is argued that
we are entering a new era—a period of space-time compression in the words of the
geographer David Harvey (1989), of space-time distanciation according to sociologist
Anthony Giddens (1990), or the replacement of a space of places with that of a space of
flows according to urban theorist Manuel Castells (1989). The almost instantaneous
transfer of information across the globe and the vastly speeded up possibilities for physical
movement of people and goods has reduced the ‘friction’ of space, the transactional costs
28 SPATIALIZING ALIZING FEMINISM/
of overcoming distance. While Marx saw the prospect of the annihilation of space by time
in the nineteenth century we seem now to be fast approaching a depthless world of
surface in which all experience might soon be simultaneous: a postmodern world of
hyperreality, characterized by the speeding up of time and blurring of boundaries. Thus as
Foucault argued a decade ago ‘We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the
world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that
connects points and intersects with its own skein’ (Foucault 1986:22): a moment in
which, according to some postmodern theorists, time is being replaced by space, or rather
temporality by spatiality (see Soja 1989).
Before we pursue the implications for feminist theorizing of these theoretical and
material displacements, of postmodern arguments about the transformation of space and
time, and indeed reveal the relations of power, place and location that position
contemporary ‘key’ theorists, I want to turn aside for a moment and address the more
specifically geographical debates (in a disciplinary sense) about the theorization of space. If
we hope to ‘spatialize’ feminist theory, or any theory, it seems important to try and
define the term ‘space’ itself. Here, of course there is a long and familiar literature.
Suffice it to say, somewhat parodying the arguments, geographers have, in the main
abandoned the search for specifically spatial regularities and laws to explain supposedly
spatial processes and accepted that spatial patterns are the outcome of social processes.
Now this would be a trivial statement—that all social relationships occur somewhere and
result in connections between people and places (although it took many years before this
relational definition of space was established)—and worryingly undermining for our
discipline were it not now accepted that spatial differentiation, patterns of uneven
development themselves have effectivity, that is they have a constitutive effect on social
processes. A recent definitional statement by Doreen Massey, a contributor to this
volume, whose work has been amongst the most influential in establishing the
geographers’ claim that ‘Geography matters!’ (see Massey and Allen 1984), is particularly
helpful here. While I realize she would not claim to speak for all geographers, her paper is
a useful summary of the view, widely held among geographers at present, that space is
relational and constitutive of social processes. Thus, she argues,
Interrelations between objects occur in space and time; it is these relationships
themselves which create/define space and time.
(Massey 1992:79; original emphasis)
Notice her insistence that space and time are interconnected—surely an unexceptional
statement.
Although Massey’s paper from which this definition was taken was a critique of, inter
alia, Laclau (1990), Jameson (1991), Soja (1989), Foucault (1986) and their arguments
about the definition and relative significance of space and time, it is worth recognizing
that Massey too draws attention to simultaneity. Thus, she argues,
LINDA MCDOWELL/ 29
We need to conceptualise space as constructed out of sets of interrelations, as the
simultaneous coexistence of social interrelations and interactions at all spatial
scales, from the most local level to the most global.
(Massey 1992:80)
that
‘Space’ is created out of the vast intricacies, the incredible complexities of the
interlocking and the non-interlocking, and the networks of relations at every scale
from the global to the local. What makes a particular view of these social relations
specifically spatial is their simultaneity. It is a simultaneity, also, which has
extension and configuration.
(Massey 1992:80–1)
And echoing Foucault, she suggests that ‘Space [is]…a moment in the intersection of
configured social relations’ (1992:81).
Surely what all these theorists are arguing, despite their apparent differences is that we
have seen both a speeding up of the interconnections and new sets of configurations that
connect spatial scales, particularly the global with the local in new and unexpected ways.
So, in a statement paralleling Massey’s emphasis on remarkably complex interconnections
between the global and the local, Fredric Jameson has argued that the postmodern
condition is one distinguished by, defined by, a particular set of spatial relations. Thus, he
suggests,
I take such spatial peculiarities as symptoms and expressions of a new and
historically original dilemma, one that involves our insertion as individual subjects
into a multinational set of radical discontinuous realities, whose frames range from
the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable
decentring of global capital itself.
(Jameson 1991:413)
What distinguishes the world at the end of the twentieth century is the transnational
attenuation of ‘local’ space, and this breaking of space into ‘discontinuous realities’ which
alters our sense of ourselves as individuals, members of various groups and communities,
as citizens of a nation state. Thus for theorists interested in questions about individual and
social identity, whether working in the humanities or the social sciences, geographic
questions, questions of location and dislocation, of position, of spatiality, and
connections, are central. Further, it seems that uncertainty or anxiety is a central theme in
a great deal of current work.
As Homi Bhabha (1994:216) suggests
anxiety is created by enjoining the local and the global; the dilemma of projecting
an international space on the trace of a decentred, fragmented subject. Cultural
globality is figured in the in-between spaces of double frames: its historical originality
30 SPATIALIZING ALIZING FEMINISM/
marked by a cognitive obscurity; its decentred ‘subject’ signified in the nervous
temporality of the transnational, or the emergent provisionality of the ‘present’.
This is a complex but provocative statement and the notion of in-between spaces is one
that I shall return to later in the chapter. I wonder though whether the anxiety apparently
caused by displacement and space-time compression is not gender-specific. For many
women, the decentring of the local, the widening of spatial horizons may have liberating
effects as well as raising new anxieties. But this is only speculation so far.
Perhaps now, however, we are ready to start, to begin an investigation of the effects of
the enjoining of the local and global on gender relations, on women’s lives in particular,
on the ways in which we theorize, as feminists, prospects for changing the world for the
better. But two final prefatory, or qualifying, statements are needed.
First, while the definitions of space I have drawn on help us specify our focus and
establish the crucial significance of interconnectedness, in my view they remain at too high
a level of generality. Spatial configurations, connections between places, are significant only
in the context of a specific question or investigation of particular sets of relationships. So,
for example, we might investigate how and why patterns of world trade and debt position
countries/ localities and individuals in particular sets of power and dominance.
Thus as Massey (1992:81) insists ‘Space is…a complex web of relations of domination
and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation’: what, in a wonderful phrase, with its
implicit reference to Haraway’s (1991) notion of a geometry of difference, she has
elsewhere termed ‘power-geometry’ (Massey 1993).
Clearly, depending on their position in the social structure, people are differentially
located in space, with differential abilities and opportunities to overcome what
geographers refer to as the frictional effects of distance. While we are all affected by the
radical transformation of local and global relations outlined above, by the power of
multinational capital and global telecommunications, there are radical inequalities in the
spatial spread of individuals’ lives. For some, the network of points or skein referred to by
Foucault above is a tightly constrained local pattern, the skein, with its wonderful woolly
metaphor, is a trap, whereas for others the interstices of the network are separated by
enormous distance and the connections are paths to greater freedom, an internet in
cyberspace perhaps, rather than the homely skein of knitting wool. And, as feminist
geographers have documented in numerous case studies in the last two decades, it is often
women who have the most spatially restricted lives (Brydon and Chant 1989; Hanson and
Pratt 1995; Katz and Monk 1994; Little et al. 1988; Momsen and Kinnaird 1994; Momsen
and Townsend 1987; Tivers 1985), trapped in the net rather than free in (cyber) space.
Geography, to my mind, is defined by a middle-range focus, and by its comparative
nature; the focus is on connections, looking at the links between processes and people at a
range of spatial scales from the local to the global, and the ways in which these scales are
themselves fundamentally interconnected —in the current clumsy but evocative phrases,
what we are interested in is aspects of, the differential effects of, ‘glocalization’ or global
localism.
The second point is a separate but related one—in the focus on change
and simultaneity, on the overcoming of space and distance, it is important that we do not
LINDA MCDOWELL/ 31
forget permanence, solidity, meaning and symbolism, what we might refer to as
attachment to place. For space is not just a set of flows, pace Castells, but also a set of
places, from a home to national territories, with associations and meanings for individuals
and groups. Here the distinction between space as relational and place as a location, as a
fixture, the geographer’s ‘sense of place’ or ‘genius loci’, what the literary and social
critic Raymond Williams termed a ‘structure of feeling’ centred on a specific territory is a
useful one. This is not to argue, of course, that the meaning and symbolism of place is
unvarying—this is clearly absurd—but to emphasize that spaces and places are not only sets
of material social relations but also cultural objects. Thus we must investigate not only
patterns of flows but also the meaning of place, of place as absolute location, and of place
as stasis, albeit with varying boundaries. If the last decade has taught us anything it is
surely that the meaning of territory has a continued significance in the contemporary
world as peoples variously fight over their attachment to place—in the former
Yugoslavia, in the former Soviet Union, in inner cities all round the world.
I want now to turn from this definitional focus to specifics and to consider the ways in
which the phrase ‘spatializing feminist theory’ might be interpreted. I have chosen to do
three things in the second part of this chapter —addressing, first a question about the
location of theorizing; second, examining some of the material consequences of
globalization and migration for the attachment of identity to place; and, third, examining
the prospects for the construction of a feminist politics that reaches across boundaries. In
all three cases I shall focus on space as a metaphor as well as a set of material social
relations. It is only the second of the three sets of issues that is, in a particular disciplinary
sense, geographical (and even here the questions are new and unrecognized as yet in more
conventional geographic discourse). But no matter. As the chapters in the rest of this
volume show, feminist geographers have long dealt with issues and questions that have
challenged the very conception of our discipline. Like feminist scholarship in general, the
excitement and achievements of the last two decades or so have lain in the radical
challenges to the nature of disciplinary knowledge per se. It is no longer possible to avoid
raising questions about who is speaking, from what position, in claims to knowledge. In
all three areas that I discuss below, it is hardly possible to do more than indicate some of
the main lines of the argument. In many cases these will be familiar—there are now a
large number of books, texts and papers by geographers and others addressing questions of
location, space, place, identity and position, too numerous to list (the recent New
Formations collection edited by Carter et al. 1993 is a useful starting place) —and in other
cases some of the particular lines of argument that I indicate here are opened up in greater
depth in other chapters in this collection.
32 SPATIALIZING ALIZING FEMINISM/
POST-CARTESIAN POSITIONS
Contextualizing theory—acknowledging by whom and where theory
is constructed and why that matters
The crisis of the rational subject has a long history. That indivisible, singular and unique
human subject—the thinking individual of Enlightenment thought who saw himself as
master of the universe—has been unravelling for decades. Stuart Hall, in an admirably
clear essay, has traced the dislocation and fragmentation of identity and the subject
through the effects of what he terms ‘a series of ruptures in the discourses of modern
knowledge’ (1994: 120). In particular, he suggests there have been
five great advances in social theory and the human sciences which have occurred in,
or had their major impact upon, thought in the period of late-modernity [the
second half of the twentieth century] and whose main effect, it has been argued, has
been the final decentring of the Cartesian subject.
(1994:120)
The five great advances are:
1 Marx’s recognition of the ways in which individuals’ actions are limited by
‘circumstances not of their own choosing’.
2 Freud’s discovery of the unconscious in which he argued that our identities and
desires are not rational but function very differently. Modern psychoanalysis has built
on Freud’s work to argue that self as whole and united is something which has to be
learned; it is formed in relation to others and is seldom completely achieved but
rather is an ongoing process involving imagination and fantasy.
3 De Saussure’s work on linguistics in which the subject is positioned within a pre-
existing set of language rules rather than being the ‘author’ of statements. Words and
statements always carry with them echoes of a range of meanings and so are
inherently unstable.
4 Foucault’s analysis of individuals as the product of ‘disciplinary power’ which
produces docile bodies. Paradoxically the surveillance and power of a wide range of
collective institutions produces an increasingly individualized subject.
5 The impact of feminism as both a theoretical critique and political movement in the
context of a wider range of social movements that are based on and draw their strength
from what has become known as ‘identity politics’.
While there is now a large feminist literature about the ways in which feminism has been
particularly effective in the conceptual decentring of the Cartesian subject, Hall’s
summary of the impact of feminism is worth repeating here for its admirable brevity and
completeness. There have been, he argues, five ways in which feminism has been
important in disrupting the idea of a centred subject.
LINDA MCDOWELL/ 33
1 It questioned the classic distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘private’ and
‘public’. Feminism’s slogan was ‘the personal is the political’.
2 It therefore opened up to political contestation whole new arenas of social life—the
family, sexuality, housework, the domestic division of labour, child rearing, etc.
3 It also exposed, as a political and social question, the issue of how we are formed and
produced as gendered subjects. That is to say, it politicised subjectivity, identity and
the process of identification (as men/women, mothers/fathers, sons/daughters).
4 What began as a movement directed at challenging the social position of women
expanded to include the formation of sexual and gendered identities.
5 Feminism challenged the notion that men and women were part of the same identity
—‘mankind’—replacing it with the question of sexual difference.
(Hall 1994:125; original emphasis)
It is clear that in all these five areas questions about location have been central. It was
feminist theory that pointed out the absence of whole areas of life from social theory, that
challenged the very notion of private life that took place in particular small scale spaces—
in the home, inside, in the private not the public spaces of the city. And while Hall is
correct with all these five arguments, feminist theorizing has, of course, moved further
and faster in the decentring than he suggests, displacing the very notion of ‘woman’ itself.
The question of difference, which is so important, not only applies to differences between
women, whether based on class, or on age, on ethnicity or on sexual identification, on
country, region or locality, but also to the notion of the individual and the self. Ideas about
a subjectivity that is decentred, fractured and partial are a challenge to the idealized
rational individual. In post-rationalist, postmodern, post-structuralist or whatever we
choose to label contemporary critical theories, there is a profound scepticism towards all
universalizing claims about the existence and nature of powers of reason, towards ideas of
progress, science, the mind/body separation and the rational subject. Instead attention is
drawn towards multiplicity and differences, none of which are theoretically privileged
over any other. Many feminists suggest that epistemologies must be regarded as contextual,
situated and positioned, as well as temporary. As Hartsock has argued ‘epistemologies
grow out of differing material circumstances’ (Hartsock 1990:158): a view that elsewhere
she has termed ‘standpoint theory’.
While a number of feminists have regarded these conclusions with deep pessimism,
believing that the deconstruction of the female subject undermines the basis for a
specifically feminist politics, others have ‘a passion for difference’ (the title of Henrietta
Moore’s 1994 book), embracing the liberatory potentiality of a non-hierarchized
multiplicity in which people are not distinguished or characterized by their difference from
a white, male, bourgeois norm (their distance from this in the sense of failure) but rather
multiplicity is celebrated.
The proponents of standpoint theorizing have argued the need for theories that begin
from the experience and point of view of the oppressed/dominated: those whom
Foucault termed the subjugated. Haraway (1991) similarly suggested that the situated
view from below is likely to include a clearer perspective on the conditions of oppression
than what she termed the View from nowhere’ (Cartesian rationality). But we must
34 SPATIALIZING ALIZING FEMINISM/
include in these contextual or positioned theories, the views from somewhere, not only
the relations of dominance that construct, define and oppress a particular group, be they
women per se or older women, women of colour or whomever, but also, as Hartsock has
emphasized, women’s ‘capacities, abilities and strengths’ (1990: 158). Standpoint
theories must ‘use these capacities as guides for a potential transformation of power
relationships’. Before turning, in the final section of this chapter, to this extremely
important question of constructing a feminist politics across differences, I want to pursue
the question of theory construction a little further and also raise some questions that I find
troubling about multiple claims to knowledge.
Standpoint theories and feminist geometries
Standpoint theories, which are specific to time and place, have a certain appeal to
geographers, and yet there is so far relatively little work by geographers that has addressed
the question of how to construct contextual theories of difference in which the associations
of gendered identities with place and location are seriously addressed. Instead geographers
have looked to feminist theorists writing elsewhere for guidance. The work of Donna
Haraway seems to have a particular resonance, in part perhaps because of her own use of
spatial terminology including maps and geometries. Haraway, perhaps in a reference to
Geertz uses the term ‘local knowledge’ or ‘embodied knowledge’, to emphasize the
deconstruction of the mind/body dichotomy. She has argued that feminists need to
develop a geometry of difference that allows us to consider the relations of difference in ways
other than hierarchical dominance. She draws on Minh-ha’s (1987) concept of
‘inappropriate/d others’ to refer to the positioning of people who refuse to adopt the
binary identity of either ‘self or ‘Other’ that is offered in dominant theories of identity.
Instead we need to theorize a geometry of multiple difference. Haraway emphasizes the
‘hard intellectual, cultural and political work these new geometries will require’ (1991:3)
but begins to sketch in the outline of a new theoretical approach. In a long passage that I
have drawn on before (McDowell 1993) but which I continue to find provocative,
Haraway argues as follows:
A map of tensions and resonances between the fixed ends of a charged dichotomy
better represents the potent politics and epistemologies of embodied, therefore
accountable, objectivity. For example, local knowledges have also to be in tension
with the productive structurings that force unequal translations and exchanges—
material and semiotic— within the webs of knowledge and power. Webs have the
power of systematicity, even of centrally structured global systems with
deep filaments and tenacious tendrils into time, space and consciousness, the
dimensions of world history. Feminist accountability requires a knowledge tuned to
resonance, not to dichotomy. Gender is a field of structured and structuring
difference, where the tones of extreme localization, of the intimately personal and
individualized body, vibrate in the same field with global high tension emissions.
Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or
LINDA MCDOWELL/ 35
otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility
for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning.
(Haraway 1991:195)
This concept of embodiment as a node in a set of fields variously structured by sets of
social relations ranging from the global to the most intimate scale seems to me to parallel
the notion of place that is common in geographical work (Massey 1992; Smith 1993),
while reminding geographers that questions of identity are not solely related to the
smallest scale, to the body and the home or to the community, which is where too many
geographers continue to place them. If we move towards a definition of both identity and
place as a network of relations, unbounded and unstable, rather than fixed, we are able to
challenge essentialist notions of place and being, and of local, face-to-face relations as
somehow more ‘authentic’—a common strand of both modern and some versions of
postmodern theorizing. Indeed, Iris Marion Young has made this specific connection in
her critique of an idealized concept of local place-based community that has imbued feminist
and socialist thought alike: a concept that, she argues, ‘implies a denial of space-time
distancing’ (1990: 302).
It is to this issue of space-time distancing, communities and the implications for
feminist politics that I turn in a moment, but first I want to conclude this section with a
difficult question about writing and the construction of multiple knowledges.
Polyphony, cacophony or authorial dominance
It is now commonplace in what has become known as the ‘new ethnography’, as well as in
literary theory, other aspects of the humanities and the social sciences, to argue that the
author is dead. Meaning itself is fluid and contextual. The notion of a singular
authoritative voice that controlled both the construction and interpretation of narratives is
challenged by arguments that suggest that there are interpretative communities, that
readers are differentially placed and so have different reactions to a single text.
While this seems unexceptional, a more difficult question is raised by what some term
a crisis of representation, that is a crisis of writing rather than reading. Many
anthropologists, and an increasing number of geographers, now suggest that the desired
aim of scholarly writing is a polyphonic text, in which the multiple voices of the narrator
and his (the pronoun is deliberate— these claims seem to have originated in a predominantly
masculine group of scholars (see Mascia-Lees et al. 1989 and Moore 1994)) subjects are
heard. Now, leaving aside difficult stylistic questions about how to construct
a multiphonic text that is legible, it may be argued that this genre does not challenge
authorial dominance. Indeed, it may even increase it and give it a new, and unacceptable,
dominance. Thus while polyphony in no way detracts from the responsibility of the
author to decide whom to include in the narrative, how to arrange the material, how to
decide who speaks for whom and on what basis, at its best it may make this process more
explicit. But there is a second consequence that is more difficult: the aim of making the
author visible in the text (usually a member of a dominant group by virtue of their
location as a scholar, if not always White, male and Western) has the consequence of an
36 SPATIALIZING ALIZING FEMINISM/
explicit movement of the author from the margins to the centre of the narrative. Thus
authors become characters in their own stories, now explicitly rather than implicitly
orchestrating the work. Now this is not an original point. Geertz (1988) pointed out, some
years ago, the irony of ending up with author-saturated texts produced by those who
claimed to be sharing authorship with others. More problematic, as Moore has recently
convincingly argued, is the necessary continuation of older notions of an author. As she
points out all these texts are based on the assumption of a singular identity —that ‘the
author in the text and the author of the text are one and the same’ (Moore 1994:117).
And, further, this relationship is a fictive one, imaginary in that it is arbitrary and
symbolic, set up in language and culturally inscribed. The author in the text is the
imaginary self of the author of the text, or rather ‘properly speaking, they are not two
selves, but a self in process’ (Moore 1994:118).
Whatever the case, Moore has tart words to say about the importance of this crisis of
representation, which as she points out is actually a political crisis (1994:117; my
emphasis). Moore suggests that ‘it is an irony of the contemporary moment that while
international capitalism and other forces threaten homogeneity, difference is on the
political agenda more than ever’ (1994: 117). While not wanting to read something into
her words that she did not intend, I detect a note of censure here. I want to suggest,
rather, that the political crisis lies precisely in the coincidence of, or intersection of,
forces of homogeneity and heterogeneity. It seems to me that the current moment is such
a vexed one for the construction of a progressive politics precisely because of this doubled
reconstruction of spatial relationships. I attempt to expand this argument in the next
section.
STRETCHING SPACE: IN BETWEEN/THE THIRD SPACE
Haraway emphasized the connections between the material and the semiotic in the webs of
power/knowledge that construct our everyday lives. I, and others, have argued that
geographers must link the material and the symbolic or metaphorical in analyses of the social
construction and significance of space in recent theoretical endeavours, including feminist
theorizing. However, a relative emphasis on either the material or the symbolic is often
appropriate, depending on the questions in mind. Here, in this second section, the
emphasis is on the material: on the ways in which the transition to an increasingly
interconnected global economy has altered people’s sense of themselves, whether they
remain trapped in the same old place or literally have been transported half across the
globe. For all people though, whether geographically stable or mobile, most social
relations take place locally, in a place, but a place which is open to ideas and messages, to
visitors and migrants, to tastes, foods, goods and experiences to a previously
unprecedented extent. It is this openness that I have termed global localism here. This
seems to me to better capture the different degrees of fixity than terms such as space-time
compression or space-time distanciation which tend to fail to recognize the unevenness of
these socio-spatial changes.
There is also another side to the recent geographic changes. We also now live in a post-
colonial world in which nations are fragmenting into smaller nations and where local or
LINDA MCDOWELL/ 37
regionally based social and political relations have increasing salience. Movements for the
self-determination of peoples, differentiated one from another on the basis of ethnicity,
language or religion, are fragmenting the world political divisions of the post-war period
and producing an unfamiliar map. Thus, through a range of processes—from the uneven
impact of an increasingly global capitalism, migration, war, new social movements—old
boundaries are being transgressed and disrupted and replaced by new divisions. In these
processes, men and women, divided or united by age, by class, or by beliefs, are
differentially affected, and the links between identity and a sense of belonging to a
particular territory or place are being remapped. Now this chapter is not the place to even
outline the main features and implications of the breaking down of old spatial divisions and
boundaries and the re-establishment of new ones. Some of these stories are told in the
succeeding chapters; others elsewhere. Instead here I merely want to draw attention to
the ways in which movement and migration have also forced us to rethink ideas about
identity, subjectivity and selfhood by disrupting another of those significant
Enlightenment binaries: in this case the division between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’ and to
draw attention to the utility of ideas of ‘between-ness’—developed in the main in the
work of post-colonial theorists and feminists of colour.
What globalization, the associated movement of people and capital, and the expansion
of hegemonic forms of Western media into ‘Others’ spaces’, has achieved is no less than
the disruption of geographic space, or at least its definition and association with ‘real
space’. The movement of vast numbers of people from the formerly colonized periphery
to the centre of what was once termed, without irony, the ‘civilized world’ has collapsed
the distinction between the West and the rest, their geographic separation and the
association of the cultural values of ‘the West’—those Western philosophical principles
(such as the Cartesian mind/body distinction)—with (in the main) the Western
hemisphere. Now a multiplicity of peoples of different colour, religion and nationality
make up ‘the West’. These people, as Moore (1994: 132) has suggested,
members of the British Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities might not readily
identify with the category of the West as deployed in anthropology, cultural
studies, colonial discourse theory; with that particular set of cultural values,
symbols, social structures and ways of being shored up by acts of violence and
economic opportunism. And yet they so obviously are part of any sensible
definition of the West; they are at the heart of the category even as they seek to
resist it, transform it and educate it.
Of course what we might clumsily term ‘people of colour’ have always been at the heart
of the definition of the West, or what it means to be Western in the sense of that being
white, or Western or advanced was always defined relationally and oppositionally. It
meant ‘not being’ whatever shifting characteristics were used to define ‘the Other’. The
key change now, of course, is that ‘them’ and ‘us’ now share the same geographic space—
the heartlands of advanced capitalism, the metropolises of the ‘First’ World. The West
can no longer be identified with a particular set of spaces or geographically defined
people. It has become, rather, ‘a discursive space, a set of positionalities, a network of
38 SPATIALIZING ALIZING FEMINISM/
economic and political power relations, a domain of material and discursive effects’
(Moore 1994:132).
This disruption of space through migration, of course, has parallels with women’s
position in the West, perhaps making more visible arguments from within feminism about
women’s awkward ‘place’ in the West. For women, too, were/are excluded by Western
philosophical ideals, equally ‘out of place’ in that discursive space called the West. The
long debate about the public and the private is too familiar to need rehearsal here, but it
reminds us of the significance of geographical location to the construction of gendered
identities. Women actively and passively, through the changing nature of their everyday
lives, their position in the family, the household and in the workplace, all of which have
been affected by the social relations of local globalism and its associated geographic
restructurings, are challenging the gendering of space as they disrupt conventional
associations between Whiteness, masculinity and the workplace, for example, between
gender and political power, between femininity and accepted definitions of sexuality. At a
range of spatial scales, from the most local in the home to the global scale, women and
people of colour have challenged conventional assumptions about the relationships
between identity, both individual and group, and location, as well as the theoretical basis
of Enlightenment thought. Old associations between a place and a people, be it a
community, a region or a nation, are breaking down and are being reforged at the end of
the twentieth century. (It is of course, important to remember that what we tend now to
refer to as ‘old’ or even ‘traditional’ relationships between place and identity were
themselves reshaped by the upheavals of industrial urbanization in the modern period, as
well as by imperialism, slavery and wars. And to keep in mind Anderson’s (1983) work
on the bonds created to construct an imagined community among people sharing the same
national territory. In other words, the pace and scope of globalization may have
accelerated but the phenomenon itself is not recent.)
A helpful way to conceptualize the current relationships between location and identity
is in a set of interlinked concepts developed by social and cultural theorists such as Paul
Gilroy, Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, though each takes a somewhat different approach.
Gilroy, in his book The Black Atlantic (1993) argues that the contemporary Black English
(and other migrant peoples) stand between two (at least) great cultural assemblages:
between the intellectual heritage of the West and an absolute sense of ethnic difference,
based on often idealized and imaginary notions of Black nationalism. Gilroy, like Hall,
argues that neither of these ideals are appropriate either for understanding the identity of
former colonized peoples in the West or for the basis of a political movement. Instead, it
is important to theorize what he terms ‘creolization, metissage, mestizaje, and hybridity’
(1993:2), although anxious about the specific terminology with, from the viewpoint of
ethnic absolutism, its undertones of impurity. Hall similarly points to three contested ways
of constructing a sense of self and group identity, especially a national identity, in an
increasingly multicutural world. He views the first two reactions as a conservative
response to anxiety and threat: the little Englander reaction of White Britons and the
search for ethnic purity and a homeland among minority groups, exemplified in a
movement such as Rastafarianism. The third response is more hopeful, although difficult.
It lies in ‘the emergence of new subjects, new genders, new ethnicities…[who have]
LINDA MCDOWELL/ 39
acquired through struggle the means to speak for themselves’ (Hall 1991:34). These new
subjects occupy new spaces—‘new regions, new communities’ (1991: 34)—in which
Hall emphasizes, like Gilroy, a new hybrid identity forged out of betweenness may
emerge.
Bhabha (1994) too emphasizes the consequences of geographic movement for identity,
suggesting that new and transitional identities, which he also terms hybrid, are emerging
from mass movements and the intermixing of different peoples. In a passage full of
challenge to geographers attempting to rethink their definition of space and spatiality,
Bhabha suggests we are seeing the emergence of ‘a third space’ in the contemporary
world. He suggests that
what is manifestly new about this version of international space and its social (in)
visibility, is its temporal measure—‘different moments in historical time…jump
back and forth’ [the quote is from Jameson]. The non-synchronous temporality of
global and national cultures opens up a cultural space—a third space—where the
negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline
existences.
(1994:218)
What is particularly important for the argument here is the thought -provoking
coincidence between Bhabha’s and current feminists’ arguments about gendered identities
and ideas of the subject as multiple and fragmented. Here is Bhabha defining the
‘residents’ of the third space:
the subjects of cultural difference do not derive their discursive authority from
anterior causes—be it human nature or historical necessity—which, in a secondary
move, articulate essential and expressive identities between cultural differences in
the contemporary world. The problem is not of an ontological cast, where
differences are effects of some more totalising, transcendent identity to be found in
the past or the future. Hybrid hyphenisations [the term is reminiscent of bell
hooks’s celebration of multiple hyphenated female identities (black-feminist-
lesbian, etc.] emphasise the incommensurable elements as the basis of cultural
identities. What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the
regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently,
‘opening out’, remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a
singular or autonomous sign of difference—be it class, gender or race…difference
is neither One nor the Other, but something else besides, in-between.
(Bhabha 1994:219; original emphasis)
Here we see then the coincidence between post-colonial cultural studies and feminist
scholarship (Butler 1990; Leidner 1993; Moore 1994; Pringle 1989; Probyn 1994) where
there is growing interest in the analysis of subjectivity and lived identity as performance,
masquerade and parody. The work of constructing an identity is never complete,
involving struggles and resistances as well as acceptance, pleasure and desire. Further,
40 SPATIALIZING ALIZING FEMINISM/
there is an insistence on the multiple nature of subjectivity and its construction in local or
lived experiences. The sense of oneself as a certain sort of woman, defined by class,
‘race’, religion, age and so forth, is given meaning by the actualities of everyday
experience. And this experience itself is a complex series of crosscutting locations in
which the significance of different aspects of the self varies. In these conceptions of
subjectivity, location and embodiment are crucial. As Moore has suggested
the powerful symbolism of notions of place, location and positionality in
contemporary feminist theory demonstrates just how much we come to know
through our bodies, and how much our theorizing is dependent on that knowledge.
The multiple nature of subjectivity is experienced physically, through practices
which can be simultaneously physical and discursive.
(Moore 1994:81)
So, as geographers assert (but are relieved to find others agree) location matters!
Thus we have a coincidence between material, symbolic and discursive constructions of
space, in situated theory, in imagined communities, in the social construction of different
visions of space and in the performative and fictive nature of subjectivities and social
relations. There is an evident drawing together of interests by a range of critical theorists
in these ideas in which location and position are key concepts. For feminist, social and
cultural geographers these are exciting times.
WHAT IS (A SPATIALIZED) FEMINIST THEORY FOR?
CONSTRUCTING A POLITICS ACROSS SPACE. SEPARATISM?
Finally, I want to conclude with a few remarks about the prospects for a spatialized
feminist politics. While postmodern/post-colonial or whatever we choose to term them
theories of multiple positionalities and multiple subjectivities may have a special appeal to
‘social theorists who live these complicated, conflicting and compelling differences
(Moore 1994:81)—and most feminists working in the academy surely identify with this
contention—these theories also seem to make it more difficult to sustain the notion of a
specifically feminist politics or indeed even to argue for the continuing centrality of
gender-based analyses. Now the arguments about relativism, values and morals and the
prospects for claiming ‘principled positions’ (the phrase is the title of a book by Squires,
1993) have been well-rehearsed by many others, including some of the most rigorous
feminist theorists (Haraway, Hartsock and Fraser are names that are uppermost in my
mind but there are many others). As these committed scholars have suggested, it is
important that we aim for a ‘social criticism that is ad hoc, contextual, plural and limited’
(Hartsock 1990:159) but one that is not disabling—as Hartsock argues, progressive social
critics have to hold on to a belief in the possibility of systematic knowledge. The aim, of
course, is to argue that systematic knowledge is not only possible, but that it must be
contextual and local, various and diverse.
However, the aim of this knowledge construction has changed. It is not enough to
assert and demonstrate difference. Those groups positioned as ‘the other’ by the
LINDA MCDOWELL/ 41
discourses of Western science now seem to have a twofold agenda. The first aim is to
dispute the categorization of their knowledge as somehow inferior, as alternative or as one
perspective among many, each with equal validity. As Hartsock suggests:
Our various efforts to constitute ourselves as subjects (through struggles for
colonial independence, racial and sexual liberation struggles, and so on) were
fundamental to creating the preconditions for the current questioning of
universalist claims…out of this concrete multiplicity [we need to] build an account
of the world as seen from the margins, an account which can expose the falseness of
the view from the top and can transform the margins as well as the centre. The
point is to develop an account of the world which treats our perspectives not as
subjugated or disruptive knowledges, but as primary and as constitutive of a
different world.
(Hartsock 1990:171)
The second aim is to develop political strategies to build and act on these perspectives
—‘to engage in the historical, political, and theoretical process of constituting ourselves
as subjects as well as objects of history’ (Hartsock 1990:170). For feminists the challenge
is to begin to forge alliances between groups who are differently positioned. In many cases
this will involve a hard political struggle of uniting women who are themselves divided by
their class position or their ethnicity around a common series of issues, as well as working
with other groups of oppressed peoples. In different circumstances, we need to ask
ourselves not only what are our differences but also what are our commonalities. This
political work will involve building bridges between positions, in the literal as well as the
metaphorical sense. The processes of local globalization that I have referred to above mean
that women in widely separated geographical spaces have interests in common. As
Chandra Talpade Mohanty has reminded us, Third World women in the nation-states of
‘the South’ and Black, Asian and indigenous women living in ‘the North’ are an ‘imagined
community’ based on Third World oppositional struggles.
Imagined not because it is not ‘real’ but because it suggests potential alliances
across divisive boundaries, and ‘community’ because in spite of internal hierarchies
it nevertheless suggests a significant, deep commitment to what Anderson, in
referring to the idea of the nation, calls ‘horizontal comradeship’.
(Mohanty 1991:4)
And, as Mohanty, goes on to argue, reassuringly perhaps for those geographers more
comfortable with a material conception of space, ‘such imagined communities are
historically and geographically concrete, [but] their boundaries are necessarily fluid’
(1991:5). Thus feminist activists are involved in a wide range of activities, based on
alliances and the construction of communities across a range of spatial scales with differing
temporalities. Within nations and communities, campaigns about legal rights, about
representation, about the provision of communal goods and resources unite and divide
women. Across nations, these and other issues—of war, religion, persecution, mutilation
42 SPATIALIZING ALIZING FEMINISM/
and torture unite and divide women. And the very processes of spatial globalization, of
space-time compression that have had such an impact on the everyday lives of millions of
people, may be used to annihilate the space and distance between them. As global
telecommunications become more accessible—the fax and e-mail, for example—they
may become the weapons of the weak as well as the powerful.
Spaces for women—arguments about separatism
One last point remains to be considered, which perhaps tempers the enthusiastic advocacy
of the politics of alliance and coalition outlined above. As the history of ‘second wave’
feminist politics has taught us, it is clear that an important part of oppositional struggles is
separatism: a separatism which is often associated with demands for a geographical space,
or territory and the maintenance of mechanisms of exclusion and boundaries. As Hartsock
recognized,
one of our first tasks is the construction of the subjectivities of the Others,
subjectivities which will be both multiple and specific. Nationalism and separatism
are important features of this construction.
(Hartsock 1990:163)
This argument forces feminists to face difficult questions to which there are no easy answers.
And the question of geography, or more accurately of scale, is a crucial part of the dilemmas
raised by separatist movements. Thus we may support a whole variety of initiatives to
create women-only spaces—from bookshops to car parks, railway carriages or art-
centres, bars to peace camps —based on arguments about solidarity, comfort and safety.
Indeed, I am sure that Hartsock’s quotation from Bernice Ragon (who is a singer, activist
and social historian), viz:
[Sometimes] it gets too hard to stay out in that society all the time. And that’s when
you find a place, and you try to bar the door and check all the people who come in.
You come together to see what you can do about shouldering up all your energies
so that you and your kind can survive.
(1990:163)
will provoke a wry smile of recognition from most readers. It is, after all, such hard work
living with ‘the enemy’ all the time.
But how are we to respond to the moral issues posed by what may seem like more
extreme versions of geographic separatism, based on ethnic separatism perhaps, or on
religious beliefs, which are often extremely oppressive societies for women? It is hard,
although not impossible, work to defend certain separatist movements while denying
others. This dilemma, of course, is but one aspect of the same one raised earlier in these
concluding remarks: the necessity for all those who adhere to a belief in difference, in the
construction of non-hierarchical local knowledges to simultaneously adhere to beliefs in
LINDA MCDOWELL/ 43
systematic knowledge, principled positions and the necessity for a progressive political
struggle for a less unequal world.
44
3
RE: MAPPING SUBJECTIVITY
Cartographic vision and the limits of politics
Kathleen M.Kirby
The Cartesian subject has seemed, to many contemporary theorists, the last (and first)
bastion of the current political order. It has been held responsible for the atrocities of
imperialism, the subjugation of women and the psychological illnesses of Western
individuals.1 Post-colonial critics and feminist critics have catalogued the ways the
Enlightenment individual founded itself at the expense of others, especially Third World
populations and women. Contemporary theorists are both challenging this norm’s claim
to exhaustively represent subjects and attempting to reconstruct this subject, where it has
hardened into reality, to propose more responsive forms of epistemological and social
relation.
My argument will be that the development of Enlightenment individualism was—and
continues to be—inextricably tied to a specific concept of space and the technologies
invented for dealing with that space. Graphically, the ‘individual’ might be pictured as a
closed circle: its smooth contours ensure its clear division from its location, as well as
assuring its internal coherence and consistency. Outside lies a vacuum in which objects
appear within their own bubbles, self-contained but largely irrelevant to this self-sufficient
ego. Will, thought, perception might be depicted as rays issuing outward to play over the
surface of Objects, finally rejecting them in order to reaffirm its own primacy. Objects
that are accepted are pulled in through the walls of the subject and assimilated, restoring
the interior to homeostasis.
The Cartesian subject, the Enlightenment individual, the autonomous ego of
psychoanalysis: all appear to be reducible to this same graphic schema. The Individual’
expresses a coherent, consistent, rational space paired with a consistent, stable, organized
environment. Cartography, a science developing (as a science) in the Renaissance and
being standardized in the Enlightenment, is both an expression of the new form of
subjectivity and a technology allowing (or causing) the new subjectivity to coalesce. The
form for subjectivity, space and the relation between them inspired by mapping has
achieved, I would argue, a kind of popular dominance today—though all three are also
beginning, according to Fredric Jameson, to’ wither away’ under the pressures of
postmoderaism.
Briefly consulting two Renaissance texts of exploration will allow me to reveal the
roots of cartography’s configuration of the subject and space. Jameson’s writing on
postmodernism will provide a place to consider more closely the ramifications of a
continued theoretical reliance on mapping. My contention is that the mapping subject,
46 KATHLEEN M.KIRBY/
now as then, is a construct incapable of responding to many of the features of the
(geopolitical) environment; that it is an exclusive structure encoded with a particular
gender, class and racial positioning; that it is a structure for subjectivity unresponsive to
the perspectives of many non-dominant subjectivities, particularly women. And finally, its
negative qualities are an effect of the way it constitutes space. The new styles of space
forming the foundation of postmodernism may offer precisely the material for building a
new kind of subjectivity, one that will not leave non-dominant subjects at the theoretical
and political margins.
Throughout his work, but particularly in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930/1961) and
The Ego and the Id (1923/1961) Freud proposed that the structure of the self is achieved
through the delimitation of an external environment, and thereby suggested that the form
for the environment that the self produces will recursively dictate the shape of the self.
The symbiotic shaping of environment and self that Freud observed might occur not only
in the psychological developmental process that goes to form an individual, but in the
cultural and historical process that went into shaping the individual, and any other form
that subjectivity has historically taken. In The land speaks’, Richard Helgerson writes,
‘One hears much of the Renaissance discovery of the self and much too of the Elizabethan
discovery of England … Not only does the emergence of the land parallel the emergence
of the individual authorial self, the one enforces and depends on the other’ (1986: 64).
Mapping comes onto the scene to both reflect and reinforce a new way of conceiving both
the subject and space.
What kind of space, what kind of subject, does mapping (per) form?2 Cartography
selectively emphasizes boundaries over sites. J.B.Harley argues that such a choice of
emphasis indicates the primacy in European mapping of ownership (n.d. 32). One could
transfer this insight into the realm of the subject by pointing out the emphasis upon
‘propriety’ and ‘own-ness’ in the ‘one-ness’ of the Enlightenment individual—as well as
this subject’s imbrication in the developing social form of capitalism. Another disposition
of post-medieval conceptions of space was standardization. Harley demonstrates the
tendency of early American cartographers ‘to obliterate the uniqueness of the American
landscape in favour of a stereotype’ reflecting a European sensibility of the natural world
(1988:68). This conception of space again parallels the form of space increasingly
underlying the concept of the ‘individual’. Standardized ‘Man’, like mapping
iconography, applied its own culturally specific standards as if they were indeed universal
to the end that actual otherness was erased. Subjects, like places, were homogenized in
favour of the generic, so that social policy based on humanism has proven insensitive to
the varying needs of ‘different’ subjects.
Changes in the aesthetic appearance of maps testified to the growing authority of
scientific discourse, which would terminate in an erasure from the map of all signs of the
immediately subjective. The ‘central bastions’ of European mapping from the seventeenth
century onward ‘were measurement and standardization’ (Harley 1989:4–5). In both
realms, idiosyncrasy and emotionality, physicality and specificity, are increasingly
marginalized. The cultural and subjective location of mapping are elided, much as are the
problematics of subjectivity for the Enlightenment individual. The Western subject during
the Enlightenment tended to define itself by cataloguing others (woman, native, criminal,
RE: MAPPING SUBJECTIVITY/ 47
insane) which it opposed because it did not require definition. Each tends to project
outward, to let the beam of attention play across the surrounding world, rather than
turning its cognition on itself.
The space that mapping propagates is an immutable space organized by invariable
boundaries, an a-temporal, objective, transparent space. Not coincidentally, the same
physical qualities characterize the kind of subjectivity that we would name, variously,
Cartesian monadism, Enlightenment individualism or autonomous egoism. But the
relationship is not only metaphoric—one of comparability; it is also metonymic—one of
contiguity. The similarity of mapped space and the mapping subject stems from the way
the boundary between them is patterned as a constant barricade enforcing the difference
between the two sites, preventing admixture and the diffusion of either entity.
Cartography institutes a particular kind of boundary between the subject and space, but is
also itself a site of interface, mediating the relationship between space and the subject and
constructing each in its own particularly ossified way.
I will turn now to analysing two examples of Renaissance narrative mapping to
demonstrate in more detail the consistency of cartographic space. Samuel de Champlain,
in a number of trips from 1609 to 1618, supported by a host of soldiers, builders and
labourers, explored the St Lawrence Gulf area of what is now known as New England.
Cabeza de Vaca followed a circuitous course through the southeast quadrant of North
America on an unplanned journey lasting from 1527 to 1537 (Vaca 1961). His party
intended to carry out a brief reconnaissance, but through a series of disasters lost their
ships, their commander, their arms, their clothing and their way.
These two narrators are bounded the same way geographically and historically. Behind
them, Europe; before them, the utterly unknown. Behind them, land stabilized by
representation; before them, an unformed and unsignifying universe. Both for the subjects
they are and the world they encounter, the explorers maintain an ideal of stable,
rationalized space while occupying a space that is chaotic and mobile. The externalization
and control of space the texts seek to propagate goes hand in hand with their attempt to
formulate a safely encapsulated subject; cartography seems the ideal method for
establishing both.
I select the following passage from The Voyages of Samuel de Champlain 1604–1618 nearly
at random. These descriptions of ‘Long Island’ appear in two succeeding paragraphs:
Being distant quarter of a league from the coast, we went to an island called Long
Island, lying north-north-east and south-south-west, which makes an opening into
the great Bay Francoise, so named by Sieur de Monts.
This island is six leagues long, and nearly a league broad in some places, in
others only a quarter of a league. It is covered with an abundance of wood, such as
pines and birch.
(Champlain 1907:30)
Of these sentences, only one dwells upon sensible, physical characteristics of the island
(its trees). There is almost no paragraph in the text that does not exhibit the same
qualities: a listing of features with little judgement (beyond whether the land is favourable
48 KATHLEEN M.KIRBY/
to commerce and sustenance); little affect; great amounts of instrumental (in both senses)
information. The cartographer removes himself from the actual landscape. Though
relation there must be for perception to occur, he describes it as much as possible as if he
were not there, as if no one is there, as if the island he details exists wholly outside any act
of human perception. At the inception of his narrative, Champlain is able to maintain the
ideal of an encapsulated, independent space for his subjectivity that will be the hallmark of
Cartesian monadism, where the relationship between subject and environment is
attenuated, the second term evacuated to a high degree to ensure the uncontaminated
primacy of the self.
Part of the function of mapping, it would seem, is to ensure that the relationship
between knower and known remains unidirectional. The mapper should be able to ‘master’
his environment, occupy a secure and superior position in relation to it, without it
affecting him in return. This stance of superiority crumbles when the explorers’
cartographic aptitude deteriorates. To actually be in the surroundings, incapable of
separating one’s self from them in a larger objective representation, is to be lost. Because
Champlain and de Vaca are foreigners, their ‘being lost’ signifies their real location in the
New World. There they could not assume the position of mastery they possessed in their
homelands, where their travels carried them (one would suppose) to destinations known
in advance across already-ordered spaces.
The environment that the explorers experienced may have had little to do with the
fixed space we are accustomed to occupying now. This passage, from his ‘Voyage of
1611’, may better communicate what the experience of America was like in the
beginning. The land he faced itself appeared to have some of the fluid characteristics of
this world of water, floating ice, obscuring fog and darkness:
The most self-possessed would have lost all judgement in such a juncture; even the
greatest navigator in the world. What alarmed us still more [than the ice] was the
short distance we could see, and the fact that the night was coming on, and that we
could not make a shift of a quarter of a league without finding a bank or some ice…
(Champlain 1907:199–200)
The land Champlain faces appears chaotic and unstable, moving in its own unpredictable
logic. Champlain’s vision and his consciousness are increasingly compressed; the land’s
attributes are magnified until where he is seems the whole world. Since he does not know
where he is, the environment, rather than being a stable field he moves across, appears to
be reorganizing around him. The landscape penetrates the subject—he can no longer
maintain his position of cool distance.
For Champlain, whose mission is overall successful, such rendings of the veil of mastery
are rare. In spite of his long cohabitation with the Indians, de Vaca remains ‘lost’
throughout his journey. He feels ‘lost’ even when the Indians he accompanies are
perfectly oriented, because his concept of orientation relies on separating himself from a
place, rather than becoming integrally involved with it. Being ‘lost’ not only describes the
subject in space; it describes the subject as space. The elevation of the subject over its
surrounding space collapses; the minute vacuum assuring their separation disintegrates,
RE: MAPPING SUBJECTIVITY/ 49
likewise decomposing the pure compartmentalization of the subject. ‘Being lost’ becomes
something like a crisis of differentiation, a dysfunction of the logic ensuring ordered
space.
De Vaca receives frequent invitations to ‘become’ an Indian’. But the explorers are
incapable, ideologically as well as practically, of doing so. Colonization was from the start
arranged hierarchically, not as a meeting between equals; the explorers wish to influence
and possess the world they meet, but take great pains to be sure that it will not
substantially inform them in return. They evacuate the others they meet, keeping their
own subject position in the form of the already formulated, complete monad. They want
to get away from America and its inhabitants, keep it ‘outside’ themselves, and not change
dramatically as a result of their relationship with it.
The European explorers attempted to maintain the environment on the ‘outside’ in
order to preserve their mastery of it. As de Vaca’s testimonies relate, the Europeans also
needed to maintain the Native Americans as external in order to reinforce their own
subjectivity. By attributing inferiority to the Native American peoples and their spatial
practices, these texts functioned to concretize individualism and ensure the Native
Americans’ exclusion from it. Mapping acted to distinguish ‘self from ‘other’: in early
America, cartography was the measure between human and non-human, civilized and
savage. Frederick Turner writes, ‘Indeed, the primitives’ harmonious and precise
knowledge of their habitats came in the process of the “Europeanization” of the globe to
be the very mark of the primitive itself’ (1980:11). The solid lines that cartography draws
between the subject and the land also reinforce the lines drawn between European white
subjects and Others. Mapping becomes a technology advancing, and the very hallmark of,
a larger cultural order premised on cleanly distinguishing between entities in the natural
environment, the psychic environment and, finally, the social environment.
In the last few decades, the Enlightenment subject mapping helped fortify has come
under fire—not only in post-structural criticism, but also, Fredric Jameson argues, in its
everyday attempt to negotiate external (cultural and physical) space.
Jameson’s essay ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ (1984)
describes postmodernism as a scene in which the matrix of space has abolished categories
of time, but space itself has exceeded its traditional organization. He sees postmodernism
as an expanding chaos of stimuli unordered by a selective grid of meaning, between whose
elements there are no hierarchies, and within which distance and difference are
increasingly collapsed. Jameson pairs the new unmanageability of built space with the
slipping away of an ordered, obvious direction for intellectual and political practice.
(Here he is not so far from the explorers, as in either situation, the whole purpose of
representing space is to determine a way to act.)
His description of late capitalist space reaches its intentionally dizzying culmination in a
description of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles:
I am more at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing itself, the experience of
space you undergo… I am tempted to say that such space makes it impossible for
us to use the language of volume or volumes any longer… You are in this
hyperspace up to your eyes and body… It has been obvious, since the very opening
50 KATHLEEN M.KIRBY/
of the hotel in 1977, that nobody could ever find any of these stores… So I come
finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space —postmodern
hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual
human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually,
and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.
(Jameson 1984:82–3)
This passage seems oddly familiar, following upon Champlain and de Vaca. Jameson’s
essay reproduces on a higher level the anxieties and assumptions concerning space, place
and orientation that mark the early explorers’ texts. Its thrust is hardly conservative, as
Jameson carves out for himself an authorial position both strongly Marxist and
productively engaged with postmodern culture. Yet not unlike Champlain, Jameson tends
to see the postmodern landscape as a problem, one that needs clearing up. His usual forms
of orientation are disabled; he finds no clearly marked or familiar reference points in the
way he is accustomed to thinking of them. This space, like that of the explorers, erases the
meaningful discriminations of ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘before’ and ‘after’, that allow the
plotting of a trajectory. Given the way he has framed the ‘problem’ of the postmodern
landscape, Jameson’s solution —‘the need for maps’—arrives as a great relief. It is his
contention that postmodern space is a ‘problem’ that I will be investigating: for whom?
and why?3
The power of Jameson’s assertions comes from his supposition that anyone who
entered this space would experience it the same way. But, like the Renaissance explorers,
he is issuing onto an unfamiliar landscape and seeking to treat it as a familiar one. The
implied ‘I’ here or the frequently used ‘we’ is not the native entering a transformed
world, as he would have us believe, but a foreigner exploring new and unfamiliar terrain.
Surely if he visited this site frequently, as a shop girl or maintenance man, or occupied it
permanently— if the homeless were allowed entry here—he would gain a working
knowledge of it. Like the colonialists, his very ability to encounter this foreign space
results from the economic and cultural privilege allowing him to travel around to
unfamiliar landscapes—for them, as agents of capital; for him, as its heir. He is a tourist.
Moreover, he has alienated himself from this environment in some ways by being an
academic Marxist, who wishes to stand outside the edifices of a capitalist world structure,
in opposition to it. His method of cultural orientation, classical Marxism, requires that
he, like the earlier mappers (both are located by the predicates of science), needs to be at
an objective distance from the phenomena he seeks to analyse. The disorientation he
attributes to a change in the environment might be charged instead to his navigational
method: note that he defines the world as an ‘external mappable’ world. What we see when
we read Jameson’s essay is the deterioration of the space established by the explorers and
the crisis of the subject associated with it, the monadic ‘space-capsule’.
It could be observed that Jameson identifies in the postmodern landscape a derealization
of space, its plasticity, its tendency to become an infinite semiosis with no resting point. His
essay strains to reinstate boundaries that are rapidly becoming far too ephemeral; one of
the most representative features of postmodernism, as Jameson describes it, is its erasure
of lines that had previously kept separate phenomena and objects apart. Boundaries of all
RE: MAPPING SUBJECTIVITY/ 51
kinds are on the one hand highly emphasized and deemed necessary, but on the other,
problematized and metaphorized. In Jameson’s postmodernism, all coalesces: the inside
becomes indistinguishable from the outside, flatness surpasses depth, the surface melts and
takes on a luminous presence separate from the object itself. From the great, concentric
loops of the ‘sealed membrane’ of Edvard Munch’s homunculus in The Scream (1984:62–
3), to the vacuity of present-day film personalities (1984:68), to the glossy polyester skin
of Duane Hanson’s ‘dead and flesh-colored simulacra’ displacing reality with ‘stereoscopic
illusion’ (‘But is this now a terrifying or exhilarating experience?’ (1984:76–7)), to the
glass skin of the hotel, like a cop’s mirrored sunglasses in its inhuman aggressivity (1984:
82), surfaces and borders are put into a derealizing play reminiscent less of the frontier-
bursting transgression of laughter than the out-of-control feeling of a carnival ride. The
individual who seeks to negotiate this landscape suffers defeat, anxiety and confusion.
The postmodern subject, like the postmodern landscape it occupies in a relation of
mutual reinforcement, has lost its traditional form of closed interiority encapsulated in a
boundary. Jameson suggests that ‘schizophrenia’ aptly describes the state of postmodern
subjects in general. While nominally a dysfunction of time, schizophrenia equally presents
a dysfunction of space: a failure to adhere to an external reality, to arbitrate the distinction
between inside and outside, and to hold the surrounding world together in a meaningful
totality. The perception of such a subject would be an unmediated barrage of disordered
stimuli whose immediate presence assaults the surfaces of the exposed subject. Moreover,
this fragmented subject, barely or only occasionally differentiated from its surrounding
world, appears incapable of formulating intentional or oppositional activity. Jameson asks,
‘does it [postmodern space] not tend to demobilize us and to surrender us to passivity and
helplessness, by systematically obliterating possibilities of action under the impenetrable
fog of historical inevitability?’ (1984:86). The immobilization depicted in the preceding
question is uncannily similar to the disorientation described by Champlain, yet more
important than their superficial similarity is a serious question. How can political activity
be imagined, without our simply denying the changes in the cultural complex we
currently face?
Jameson’s essay distributes the space of the subject in two opposing categories: on one
side lies the securely bounded ego of the Enlightenment, a construct allowing instrumental
operations but preventing substantial change and seemingly setting subjects into
immutable hierarchies; on the other, a fleeting, fractured, postmodern subject no more
able to formulate intentions and maintain interests than to maintain one proper unified
shape. Such a rigid differentiation of spatial formats represses possibilities for discussing
ways spaces, shapes and forms for identity might be substantially altered without being
entirely evaporated; for exploring the ways that boundaries might be both maintained and
altered to allow political redefinition of the environment.
Like the early explorers, Jameson’s ideal of monadic subjectivity is not sustained by his
narrative. As with Champlain and de Vaca, the hermetic individual of investigation is
shadowed by a less self-assured narrative twin: this subject ‘en proces’, and how it came to
be, is actually the subject matter of Jameson’s enquiry. And an interesting subject it is.
What I have always found most intriguing (even exciting) about Jameson’s account of
postmodern hyperspace is the way Jameson describes space as a medium penetrating him,
52 KATHLEEN M.KIRBY/
one that has overcome the very limits of his psychic and physical portals, one that
encroaches upon him right up to ‘his eyes and body’. The essay ‘Cognitive mapping’, an
early draft of the argument here, betrays similar concerns over the interpenetration of
space and body and the connection of body and psyche. There Jameson worries that the
‘postmodern body’ ‘is now exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all
sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed’ (1988: 351). This
account appeals to me partly because of its obvious eroticism, and partly because it
describes so well the experience I undergo traversing all kinds of public spaces—not only
postmodern ones, and not only when I am lost. Jameson’s comments strike a chord in
me: I recognize this state; I enjoy its representation at the same time that I feel
ambivalence about the state itself. The crisis of boundaries I undergo in public spaces is,
on the one hand, detestable (and for me probably more than Jameson, a sign of the
physical, as well as ontological, dangers I face). On the other hand, I experience it as a
continually promising phenomenon. It is a sign of a real and vital contact with an outside
and an ‘other’, and an opportunity for a substantial interaction and personal
transformation. The apparent surprise that this experience imposes on Jameson, as
opposed to its familiarity to me, leads me to posit a gender differential in spatial
negotiation. One feature of his spatial anxiety may be the way this space makes his body
become conscious to him, an occurrence that is unusual, as he is accustomed—far more
than the early explorers, no doubt —to forget the body, to use orienting principles that
allow him to erase his physicality. This ‘forgetfulness’ is, for women in the West, much less
available (and a real relief when it does occur). To become conscious of embodiment
could only be a positive step for masculinity, as much as such consciousness is also a
perpetually wearing aspect of femininity.
A colleague of mine commented concerning this essay that a woman would never be
lost as Jameson is: she, because of the ever-present threat of physical attack, is always
quite conscious of the position of exits, darkened stairwells and blind corners. Her
testimony does not indicate that she is any better ‘located’, in the teleological sense
Jameson intends, than he, but it does suggest that ‘orientation’ is not a generalizable
project. Space can be negotiated on a number of different levels, and for different
reasons. Jameson will often refer to his new programme as ‘cognitive mapping’,
apparently assuming that cognitive maps will reintroduce a common ground of perception
and understanding. But will a standardization in theorizing spaces exclude, once again, the
concerns of subjects who don’t fit the model of ‘universal’ subjectivity? As subjective as
the essay on postmodernism may appear, Jameson prefers scientific mapping over older
forms of orientation, like the sailor’s itinerary, which remain too subjective and
ungeneralizable by being tied to specific places and routes and individual intentions (1984:
90).
This text’s blind corners derive not from a failure to include all subjects, but rather
from the very exclusive/inclusive form it attributes the subject—a form not suitable to
describe the dynamics of some non-dominant subjectivities. Mary Ellen Mazey and David
Lee, in their comprehensive book Her Space, Her Place: A Geography of Women (1983), both
define cognitive mapping and demonstrate the disparities that can exist between cognitive
maps. From Yi-Fu Tuan (1974:62), Mazey and Lee take the example of a married couple
RE: MAPPING SUBJECTIVITY/ 53
strolling on a shopping expedition. Though both are (objectively) occupying the same
space, the two may not see or hear the same things; their worlds converge only
occasionally when the one asks the other to ‘admire some golf clubs in the shop window’
(Mazey and Lee 1983:37). The man and the woman may be forming the space around
them in such wholly opposed ways, Mazey and Lee contend, that it would be fair to say
they are in different spaces.
Let me imagine for a moment the way this landscape might appear to the characters in
their traditional couple: for the man, I imagine that the most prominent feature of the
landscape would be pathways, along which he projects himself, making his world a space
that returns to him a self-image of movement, command, self-assurance and self-
satisfaction. For the woman —and, as a woman—I imagine a world structured not by
pathways but by obstacles: the people in it may be threats as much as impediments; rather
than seeing how to get from ‘point A’ to ‘point B’ I often see what is keeping me from
getting there.
My hypothetical ‘male’ perspective may apply only to those men who are accustomed
to dominating their landscapes—white, youngish, physically able professional-class men;
certainly teenage men could not be accused of being ignorant of the attitudes others
(especially peers) project towards them, and men in poor urban areas of America cannot
afford to be. But I would also argue that men of almost any class or race have the luxury to
be far more selective in their environmental attention than women of the same
demographic group. Not only because they are at lesser (perceived) risk of physical
attack, but also because of the customary difference of men’s and women’s labour—even
when both are professionals.
Men’s work tends to be localized, attached to particular places and time periods. That
is, when men are ‘off work’, they are not working. Women —even those who do not
have children—are often responsible for the maintenance of the household’s physical
environment. They are rarely ‘off work’ when at home. Men can separate themselves
from their environments, live in a space that somebody else creates and maintains, ‘tune
out’, see in the space only what it pleases them to look at.4 Women, the working class,
and people of the Third World create the environment for Western men, so they are able
to expel it from their consciousness. A woman’s consciousness is more immersed in her
surroundings, which she—more than a man—is likely to be monitoring for danger or for
dust.5
There may prove to be, then, different forms of relating to space than that implied by
mapping, ones that continue to be practised today by those people who literally cannot
afford to separate themselves from the ground: the indigenous, the indigent; until
recently, women; and especially, I think, children.6 Mapping—theoretical or scientific—
excludes these subjectively variable perspectives on epistemology, but more importantly,
it ignores the variability of subjective structure. Formulating ‘subject’ as individual with
pre-set boundaries, it fails to recognize the very conventionality of the individual
boundary that it imposes.
The ‘crisis’ in subjectivity that Jameson depicts may be largely a crisis only for those
subjects who previously were able to establish dominance over their surroundings. The
journals of the Renaissance explorers show the hermetic form of individualism to be a
54 KATHLEEN M.KIRBY/
historically contingent fiction. Jameson’s work suggests, further, that that subject’s time
has passed.
While Jameson acknowledges the reactionary status of the modern subject’s stiff
differentiation, he does not want the dissipation of subjective boundaries to progress too
far. Other post-structuralist critics contend otherwise: the new plasticity of limits in the
postmodern era might be precisely the opening that political criticism needs to achieve a
radical reformation of subjects. Jameson protests postmodernism’s tendency to turn
‘everything in our social life…to the very structure of the psyche itself…“cultural” in some
original and as yet untheorized sense’ (1984:87). He does not take this observation to its
logical conclusion—that the boundary always was arbitrary and ‘cultural’. Hence he
disposes the very possibility that has caused post-structuralism to focus on the boundary—
that the world can be re-envisioned and revised via human negotiation.
Investigative frameworks like classical Marxism that focus on time position their
objects (or subjects) of study as closed entities that maintain continuity as they pass
through time; space raises some very difficult questions about the constitution of the
object (or subject) itself: where does it begin and end? Where are its boundaries? What
differentiates it from other aspects of reality? Taking up space can, therefore, be a truly
destabilizing method, as a spatial perspective cannot assume the existence of objects prior
to its analysis.
Theoretical mapping, like real Renaissance mapping, shapes subject and environment in
a particular way that would exclude some of the very promise of the postmodern—its
tendency towards flux and revision; its porousness of division; the fluidity of its
boundaries. The inclusive transformations we imagine might require eradicating,
radically, the ordering lines of our culture, and our selves.
NOTES
1 Lacan objects to its pretence of self-knowledge and self-transparency (particularly in ‘Of the
subject of certainty’, 1977). Jessica Benjamin (1988) critiques its presumption of
independence, the way it represses its inevitable relatedness to others, banishing them to
preserve its omnipotence. Feminist critics of science such as Evelyn Fox Keller (1985) and
Sandra Harding (1986) have pointed out its participation in a structure of knowledge
inseparable from domination, arguing that the empirical subject relates to the world only by
objectifying it. Post-colonial critics point out how the imperial subject held the foreign lands
and the people in them apart, separate from the ‘self’, and basically unlike it, or, alternately,
incorporated the people and territories they encountered into their own self-image,
obliterating their difference. For examples of these perspectives, see JanMohamed (1986)
and Spivak (1991).
2 Cultural geography seeks to demonstrate that the organization of space, like any other aspect
of the real, is conventional, to some degree arbitrary and indisputably culturally specific. I
thank the late J.B.Harley for patiently directing me through this important field of study,
still little known in many English departments, and for the trenchant analyses his essays
provide.
3 For further discussion of these issues see Jameson (1988,1991).
RE: MAPPING SUBJECTIVITY/ 55
4 One of the finest analyses of gender-differentiated modes of spatial existence comes, not
surprisingly, from outside the academic community, as well as from a feminist: from
columnist Jacqueline Mitchard’s series ‘The rest of us’. Her article ‘Men still fail to pick up
on all the pieces’ (Milwaukee Journal 30 July 1989:G1) provoked much of the thought in the
preceding paragraphs.
5 Mazey and Lee provide two fascinating pieces of data that may have a correlation to this
divergence in subjective stance. They point out that the enormously profitable genre of
romance fiction—supported mainly by women—is practically defined by its depiction of
exotic locales (1983:44). This suggests to me two things: first, that women want to travel,
but are compelled to do it vicariously from the safety of their homes (on this supposed
safety, however, Mazey and Lee relay the data of a 1978 study showing that 32 per cent of
rapes occur in the victim’s home (1983:44)). This dependence on fictions suggests that women
have a much harder time escaping mentally, requiring outside support. In relation to the
difficulty women have in escaping, Mazey and Lee refer to another study showing that ‘women,
more than men, rate highest those vacations which would make them carefree, adventurous,
daring… Though both women and men rate stay-at-home vacations low, men were more
enthusiastic about them than women’ (1983:45). This divergence suggests, again, that men
more than women are able to divorce themselves from the environment of the home. This
data comes from Rubinstein (1980).
6 My research comes on the heels of a furore over the failure of public education to
successfully train youths in national and global geography. Children develop naturally a
precise and complex knowledge of their ‘home’ territories, however narrow that ‘home’
may be. Given that so few children will have an opportunity to intervene (for better or
worse) in world politics, is teaching them geography not simply a way of adapting them to
the multinational military-industrial complex, without giving them the tools to change it?
56
4
AS IF THE MIRRORS HAD BLED
Masculine dwelling, masculinist theory and feminist masquerade
Gillian Rose
The transition to a new age in turn necessitates a new perception and a new
conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers, or envelopes
of identity.
(Irigaray 1993a:7)
How, then, are we to try to redefine this language work that would leave
space for the feminine? Let us say that every dichotomizing—and at the same
time redoubling—break, including the one between enunciation and
utterance, has to be disrupted. Nothing is ever to be posited that is not also
reversed and caught up again in the supplementarity of this reversal.
(Irigaray 1985a:79–80)
[This paper was originally written as a script for a particular kind of performance: a seminar
presentation. Performing it produced myself as a speaker and, now, in its essay version, as an
author. But, as Butler (1990, 1993) suggests, gender is also produced through performances,
and I have argued elsewhere that many performances of academic geography, in their
conventionalized ways of talking, writing, behaving, depend on and then reproduce certain
masculinities (Rose 1993). However, Butler suggests too that some kinds of performance can
destabilize gender. So this paper tries to destabilize the implicitly masculine subjectivity
which constructs so many geographical performances by itself performing, performing
obviously, performing to excess, performing in different voices. By shifting voices I want to
emphasize the constructedness of geographical discourse, of geographical knowledge. The
performance is in these shifts between different voices and not in any one of them. I am not
trying to advocate an alternative, ‘feminine’ voice to counter masculinist geography; rather, I
am trying to suggest the different critical possibilities offered by a certain mobility between
different voices. And the particular object of my mobile critique here is some recent discussions
by geographers about real space. So, imagine a cold, analytical, academic voice and read
on…]
Many geographers have remarked on the prevalence of what they term ‘spatial
metaphors’ in contemporary social and cultural theory. They have noted that subjects are
often diagnosed as decentred; that theory travels, knowledges are local, identity is
58 MASCULINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST MASQUERADE/
deterritorialized; that nomads, vagabonds and exiles are proliferating; that epistemologies
of the margin, the borderland, the diaspora and the closet are being elaborated; that
cognitive maps of this postmodern moment are being demanded. Geographers have
recognized that such spatial metaphors are widely used in current social and cultural
theorizing as a means of articulating the intersection of subjectivity, power and the
production of knowledge.1 The politics of knowledge is understood in terms of the politics
of representation, and the politics of representation is interpreted in terms of a geopolitics
of location. The production of knowledge, then, is thus always claimed as situated (Haraway
1991). The resultant turn to spatial metaphors in work addressing power/knowledge/
identity has led Soja (1987: 289) to suggest that ‘space and geography may be displacing
the primacy of time and history as the distinctively significant interpretive dimensions of
the contemporary period’.
However, many geographers have also been highly critical of the deployment of these
metaphors, and most have based their critique on a distinction between the space they
argue is assumed in these metaphors and another kind of space they consider to be more
truly geographical. In the most detailed critique so far, for example, Smith and Katz
(1993) focus on what they describe as the difference between ‘metaphorical’ space and
‘material’ space. They begin their discussion by noting that metaphor works by comparing
one, unfamiliar meaning system—the ‘target domain’—with another, familiar meaning
system—the ‘source domain’—in order to ‘reinscribe the unfamiliar event, experience
or social relation as utterly known’ (1993:69). They then offer a brief reading of
Althusser and Foucault, chosen for their formative influence on contemporary social and
cultural theorizing, and argue that the source domain of the metaphorical spaces in the work
of Althusser and Foucault is what Lefebvre described as absolute space: it is transparent,
stable and fixed. And Smith and Katz suggest that ‘it is precisely this apparent familiarity of
space, the givenness of space, its fixity and inertness, that makes a spatial grammar so
fertile for metaphoric appropriation’ (1993:68). They then go on to argue that metaphors
which refer to absolute space function to freeze what are in fact dynamic social processes;
thus they accuse Foucault’s ‘pervasive substitution of spatial metaphor for social structure,
institution and situation’ of continuing ‘to elide the agency through which social space and
social relations are produced’ (1993:73). In contrast, Smith and Katz describe material
space, which they also term ‘geographical space’ and ‘social space’ (1993:73, 80), in terms
of its ‘multiple qualities, types, properties and attributes…and its relationality’ (1993:
80). And they conclude that if spatial metaphors are to be part of a radical critical project,
it is this material or geographical or social space which must be their source domain,
because its dynamism renders socio-spatial structures amenable to change; in contrast,
spatial metaphors which refer to absolute space are regressive because absolute space
serves to freeze and thus to sanction the socio-spatial or theoretical status quo.
Smith and Katz’s insistence on the need to interrogate critically the specific qualities of
the space to which social and cultural theorists refer is without doubt correct, and many
radical geographers have made similar arguments (Bondi 1993; Keith and Pile 1993;
Massey 1993; Pratt 1992; Reichert 1992). However, Smith and Katz legitimate their
argument by claiming that the material, geographical, social space they advocate is real.
Material, geographical, social space is actually real space. And they are not alone in
GILLIAN ROSE/ 59
making this claim: their essay is but the most full elaboration to date of a distinction which
many geographers are currently making between what they argue is a real space and what
in contradistinction they define as some kind of non-real space. For Harvey (1989), the
distinction is between ‘real’ and ‘metaphorical’ space or between reality and image;
Hanson (1992:573) differentiates between what she terms ‘geographic space’ and ‘cultural
space’; Daniels and Cosgrove (1993:57) separate metaphorical from actual space; Bondi
(1992) distinguishes between ‘real geographies’ and ‘symbolic’ ones; Agnew (1993: 261)
differentiates representations and metaphors of space from concrete particulars; and
Lagopoulos (1993:264, 265) makes distinctions between cognitive and geographical space
and also between signified space and real space. Implicit in these distinctions (and often
explicit also) is a hierarchization: real space is understood as a more accurate description of
causal processes, and is therefore more important for geographers to study. For all of
these geographers, then, there is a real space to which it is appropriate for metaphors to
refer, and a non-real space which it is not.
In what follows, this distinction between real and non-real space is characterized as a
performance of power, and of masculinist power in particular. It will be shown that the
distinction between real and non-real space is constructed in terms which are also
gendered, and that this hierarchical engendering of spaces is naturalized by the claim that
only one of those spaces is real. The distinction between real and non-real space thus
requires a feminist deconstruction.
This deconstruction is not difficult to develop, however. The distinction between real
and non-real space does not hold even among its advocates, since the distinction is not
signified consistently in their discussions. The distinction produces instabilities which
undermine the distinction itself. To understand this failure, Butler’s (1990, 1993)
discussion of performances of hegemonic power are useful. For Butler, discursive power
performs its productive effect through its reiteration of naturalizing norms; it enacts what
it names. The reiteration of the real by geographers can be seen in the multiplication of
terms used to describe that space: real, material, experienced, concrete, social, actual,
geographical. The non-real proliferates too among geographers: imagined, symbolic,
metaphorical, imaged, cultural. These are the reiterations which for Butler constitute the
performance of normative power. However, Butler goes on to argue that norms must be
performed repeatedly because their constituting citation of the subject and non-subject is
never guaranteed. Reiterations thus also constitute the failure of discursive power; their
very repetition assumes a failure in their effect, and it also produces gaps and fissures in
discourse which can be resources for critique. In the context of normative geographical
performances, the latter possibility is particularly pertinent because the repeated terms
used to define real space are not equivalent. The ‘real’, ‘experienced’, ‘concrete’,
‘social’, ‘actual’, ‘geographical’ are not the same things, and nor is any one consistently
aligned with a non-real opposite. The excess of these terms—that is, their non-
equivalence and multiplication —suggests that the distinction between real and non-real
space is not a self-evident one. Indeed, it suggests that the distinction cannot be
maintained with either clarity or firmness in these accounts.
If the distinction between the real and non-real is unstable, then, so too are the
definitions of each. This is particularly evident in relation to the tropes of fixity and
60 MASCULINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST MASQUERADE/
dynamism which are central to the constitution of the ‘real’ and the ‘non-real’. I have
already noted that for many geographers, what signifies real space is its dynamism, its
processual creation, its construction. In contrast, what signifies non-real space is its fixity,
immobility, stasis. However, assertions of the reality of real space consistently also invoke
images of fixity. Thus Harvey (1989:187) describes real space in terms of ‘its invariant
elements and relations’, Smith (1984:xiv) wants to analyse its ‘concrete process and
pattern’, and Soja and Hooper (1993:195) also describe real space as ‘concrete’.2 Real
space then becomes the Very solid basis’ from which Harvey (1989:112), for example,
can interpret the world. And if the real is solid, concrete and invariant, then the non-real,
all that the real is not, must be signified not in terms of fixity but in terms of fluidity.
Thus Smith (1984:xiv) refers to Nature as ‘sodden with metaphor’, Smith and Katz (1993:
69) describe non-real space as ‘fertile’, and in Harvey’s (1989) hysterical account, non-
real spaces become a maelstrom in which all that is solid apparently melts: his imaged
spaces are ephemeral, superficial, specular, eclectic, fragmented, chaotic, depthless,
schizoid, fascistic, fetishistic, a fluid towards which one is seduced by veiled, titillating
gyrations and in which one then wallows or, even worse, is swamped. In this account, the
non-real signifies not fixity but total dissolution.
Here it is impossible not to remark on the rhetorical encoding of two different kinds of
space as two different kinds of sexes. As with so many binary accounts of difference, the
difference between these real and non-real spaces is constructed through the terms of
sexual difference. The real is simultaneously concrete and dynamic, yet both these
qualities signify the masculine; the non-real is simultaneously fluid and imprisoning, but
always engendered as feminine. Material real space could thus be re-described as the
effect of masculinist power, its very materiality also its particular masculinity; but non-real
space is also the effect of masculinist power, its lack of reality the sign of its feminization.
The instabilities between and within these efforts to define real and non-real space are
symptomatic of, indeed are constitutive of, a compulsive fixing of sexual difference. They
are so chronic as to displace the distinction itself to reveal what Derrida (1979:293) would
describe as ‘the common ground’, or the différance, on which the distinction depends.
What the instabilities of this distinction suggest is that the distinction is a dualism which
reiterates the constitutive relation between the masculine same and the feminine other.
Through trying to fix difference, they fix the same. It is difficult not to agree, then, with
Butler (1993:2), when she argues that materiality (by which she means that which is
naturalized as real) should be ‘rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most
productive effect’. The reiteration of the distinction between real and non-real space
serves to naturalize certain, masculinist visions of real space and real geography, and to
maintain other modes of critique as, to quote Christopherson (1989), ‘outside the
project’. It is an act of exclusion.
This reading of the repetitions and reversals in the terms which are intended by some
geographers to secure the distinction between real and non-real space suggests that the
distinction, and therefore also its exclusions, cannot be made to hold. The work
undertaken to stabilize the distinction also works to collapse it. Indeed, its collapse
suggests that there are not two objects at stake in this discussion—real space and non-real
space—at all, but just one—space—which is split into two. Space is split into two and
GILLIAN ROSE/ 61
becomes, in the words of Bhabha (1990:76), ‘at once an “other” and yet entirely knowable
and visible’. And for Morris as for Bhabha, this splitting indicates an ambivalence towards
its object: Morris (1992:262) describes ambivalence as ‘a way of struggling with the
problem posed by an impossible object—at once benevolent and hostile—by splitting it in
two’. The conclusion must then be that for those geographers concerned to maintain the
distinction between real and non-real space, space itself is their impossible object.
[A pause, and then another voice, enthusing, a young lecturer perhaps, eager to interest and
to be interesting…]
Well, it looks like if I want to say anything more about this I’ve got to begin again,
somewhere else, beyond geography! What I want to do in this chapter is to challenge the
distinction a lot of geographers are making right now between real and non-real space by
talking about, or talking with, the work of Luce Irigaray. And I want to begin by
explaining why I love Luce…(sadly that joke isn’t my own—it’s from Chris Holmlund,
1989).
Now, Luce Irigaray is not a geographer—she’s trained in linguistics and psychoanalysis,
and she also talks about philosophy in detail. Even so, space is fundamental to the way she
thinks about subjectivity, language and power. Spatialized notions—like extension, gap,
interval, container, envelope, horizon, verticality, threshold, geometry, dwelling,
elsewhere—are all key terms in her arguments about phallocentric structures of meaning
and phallocratic social institutions. She uses these spatial terms carefully, although not
always consistently, throughout her work, and so I’d argue that she is a kind of theorist of
the spatial—although I think part of her project is to redefine what we might understand
by both ‘theorist’ and ‘spatial’.
So her use of spatial terms doesn’t mean that she’s some kind of geographer by another
name. Quite the opposite—and this is one reason why I like her work so much—her
discussion of space occupies an entirely different register from that of geography. And this
is most obvious to me in the way she writes. Sometimes her work reads like that of an
incisive, clinically dispassionate critic, deconstructing texts with a cold, relentless rigour.
More often though she is emotional, elliptical and allusive. Her critiques of Western
metaphysics sometimes sound like sad letters from a grieving lover, or maybe mother, and
at other times like a tirade from a well-informed biology mistress. It was this mobility of
voice got me thinking about the critical possibilities of performing this piece, of working
with the uncertainties of performance that Butler (1990, 1993) talks about, trying to
parody and masquerade in different voices.3
The richness and mobility of Irigaray’s writing voices have the effect of making the
monotone of most academic writing sound less like an analysis and more like a symptom.
And of course Irigaray argues that is precisely what dominant modes of academic writing
are, a symptom. In the flat monotony of the philosophical text, the psychoanalytic text
and the geographical text—and I just love those kind of generalizations she makes even
though I know I shouldn’t, they’re so ridiculously, wonderfully sweeping—she hears the
repetitive and compulsive iteration of phallocentrism. So she writes to disturb that
monotone, that monotone that’s also a monologue, and she does that in part by her
62 MASCULINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST MASQUERADE/
diverse writing strategies which are a kind of teasing, ‘hav[ing] a fling with the
philosophers’ (Irigaray 1985a:150).
She also disturbs that monotone by establishing conversations within her texts—she
often addresses a series of questions at quotations from other authors. And she also
establishes conversations with her texts. Irigaray invites a conversation between her
writing and myself or you as her reader—and a major part of Irigaray’s project is to
enable a dialogue between her and me as women, to enable a dialogue among women.
When she talks about reading, she says:
The only response one can make to the question of the meaning of the text is: read,
perceive, experience… Who are you? is probably the most relevant question to ask
of a text, as long as one isn’t requesting a kind of identity card or autobiographical
anecdote. The answer would be: how about you? Can we find common ground? talk?
love? create something together? What is there around us and between us that
allows this?
(Irigaray 1993b:178)
Irigaray insists that I remain distinct from her—she wants to make a ‘between’ between
us, an around, a space, in order to initiate a dialogue. She gives me an invitation to speech
through this assertion of a kind of connective space between us. And—being obsessed
with geography, feeling that it matters so much and that much of geography is not so
much doing it wrong as missing the point—what I want to talk with her about is precisely
this notion of a ‘between’ and ‘around’ her and me. That ‘between’ and ‘around’ is a
space I find enabling, to me it’s real, because it invites me to perform, to respond, to try
to produce a self in relation to her. But why does Irigaray spatialize the possibility of
dialogue?
This is a question about how space itself is bound into subjectivity and intersubjectivity,
and Irigaray has prompted a risky response from me. She says that ‘no narrative, no
commentary on a narrative, are enough to produce a change in discourse…unless they go
beyond the utterance into the creation of new forms’ (Irigaray 1993b:177). So here are
some of the questions about some geographers’ efforts to distinguish between real and
non-real space provoked by conversing with Irigaray.
[And here a third voice seems necessary, inflected by Irigaray’s intonations…]
…what if the insistence that there is a real space, that there is a real which is neither
imagined nor symbolic, a real which is quite untainted by the imaginary or the symbolic, is
not a statement of plain commonsense fact at all, but a hope, a desire? What if this real, this
claim that there is a real space, itself depends on desire, is itself an imagined fantasy? A desire
for something safe, something certain, something real? A fantasy too of something all-
enveloping, something everywhere, unavoidable, unfailingly supportive: space? In which all
things could be charted, positions plotted, dwellings built and inhabited? And was itself a
dwelling, secure? What if that space, that real space, was a dream, an old dream, a most
basic dream? Would this be space dreamt as territory? Would this be the plenitudinous space
which geography assumes, in which everything has its space and no space can be occupied by
GILLIAN ROSE/ 63
two objects simultaneously? Might this be the actual space of the real world which can be fully
analysed scale by scale, from a satellite maybe, or a hotel tower, each scale with its own real
structures, scale after scale nesting one within the other in infinite regress, the latest addition
the scale of the body, in a series which hopes to constitute a totality (Smith 1993)? Whose
desire, whose space would this be? Who would it constitute? Who would dwell within it, and
how?
[Well, that’s rather an embarrassing passage measured by the conventions of academic
geography, so perhaps I’d better return quickly to the certainties of a more academic assertive
voice…]
1 Irigaray assumes that space is a medium through which the imaginary relation
between self and other is performed.
2 Irigaray assumes that certain formulations of space enable the production of only
certain relationships between self and other.
3 Irigaray assumes that the master subject constitutes himself through the performance
of a particular space. For example, she suggests that ‘it is rather by distance and
separation that he will affirm his self-identity’ (Irigaray 198 5b:166) and that ‘if he
arrived at the limits of known spatiality he would lose his favourite game, the game of
mastering her’ (Irigaray 1993b:42)
4 Irigaray assumes that the critical task is therefore to subvert the space of the master
subject and to remedy the absence of ‘the missing categories of her space-time’
(quoted in Whitford 1991:159).
[Order restored, an academic voice returns, but becomes increasingly baffled…]
A key term in understanding Irigaray’s conceptualization of subjectivity and space is
‘imaginary’. As Grosz (1989) suggests, Irigaray’s use of the term ‘imaginary’ bears some
relation to its use in Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, the ‘imaginary’ refers to the
dyadic relation between self and other, or to what Ragland-Sullivan (1992:174) describes
as ‘the domain of transference relations’, of which the pre-Oedipal relation between
mother and child is paradigmatic. For Irigaray too, the imaginary is central to modes of
intersubjectivity. This imaginary relationship is later structured through the cultural
constructions of the symbolic. To the extent that she agrees with Lacan, then, Irigaray’s
notion of the imaginary might be represented as in Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1
However, there is other evidence in her work to suggest that, agreeing with
commentators like Brennan (1991) and Elliott (1992) who insist on a difference between
64 MASCULINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST MASQUERADE/
Figure 4.2
Figure 4.3
the social and the psychic, the relationship between the social and the imaginary for
Irigaray might better be shown as in Figure 4.2.
But then again, something like Figure 4.3 also represents her arguments.
And if it is not at all clear how Irigaray theorizes the imaginary in relation to its
Lacanian formulation, neither does she differentiate in her work between the quite
incompatible connotations carried by the concept of ‘the imaginary’ from its diverse
deployments by Lacan, Bachelard, Sartre (Whitford 1986) and by Le Doeuff (Morris
1988). Thus it is impossible to convert Irigaray into anything like the example in
Figure 4.4.
How beautifully reassuring, what a, literally, incredibly clean edifice, that diagram is.
Although perhaps not a very subtle one.
[And here, if I wanted to continue in this particular voice, I’d turn away with a certain
amount of relief from the confusions, sorry, the complexities of Irigaray’s work and, with a
certain amount of relish, turn towards the task of explicating exactly how Derek’s, sorry
GILLIAN ROSE/ 65
Figure 4.4 Marxism and post-Marxism (Gregory 1994:101)
Gregory’s work isn’t quite complex enough…but I’d rather return to being intrigued and
enthused by Irigaray…]
Irigaray absolutely refuses to define her conceptual apparatus, or to maintain the theoretical
stability of any of the terms she uses in her project, or to systematize the relations
between them. She refuses to make a clear distinction between the imaginary, the
symbolic, fantasy and the social, for example. Addressing psychoanalysts, she says:
Your fantasies lay down the law. The symbolic, which you impose as a universal
innocent of any empirical or historical contingency, is your imaginary transformed
into an order, into the social.
(Irigaray 1991:94)
Indeed, Irigaray is hostile to the very notion of ‘concept’ itself. And here I have to talk
with her terms…they all come rushing in…enunciation, imaginary, auto-affection,
property… I can’t assimilate her work; just as she insists on my voice in this dialogue, so
she insists on her own. So: she argues that the idea of ‘concept’ is part of ‘a system of
meaning which serves the auto-affection of the (masculine) subject’ (Irigaray 1985a:122–
3). She argues that the ‘concept’ is part of the male—well, the male imaginary. For her,
‘concept’ is an authoritative definition of meaning, closed and proper; it can be traded like
a commodity among men in the academic marketplace, she argues, constituting them in
the act of exchange as men of theory (Irigaray 1985a: 158), or placed at unitary points in
66 MASCULINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST MASQUERADE/
orderly conceptual diagrams. For her, the task is to ‘disengage ourselves, alive, from their
concepts’ (Irigaray 1985a: 212). Irigaray resists what she sees as the closure of the
conceptual by insisting on the dialogic nature of her texts—her diverse modes of engaging
with particular texts, her engagement with her reader—so her work is itself imaginary,
explicitly relational. And she argues that this means it cannot be transposed into another
context, cannot be appropriated as property into circuits of theoretical exchange or
expropriated into diagrams of proper conceptual relations (Irigaray 1993b:177–8).
I want to say more about Irigaray’s notion of the imaginary, but because of her hostility
to proper definitions it’s easier to talk about what Irigaray sees it is not than what it is.
Irigaray uses the term to disrupt a number of key conceptual distinctions which underpin
dominant, phallocentric modes of thinking.
For example, Irigaray uses the term ‘imaginary’ to refuse the distinction between
concept and practice. This is very obvious in her critique of psychoanalysis. Addressing
‘gentlemen, psychoanalysts’, she condemns their professional, institutional rejection of
anyone ‘who questions the history, culture or politics in which psychoanalysis is
inscribed’, and suggests that this rejection occurs in ‘the name of a father of
psychoanalysis to whose unconscious any unconscious should be made to conform’
(Irigaray 1991: 80, 81). This conformity is also a theoretical move; Irigaray argues that
psychoanalytic theory exemplifies phallocentric discourse in which only men can accede to
subjectivity because only masculine subjects are acknowledged by that discourse and can
thus be symbolically constituted through it; as she notes, for psychoanalysis; ‘a man minus
the possibility of (re)presenting oneself as a man=a normal woman’ (Irigaray 1985b:27).
This intersection of conceptual framework and institutional practice she argues is an effect
of the imaginary. The imaginary is at once symbolic and social.
Her use of the term ‘imaginary’ also displaces the distinction between the individual
and the broader social structures in which they are embedded. Thus psychoanalysis and
psychoanalysts are simultaneously the object of her critique. And she writes about women’s
health, for example, and queries:
[women] are often slightly unwell? Maybe. How could this be otherwise when
there’s no space for a woman’s self-affirmation as I [je], but when, on the contrary,
we must continuously support the assertions of others: in discourse, in images, in
actions, and particularly in the commercial use of the self.
(Irigaray 1993c:101)
This example also indicates the way in which her use of the imaginary displaces the
distinction between mind and body, between culture and nature. Bodies are inscribed
with the marks of phallocentrism, and phallocentrism itself is structured by
interpretations of the bodily. Irigaray (1985a, 1985b) suggests that the male imaginary has
a certain topography, of one-ness, verticality, solidity, and that this is bound into male
genital ‘morphology’. ‘Morphology’ is Irigaray’s term for the symbolic significance of
anatomy, a term which emphasizes the cultural encoding of the bodily. The imaginary is
thus a ‘corporeal imaginary’ (Whitford 1991:59).
GILLIAN ROSE/ 67
Most importantly for what I’m trying to argue here, Irigaray’s understanding of the
imaginary is also a way of refusing to render fantasy in opposition to ‘reality’. She turns
again and again, for example, to the significance of Greek myths in order to interpret
contemporary Western issues like the use of technology, or environmental pollution, or
mental health. Irigaray is also concerned to challenge the fantasies which underpin the
apparently objective theoretical frameworks of philosophy and psychoanalysis. These
fantasied modes of social and theoretical organization are also the imaginary.
The imaginary, then, could be described as a series of refusals by Irigaray, a series of
refusals of dichotomies. The imaginary refuses to distinguish between the social and the
symbolic, or the real and the imagined, or the real and the textual, or between the bodily
and the cultural, or between agency and structure. And it is this imaginary that I want to
think space through. I want to argue that the imaginary is itself spatialized and enacts
spatialities; it performs the relation between subjects through spatialized relations. It
enacts and produces particular subjectivities through particular spatialities. And in the case
of what Irigaray calls the male imaginary, the imaginary performs subjects and non-
subjects, space and non-space, same and other.
[I now want to stage an exchange of comments between Irigaray and myself, a dialogue, on the
subject of the geographical imaginary which desires a difference between real and non-real
space. I cite her often allusive comments on the spatialities of dominant, masculinist modes of
knowledge, and then see what interpretations of geographers’ efforts to maintain a distinction
between real and imagined space might follow…]
Irigaray argues that there is a topography to the performance of the male imaginary:
the scenography that makes representation feasible, representation as defined in
philosophy, that is, the architectonics of its theatre, its framing in space-time, its
geometric organization, its props, its actors, their respective positions, their
dialogues, indeed their tragic relations, without overlooking the mirror, most often
hidden, that allows the logos, the subject, to reduplicate itself, to reflect itself by
itself. All these are interventions on the scene; they ensure its coherence so long as
they remain uninterpreted.
(Irigaray 1985a:75)
Mirrors. Flat mirrors, endlessly reflecting the anxious subject back to himself as he
spectates, speculates. Reflecting the same back to himself. The mirror produces the
illusion of he who imagines he stands in front of it: the master(ful) subject. The distance
from the mirror, its invitation to his gaze, constitutes this subject. This subject is the
effect of speculation.
For relations among subjects have always had recourse, explicitly or more often
implicitly, to the flat mirror, that is, to what privileges the relation of man to his
fellow man… What effects of linear projection, of circular turning back onto the
68 MASCULINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST MASQUERADE/
self-(as the) same, what eruptions in signifying-points of identity has it entailed?
What ‘subject’ has ever found in it, finally, its due?
(Irigaray 1985a:154)
And the mirrors are frozen. Rigid like ice. Are mirrors ‘the net you draw round your
catch, the ice in which you store your property, the mirrors where you conserve and
freeze your desires?’ (Irigaray 1992:18). Solidified in their repetitive reflection of the
same, a solidity of morphological tumescence and of death. And mirrors can be walls.
They cluster together, overlap, build a ‘palace of mirrors’ (Irigaray 1985b:137), provide
‘solid walls of principle’ (Irigaray 1985a:106). They give form, they turn ideas into
structures, edifices, they produce ‘the absolute power of form’ (Irigaray 1985a:110), the
solidity of concepts, boundaries and order. All this is part of ‘a complicity of long standing
between rationality and a mechanics of solids alone’ (Irigaray 1985a:107).
From this encircling projective machinery, no reality escapes unscathed. Alive.
Every ‘body’ is transformed by it… What is disturbing is that of these fantasies he
makes laws, going so far as to confuse them with science—which no reality resists.
The whole is already circumscribed and determined in and by his discourse…
Nothing escapes the circularity of this law.
(Irigaray 1985a:88)
I respond to Irigaray… And the desire for the solid produces too among geographers a desire
for rules and regulations which might stabilize meaning. For if they are forced to acknowledge
metaphor since ‘any project to abolish metaphor is not only doomed to failure but is, literally,
absurd’, then they must also demand that ‘it is necessary to devise more explicit translation
rules…between material and metaphorical space’ (Smith and Katz 1993:68). Indeed, to
describe these spatial images as metaphors at all assumes an economy of substitutable solid
objects and reiterates ‘the privilege granted to metaphor (a quasi solid) over metonomy (which
is much more closely related to fluids)’ (Irigaray 1985a:110). Real space then contains a
certain fixity, concreteness, solidity.
Irigaray also says…and in this corporeal imaginary, the body itself is imagined through
mirrors. Mirrors build a body, a carapace, a hard body, enclosed. The mirrors envelop the
master subject. ‘Proprietor, your skin is hard. A body becomes a prison when it contracts
into a whole… When a line is drawn around it, its territory mapped out’ (Irigaray 1992:
17). And the line creates an inside and an outside.
But now everything has moved inside the house the subject has made, or is. And
whether the scene seems set inside, or outside, whether in his room or in his study,
sometimes enjoying a fire fancied to be burning in baroque curls of smoke or else
gazing out through the/his window at the still in (de)finite space of the universe,
the action is always inside his house, his mind.
(Irigaray 1985b:212–13)
GILLIAN ROSE/ 69
And in occupying ‘the site of sight’ in this way (Irigaray 1985b:95), the subject himself is
invisible to himself. Looking out from his palace of mirrors, from his study constituted as
an invisible place, the site of sight, the subject sees the world, his world.
And I can continue… Rules, rulers, ruled. Metaphorical space, in its proliferation, must be
brought to order; the fear of metaphors ‘out of control’ requires a demand for control (Smith
1993:98). The ‘actual spatial source of such metaphors as domain, field, region’ must be
stated (Smith and Katz 1993:73), regulations producing regulators, controlling controlled
producers of meaning. They might risk going through the looking-glass like Alice, but they
guarantee their return journey (Smith and Katz 1993:74), not wanting to linger on ‘the
other side’ (Irigaray 1985a:9–22). And that other?
Irigaray says… The very first dependence, the very first relationship, is with the mother,
‘this bodiliness shared with the mother, which as yet has no movement of its own, has yet
to divide up time or space, has in point of fact no way of measuring the container or the
surrounding world or the content or the relations among all these’ (Irigaray 1985b:161).
The first relationship is before time or space. But, ‘the everything that he once received in
his mother’s womb: life, home…food, air, warmth, movement, etc. This everything is
displaced…because there is no way to place it in its space, its time, and the exile from
both’ (Irigaray 1993b:16). The exile from the mother occurs at birth; and when the
mother is absent; through the castration complex; through the symbolic murder of the
mother. It has profound consequences. The exile produces a feminine other:
A woman serves (only) as the projective map for the purposes of guaranteeing the
totality of the system—the excess factor of its ‘greater than all’; she serves as a
geometric prop for evaluating the ‘all’ of the extension of each of its ‘concepts’,
including those that are still undetermined, serves as fixed and congealed intervals
between their definitions in ‘language,’ and as the possibility of establishing individual
relationships among these concepts.
(Irigaray 1985a:108)
She is the ‘silent plasticity’ which can ensure ‘the serene contemplation of empire’
(Irigaray 1985b:142, 136). She is the other of his language-blanks, excess, matter, a matrix
—necessary to his meaning but silenced within it.
If there is no more ‘earth’ to press down/repress, to work, to represent, but also
and always to desire (for one’s own), no opaque matter in which theory does not
know herself, then what pedestal remains for the existence of the ‘subject’?
(Irigaray 1985b:133)
This is the matter, the nature, the raw material of speculation, on which theories and
concepts depend. This is space, ‘this sea where he is…an extended corporeal thing. Probably
immense…an extension at the “I”’s disposal for analytical investigations, scientific
projections, the regulated exercise of the imaginary, the utilitarian practice of technique’
70 MASCULINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST MASQUERADE/
(Irigaray 1985b:185–6). This is woman as place, ‘never here and now because she is that
everywhere elsewhere from whence the “subject” continues to draw his reserves, his re-
sources, yet unable to recognize them/her’ (Irigaray 1991:53). The loss of security, loss
of self, disintegration threatened by the exile from the mother is symbolized through the
figuration of the (m)other as the symbol of the death which this loss invokes. She, matter,
becomes the location of his fear of death and dissolution. The mother functions as a place
for the sublimation of death (Irigaray 1985b:54–5). Her deadliness is her otherness; ‘in
this proliferating desire of the same, death will be the only representative of an outside, of
a heterogeneity, of an other: woman will assume the function of presenting death (of sex/
organ), castration’ (Irigaray 1985b:27). The death drive is displaced onto the figure of
mother as place, matter, matrix. This is the uncanny place, the feminine place to which
heroes are drawn but from which they must also escape.
So I can comment…that (space) which is non-real is condemned by geographers as dead,
deathly, frozen, icy, calcified, as feminine; and it is condemned, expelled into the realm of
the non-real. But whose death does it threaten, whose death is entailed, since this non-real
space is expelled because it resists analysis: spatial metaphors ‘work precisely by reinforcing
the deadness of space and therefore denying us the spatial concepts appropriate to analysing
the world’ (Smith 1990:169). It is the inability to analyse which produces death, it produces
only the casualties of the battlefield (Smith and Katz 1993:75, 77), it would be ‘fatal’ to
get the analysis wrong (Merrifield 1993:526). The non-real threatens the end of analysis,
the end of the analyst. So deadly it must be non-real.
Irigaray once more… Belief in solids, in solid objects, in the material as simply there, is
thus a guarantee of the subject’s own subject-hood. A belief in the real is a belief in the
self because it is a belief in a death displaced elsewhere, beyond the territory, beyond the
protective, reflective tain of the mirror.
You don’t believe it? Because you need/want to believe in ‘objects’ that are already
solidly determined. That is, again, in yourself(-selves), accepting the silent work of
death as a condition of remaining indefectibly ‘subject’.
(Irigaray 1985a:115)
And in return I can say… So real space, not being the deadly non-real, must be dynamic,
creative, fecund, concretely so. The production of space is lauded, ‘the process of producing’
explored (Merrifield 1993:523), its social construction analysed (its construction, its
building, its construction as a dwelling) (Bondi 1993; Smith and Katz 1993). It must be the
location for ‘actual daily life’ (Merrifield 1993:525), it must have a ‘lifely tension’
(Reichert 1992:90). A space produced, requiring production, by the subject, producing the
subject. A really material, geographical space, a really material geographer. Really real.
Irigaray suggests…that his ‘vectorizations of space’ are the means of suturing the
unacknowledged wound of the break with the mother, a remembering that is also
forgetting, dis-membering (Irigaray 1993b:34–5). ‘She can only be encountered piece by
GILLIAN ROSE/ 71
piece, step by step…if he arrived at the limits of known spatiality he would lose his
favourite game, the game of mastering her’ (Irigaray 1993b:42). The fear of the mother
mobilizes a particular mode of spatiality, a space of territory, position, containment,
distancing. He wants ‘to master her, to reduce her little by little to nothing, by
constructing for himself all kinds of new enclosures, new homes, new houses, directions,
dimensions, foods, in order to break the bond with her’ (Irigaray 1993a:34). And this is a
process of dwelling.
To inhabit is the fundamental trait of man’s being. Even if this trait remains
unconscious, unfulfilled, especially in its ethical dimension, man is forever
searching for, building, creating homes for himself everywhere: caves, huts,
women, cities, language, concepts, theory, and so on.
(Irigaray 1993a:141)
And she is contained, enclosed, by these efforts. She is imagined as contained, imagined as
having a spatiality of impermeable borders, imagined as having ‘the solidity of land’
(Irigaray 1991:64), as being the hard surface of the mirror:
What ‘other’ has been reduced by [the mirror] to the hard-to-represent function of
the negative? A function enveloped in that glass—and also in its void of reflections
—where the historical development of discourse has been projected and assured.
(Irigaray 1985a:154)
The surface of the mirror is feminized, woman is the flat surface at which the subject
gazes, sees himself, gazes that distance. There is ‘a play to achieve mastery through an
organized set of signifiers that surround, besiege, cleave, out-circle, and out-flank the
dangerous, the embracing, the aggressive mother/body’ (Irigaray 1985b:37). And she is
enveloped; her envelope consists of clothes, jewels, cosmetics, the home. ‘You close me
up in house and family. Final, fixed walls… Have I ever experienced a skin other than the
one which you wanted me to dwell within’ (Irigaray 1992:25, 49). There is no spatiality
which would allow the mother to become a subject.
You grant me space, you grant me my space. But in so doing you have always
already taken me away from my expanding place. What you intend for me is the
place which is appropriate for the need you have of me. What you reveal to me is
the place where you have positioned me, so that I remain available for your needs.
(Irigaray 1992:47)
Envelopes are another solid then; they depend on a certain kind of space to constitute the
masculine subject and his feminine (m)other.
And I repeat…so non-real space is static, passive, immobile.
72 MASCULINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST MASQUERADE/
Irigaray continues…these feminine envelopes always contain the threat of the fluid body
matter contained, though. They contain it to limit it, and they also contain it by carrying
it. Inside the envelope blood and milk flow.
There almost nothing happens except the (re)production of the child. And the flow
of some shameful liquid. Horrible to see: bloody. Fluid has to remain that secret
remainder, of the one. Blood, but also milk, sperm, lymph, saliva, spit, tears,
humours, gas, waves, airs, fire…light. All threaten to deform, propagate,
evaporate, consume him, to flow out of him and into another who cannot easily be
held on to. The ‘subject’ identifies himself with/in an almost material consistency
that finds everything flowing abhorrent… Every body of water becomes a mirror,
every sea, ice.
(Irigaray 1985b:237)
And I want to say…hence the horror of imaged, non-real space as fluid, ‘that opaque world
of supposedly unfathomable differences’ (Harvey 1993:5). The horror of the ephemeral,
specular, eclectic, fragmented, chaotic, schizoid, fascistic, fetishistic, fluids, veiling,
titillating, enveloping, wallowing, swamping. Fluid and fusing. Hence the fear of non-real
space is the fear of ‘fusion’ between real and non-real space (Smith and Katz 1993:68), the
fear of fusion itself. Horrible, threatening. Surely therefore unreal, unimportant, non-real.
The object of desire itself, for geographers, would be the transformation of fluid to solid (cf.
Irigaray 198 5a:113)?
For Irigaray it is obvious that ‘woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less
obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies’ (Irigaray 1985a: 25). And she is a
spatialized prop: matter, earth, nature, interval, ground, envelope, container. And while
he fantasizes a universe from the implosion that is his study, she is both infinite matter and
an envelope or mirror, always carrying his meaning.
And for me finally to try and describe the male geographical imaginary, it performs…
…an infinite sea of matter, imagined from an enclosed and frozen place. A study
requiring an immense scene. A doubled space, its subject constituted by extension and
intension, (self)contained and expansive. Only the study and the extended space real.
…the (m)other both extensive matter and enclosed container. Matrix and envelope. A hole
and holed up. Imprisoned and exiled, ‘unmarked primary matter on the one hand and the
signs or emblems in which he cloaks her on the other’ (Irigaray 1993b:115). The spaces of
her surfaces and her fluidity unreal.
…a desire for solidity but with fluids always threatening.
…space, then, as an impossible object The (m)other as both petrifying and fluid, the same
as both concrete and processual.
Yet Irigaray insists…the distancing of the mother produces another supplement which
undermines the certainty of phallocentrism. The very process of representation contains
its own uncertainty: ‘he believes that, when he sent her far off like this, she will come
GILLIAN ROSE/ 73
back the same, whereas she returns to the other in the same (le même). This difference
undermines the truth of his language’ (Irigaray 1993b:35). There will always be an
elsewhere, beyond the contradictory spatiality of the same and his other. Another way of
thinking space, another way of relating to others.
So I now feel I can say…in this frozen space, this waste, rigid with its repetitious reflections,
its serial thinking, in this palace of mirrors, this sepulchre, the tomb of the corpse of the clanking,
glittering carapace of the ‘subject’, occupying this performed space are others, striating this
performed space is another possible space. Some might be parodying their surface appearance,
appearance as surface. Their surface might be a mask, they might be masqueraders, and they
might remain elsewhere (Irigaray 1985a:76). Their inability to participate wholly in the
imaginary of masculinism constitutes both their femininity and their threat. Their mask, their
envelope, constitutes both their role and their risk; they are necessary and unwanted guests at
the performance. And their mask might indicate ‘the abeyance of form, the fissure inform, the
reference to another edge’ (Irigaray 1991:56; see also Reichert 1994), a hinge into another
spatiality. To mark their presence is to write as if the imaginary space of the master
geographer was threatened from within and from without. It is to write as if the mirrors were
not solid but permeable, as if the tain could move, as if the glass and silver were melting, as if
there was an elsewhere. As if heroes were vampires and as if the women holding hankerchiefs
to their faces like shrouds were smiling. It is to write as if the mirrors had bled, bled their
violence, bled their ancestry, as if blood could be beautiful, as if an elsewhere was possible.
[The conventionalized need for a condusion requires a return to an academic voice at this
point. Because of course the reverse is also true: the academic voice parodied here requires
conclusions.]
In this chapter, I have attempted to displace the opposition between real and imagined
space. Despite the recognition by geographers like Harvey, Smith and Katz that the
distinction is troubled, they, like many other geographers, continue to insist that it is
valid. As Reichert (1992) has also argued, however, theoretical manoeuvres like these
themselves assume a particular spatiality. Drawing on the work of Irigaray and Butler, I
have described this foundational spatiality as a performance of the male imaginary. It is a
spatiality both of boundaries, intervals and solidity, and of flows, fusion and melding; the
complex contradictions between these two modalities of space enable but also undermine
the conceptual work of distinguishing between different kinds of space. It is this prior
spatialized male imaginary which allows geographers to distinguish between real and non-
real space in their particular, contradictory manner. I hope thus to have shown that this
real space is no more and no less real than the non-real space against which it is defined,
and that both entail this imaginary.
And I have tried to do this by masquerading, performing a self, both by articulating
different voices and by engaging with Irigaray as my interlocutor in a dialogue. This is not
to suggest that I have performed an escape from masculinist discourses and have
manipulated an authorial mask from a place entirely outside. Irigaray (1985a:135) herself
insists that such an escape is impossible; she argues that phallocentric discourse must be
worked against itself from the inside. Its mirror must be retraversed. This strategy of
74 MASCULINIST THEORY AND FEMINIST MASQUERADE/
deconstruction from within means that the risks entailed in her writing, and this
performance, are high; masquerade may be assimilable to masculinist discourse as just
another example of feminine superficiality. As part of her concern for dialogue and for the
intersubjectivity of language, however, Irigaray articulates the importance of the audience
to the meaning of a masquerade. So the question of the politics of masquerade might then
become, how does the audience interpret the performance: who are you? and the answer,
how about you? This performative context is crucial in thinking about the subversive
possibilities of masquerade.4 It locates the significance of the masquerade not with the
masquerader’s intentions, but with their relation to their audience, which is to say with the
discursive context of the performance of masquerade.
So in another moment of retraversal, I now turn to you as my audience, witnesses to this
masquerade, and, as I can’t hear your reactions, end this chapter with the recognition that
without you, I’m nothing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’m most grateful to the Department of Geography at the University of Syracuse for giving
me the opportunity to write and perform this paper. I’d also like to thank Nancy Duncan,
Doreen Massey, Matt Sparke, Pam Shurmer-Smith and David Woodhead for their helpful
comments on a previous version.
NOTES
1 For an elaboration of these metaphors, see Pratt (1992).
2 It should be noted that elsewhere in their essay, Soja and Hooper (1993) are keen to displace
the real/non-real distinction.
3 For some sympathetic discussions of Irigaray’s textual masquerades, see Braidotti (1991);
Butler (1993:36–49); Fuss (1989); Gallop (1988:92–9); Grosz (1989); Whitford (1991).
4 In her recent clarification of her argument about performance, Butler (1993: 12–13) has
downplayed its theatrical analogies because, she argues, the interpretation of performance as
theatre removes power from the scene by neglecting the anterior regulation of a
performance. However, Butler’s rejection of the theatrical analogy also erases the question of
the audience, or of the social, from her work. Hence she can say little about performative
context or about how certain subjects develop ‘collective disidentifications’ which enable the
subversion of the performed norms (Butler 1993:4).
5
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION
Heidi J.Nast and Audrey Kobayashi
INTRODUCTION
This chapter teases out interconnections between spatiality, corporeality and visuality1
through critically interweaving two very different sorts of works: one, by Jonathan Crary,
titled Techniques of the Observer (1993), and the other by Carolyn Merchant titled The Death
of Nature (1983). We have chosen Jonathan Crary because he, perhaps more than any
other theorist, explores in detail how visuality has historically been constituted and
deployed in spatial as well as corporeal ways. In particular, he provides useful graphic
descriptions of the main disciplinary practices through which dichotomous notions of
subject and object were identified and carried through metaphors of interiority and
exteriority. He goes on to argue that this at-once spatial and epistemological divide
collapsed in the nineteenth century when subjects became structurally enmeshed into, or
part of, machines. For the most part Crary ignores gendered or other corporeal
differences. Carolyn Merchant, in contrast, foregrounds gender in an alternative
elaboration of the historical emergence of the subject-object split. Specifically, through
careful exegesis of historical texts, she argues that the split was mapped onto a Man/
Nature (Woman) dichotomy which began to take shape in late Renaissance times and
which was instrumental to the rise of ‘science’, (merchant) capitalism and secular states.
Unlike Crary, she does not claim that the dichotomy eventually collapsed, but rather that
it became foundational to contemporary social relations. This early work of Merchant
remains unique both in her own scholarly repertoire and in the fact that it is the only text
on gender and science that demonstrates how an epistemic stance served gendered ends
across a number of geo-political fields.2 While her work might be criticized for indulging
in historical over-generalizations and essentialist statements about women, it also points to
a very innovative way of understanding the profoundly gendered geo-political effects of
particular epistemes.
The chapter begins, then, by outlining Crary’s historiographic analysis of vision: how it
was understood in scientific terms prior to the early 1800s; how this understanding
ruptured in the 1820s and 1830s; and how a new ‘physiological’ mode of vision largely
supplanted the older ‘geometrical optics’. Rather than immediately engaging with his
historiography, however, we first juxtapose it with Carolyn Merchant’s analysis of how
Western scientific communities’ ways of knowing the world and the body changed
76 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
dramatically in the 1600s; Man and Nature emerged as new, mechanistically interrelated,
oppositional categories. The juxtaposition suggests a reframing of Crary’s discussion of
vision to make issues of gender and other corporealized ‘differences’ integral rather than
incidental or marginal to vision’s history. The fourth and fifth parts of the chapter, then,
discuss how one might use Merchant’s work to re-corporealize Crary’s analysis. In
particular, her work helps deconstruct his problematic positing of a universal observer,
something that requires a singularly positioned and universal (unmarked) body. At the
same time, we use Crary’s insights to significantly re-work the gendered dualism of
Merchant, in the process making both analytical frameworks more malleable to historical
constructions of difference.
CRARY’S VISION—PART I: DECORPOREALIZED TRUTH AND
THE MIND’S EYE
In two works titled Techniques of the Observer (1993) and ‘Modernizing vision’ (1988),
Jonathan Crary argues that a decisive break in Western ways of visualizing the world
occurred in the early 1800s. Before that time, from the late 1500s to the late 1700s,
visuality was associated metaphorically and practically with the camera obscura, an
important instrument of scientific objectivism and perspectivalism. In the simplest case
the camera obscura consisted of a dark enclosed interior in which a person could sit
(Figure 5.1). One of the interior walls was punctured by a small opening through which
light entered, projecting an inverted image of what was outside onto the opposite interior
wall. The image was thought to be superior to what was directly observable in the outside
world and was relied upon to produce a unifying and ordering image of that world. More
importantly, for Crary, the image emanated from the outside and was directly registered
on the walls of an inside, the image, in a sense, straddling both spatial domains. According
to Crary, use of the camera obscura resulted in a phenomenological and epistemological
reordering of the world: the universe could now be cast in terms of an interiorized
subject and an exteriorized world.
Bordo’s (1987) work on Cartesianism and culture suggests that the camera obscura’s
utility in effecting such a reorganization stemmed from growing and general scientific
distrust of the body as both register and mediator of knowledge. It was imperative that
one withdraw from the world and the senses, particularly the eye, and cultivate the
intellect or ‘mind’s eye’—an interiorized disembodied arena of ‘pure understanding’. For
Descartes,
[t]o achieve this [spatial and bodily] autonomy, the mind must be gradually
liberated from the body; it must become a ‘pure mind’… [C]onstant vigilance must
be maintained against the distractions of the body. Throughout the Meditations,
emphasis is placed on training oneself in nonreliance on the body and practice in the
art of ‘pure understanding.’ It is virtually a kind of mechanistic yoga.
(Bordo 1987:91)
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION/ 77
Figure 5.1 Camera obscura, mid-eighteenth century (Crary 1993:31)
The camera obscura, then, was one means of allowing for a mechanistic giving-over of the
senses to an apparatus that would rationally organize and reproduce the world in a way
congruent with a disembodied intellect (Crary 1993:48, 60). Through working in tandem
with an interiorized mind’s eye, the apparatus was understood to judge and literally trace
out transcendent truth. The camera additionally served as a primary terrain for
organizing, staging and policing an exteriorized world: the camera could be trained onto
this rather than that object; crystals or other objects were employed to filter the light coming
into the aperture, and mirrors and different receiving surfaces could be used to re-work
the image. The interiorized subject’s activities were, however, considered transcendent,
carried out in the service of a science that guaranteed ‘correspondence between exterior
world and interior representation and… [that excluded] anything disorderly or unruly’
(Crary 1988:32).3
Through numerous published scientific works and experimentations and, secondarily,
through its instrumental use in painting and copying, the camera obscura became the
dominant model for understanding vision and representation. Accordingly, the observing
subject or I, ensconced in the camera, became the metonymic embodiment of an
ironically disembodied, transcendent mind’s eye. In so far as the interiorized site was
divine (it was here that God’s ordering of the world was made clear), so too was the
ensconced subject (see Bordo 1987).
CRARY’S VISION—PART II: CORPOREALIZED VISION AND
THE EYE
Crary suggests that the camera obscura model of visuality and truth ruptured in the 1820s
and 1830s to be largely replaced by a scientific physiological one. The presence of a
discerning mind’s eye and the explanatory powers of geometrical optics, upon which the
78 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
camera obscura had depended, were now questioned. The camera obscura, once
‘paradigmatic of the dominant [stable, fixed] status of the observer in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries’ was replaced by optical devices such as the phenakistiscope, diorama
and stereoscope, signalling a paradigmatic shift in how the observer was located and
constituted phenomenologically and epistemologically.
In the case of the phenakistiscope, an observer stood in front of a pie-sized disk or plate
having 8–16 slits radiating symmetrically outward from the centre. Attached to, but
slightly separated from, the disk via a shaft was a second and parallel disk of matching size.
Upon this surface a figure was drawn at sites perfectly opposite the slits, at the same scale
but in slightly different positions. As the observer stood in front of the first disk, looking
into one of the slits, the two-disk apparatus was spun so that the images were seen in rapid
staccatic succession. What would be single stationary figures had the disk been moved
very slowly, were now seen to be a single figure in gradual, continuous motion. This and
other similar mechanical productions of illusory motion and time emerged out of
physiological research on retinal after-images, images that remain in the eye for short
period of time after the eye is closed or a light source is removed.
Observational immobility of a subject was similarly required in relation to dioramas,
large stage-like settings onto which observers were placed and through which they were
carried via an often circular, moving platform. Such a device made observation of
numerous perspectives of light and scenery compulsory. Lastly, the binocular stereoscope
—similarly developed through physiological research—trained each of the eyes of an
(again) immobile observer onto separate and nearly identical side-by-side (or sometimes
slightly overlapping) images. The resulting stereographic or three-dimensional image was
considered a superior way of representing proximate objects in that it reflected the
physiological binarism of optical processes; views from two different optical angles were
melded by the brain onto a single virtual plane. More than any other optical device, the
stereoscope conflated tangibility with visual experience, conflating the real with the
optical (Crary 1993:124).
For Crary, what is important in all these optical devices is that their workings required
the observer to become physically integrated into the apparatuses themselves.
Accordingly, the observer becomes ‘at once a spectator, a subject of empirical research
and observation, and an element of machine production’ (Crary 1993:112). It is this
triadic, contradictory position of the subject which Crary suggests collapsed distinctions
between spectacle and surveillance, counter to Foucauldian claims of their separation.
Through the widespread and popular deployment of these and similar apparatuses the
viewing subject became divorced from notions (and expectations) of exactitude and
correspondence between image and world. Besides the creation of these leisure items
(consumed on massive scales in parlours, theatres and street corners), however, the
physiological model of vision served more practical ends; most strikingly, it was
instrumental to the mechanizing needs of industrial capital. The eye was studied, for
example,
in terms of reaction time and thresholds of fatigue and stimulation [which] was not
unrelated to increasing demand for knowledge about the adaptation of a human
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION/ 79
subject to productive tasks in which optimum attention span was indispensable for
the rationalization of labor. The economic need for rapid coordination of hand and
eye in performing repetitive actions required accurate knowledge of human optical
and sensory capacities.
(Crary 1988:37)
In disrupting previous received notions of a truth situated in a disembodied mind’s eye,
then, the scientific relocation of vision in a physiological eye discursively and practically
severed the observer from correspondent and visually verifiable ‘truth’ in the material
world. The viewing subject, decoupled from a formerly geometrically mediated and
stable ‘out there’, was now considered materially coextensive and mechanistically
enmeshed with the world. Crary, drawing on Baudrillard’s work on the destabilization of
signs and codes beginning in the Renaissance, Benjamin’s writings on the flâneur and
modernity’s proliferation of signs and increased consumption, Debord’s work on
spectacle and Foucault’s notion of a ‘technology of individuals’ in the nineteenth century,
suggests that physiological optics recast the observer in terms of a spatially unfixed, and
thus more manipulable, subjectivity. The subject, along with a constitutive constellation of
viewable objects, was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The observer could now
be constituted, disciplined, normalized and circulated as an atomistic, interchangeable site
of production and consumption. Severed from founding, spatially stable referents, the
subject was easily inserted into a hyper-commodified world of signification controlled
ultimately by capitalism:
[T]he imperatives of capitalist modernization, while demolishing the field of
classical vision, generated techniques for imposing visual attentiveness, rationalizing
sensation, and managing perception. They were disciplinary techniques that
required a notion of visual experience as instrumental, modifiable, and essentially
abstract, and that never allowed a real world to acquire solidity or permanence.
Once vision became located in the empirical immediacy of the observer’s body, it
belonged to time, to flux, to death. The guarantees of authority, identity, and
universality supplied by the camera obscura are of another epoch.
(Crary 1993:24)
THE BODY AND THE MACHINE
The Death of Nature by Carolyn Merchant (1983) in many ways places Crary’s concern
with how technologies of vision inform epistemological and phenomenological
understandings of the world in a larger and more differentiated bodily and geographic
context. Rather than concentrating on how discrete models of vision mediated (a universal)
subjectivity per se, Merchant interrogates how historically differential markings of
gendered bodies were enmeshed with, and mediated through, larger social and geo-
political relations. Like Crary, she suggests that in Renaissance Europe an epistemological
rupture occurred that transfigured social relations and that was mediated by
metaphors that were lived as well as spoken. Unlike Crary, however, she suggests that
80 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
this rupture heralded rather than preceded modernity and that it had gendered effects. Her
analysis entertains bodily differences whereas Crary’s does not.
Specifically, Merchant analyses how and why medieval organic metaphors, which had
spatially ordered the world during the Renaissance, collapsed as tensions arose between
two opposing political and scientific discourses. In one camp were the vitalists who held
that all of the natural world (including humans) contains an innate organic life force, an
idea that continued up through the monadic philosophy of Leibniz in the early 1700s. The
hierarchical, organic notion of a body politic was grounded historically in vitalism: a
monarch was literally seen to make up the body head that was also the locus of divine
right, while various nobility and commoners made up the social body. The latter was
composed of unequal parts, each part having different but ordered rights and functions
(see also Haraway 1991a:7–9).
Sixteenth-century social changes precipitated by mercantilism, however, disrupted the
organic model. The growth of a market economy produced greater socio-spatial mobility
and was associated with a decentralization of powers that produced a swelling of the
metaphorical monarchic head. Both changes were uncontainable by organic body images
presaging a shift to mechanistic metaphors. The human body, no longer an appropriate
metaphor of vitalism, became incorporated into a new terrain of metaphors involving The
Machine. Thus, in Descartes’ Treatise of Man (written around 1632–33) the human body is
analysed explicitly as a machine, while he compares the cosmos to an energy-saving
machine in his Principles of Philosophy (1644). The machine also becomes a metaphor for
ideal social organization, a solution to social disorder that ran counter to the organicism of
the original meaning of the ‘body politic’. Such usage is evident in Hobbes’s Leviathan
(1651; Merchant 1983:204, 209).
Most importantly, for Merchant, practical and metaphorical deployments of the
Machine informed an ontological hiving off of male from female, Man from Nature.
Nature was constructed in terms of a passive materiality that was called to order by the
masculine, rationalizing gaze and hand of science. The dichotomy was materially
strengthened as the bodies, workings and judgements of masculinist science became
integral to those of non-monarchic states and capital. New machine technologies
employed by merchants and mining enterprises, surveys of feudal lands and new
accounting procedures, for example, supported the rise of a bourgeoisie and the demise
of monarchies. Production, the state and science were cast as masculine domains from
which women were increasingly forbidden (see also Bordo 1987; Schiebinger 1989).4
In contrast to Crary’s historization of a dichotomous interiority/exteriority divide,
then, Merchant focuses on the emergence of a dichotomous and mechanistic Man/Nature
relation. And while Crary posits that modernity commenced with the rise of a
physiological discourse—which collapsed the interior/exterior divide, Merchant posits
that modernity was mediated through a Man/Nature dualism which continues to
dominate Western cultural relations today. The next section geographically critiques and
re-works both analyses to entertain a more complicated political and spatial field. We
begin with Crary.
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION/ 81
POSITIONALITY AND VISION
Crary’s work is problematic for a number of reasons, most importantly because it
implicitly posits a universal observer. Writing about the camera obscura, for example,
Crary (1993:38) asserts that during the seventeenth century it becomes ‘the compulsory
site from which vision can be conceived or represented’. He does not, however, deal with
who and why someone is inside the ‘box’, how the box is positioned, on whom the aperture is
trained, or how those in and outside the box are related; what is implied, therefore, is
that all ‘eyes’ (or mind’s eyes) equally identify with and construct the dominant
discourse. Accordingly, withdrawal into the camera obscura is described in terms of a
metaphysics played out upon a generic, universal body:
[T]he camera obscura is inseparable from a certain metaphysic of interiority: it is a
figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a
privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior
world…
(1993:39)
‘Domestic’ places, however, discursively imply protected, female or womb-like sites,
something the camera obscura is obviously not. As the site of a metaphorically
transcendent being that polices the world, the inner space is more akin to heaven than
home—a control room more than a kitchen or hearth. Clearly, entering a camera obscura
to contemplate the world (or contemplating entering such a device) entailed some degree
of leisure, scholarship, and institutional and personal privilege denied to all but a few
men.5 Similarly, Crary never addresses the fact that the camera obscura did not seal the
(male) observer off from the world; rather, from the recesses of control, this figure was
able to call upon discursive and disciplinary (exclusionary) forces not available equally
across the social field. Thus, being ‘inside’ a camera obscura-like space was presumably
much different if you were painter or painted, servant or master.6
The passage above continues:
At the same time, another related and equally decisive function of the camera was
to sunder the act of seeing from the physical body of the observer, to
decorporealize vision… [T]he observer’s physical and sensory experience is
supplanted by the relations between a mechanical apparatus and a pre-given world
of objective truth.
(Crary 1993:39)
But while the body may have been abjected at the level of ‘truth’, at another level, the
‘physical and sensory experience’ of the judging observer was not supplanted but, rather,
given substantial, god-like powers. As Haraway (1991b:189) states with reference to the
disembodied gaze of science, such pseudo-disembodiment is a ‘god-trick’ (see also Rose
1993b). Locating the judge is additionally important in that it speaks about who and/or
what is rendered an ‘observed’: how the box is positioned is not serendipitous, but
82 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
planned,7 which as we shall show below, makes a difference as to how the field of
exteriority is ontologically constructed.8
Lastly, Crary does not address how the camera obscura was able to exert such influence
over the body politic nor how it mediated particular kinds of political relations. By not
distinguishing epistemological from practical effects of the camera, then, Crary
problematically re-creates the transcendent mind-body/inside-outside divide and ignores
social difference and locatedness in ways that contradict key historical claims in his
analysis.
The contradictions are particularly evident when Crary describes the transition from
geometrical to physiological regimes of vision. For Crary, physiological optics allowed
observation to be enmeshed in an abstract visual field that required no stable point of
observation and no necessary or fixed referential relation to the world-at-large.
Corporeality and time were reduced to visual simulacra, allowing desire to be
manipulated and mediated visually in ways congruent with the commodifying aims of
capitalism.9 What Crary does not take into account, however, is that the observer is only
unlocatable with respect to a particular constellation of objects. A specified ensemble and
relation of subjects and objects are, by his accounts, needed to activate (in Foucauldian
language, deploy) the physiological mode of vision. The viewer needs to pick up and use a
stereoscope, for example, before the physiological mode is enacted or lived.
A corollary to this is that Crary does not question whether or not the necessity or
desire for correspondence and coupling between observer and observed varies across
socio-political fields: how universal or comparable are, for example, the lives and
subjectivities of those enmeshed in a semi-roboticized factory assembly line and those of
astronomers, architects, cartographers or surveyors? Is not the former embedded in more
bodily and consistent ways with the physiological mode of apprehending the world
whereas the others consistently draw upon the geometrical mode of knowing
characterized by the camera obscura? And what about those located in rural farm
communities or those who refuse to mass consume out of choice or necessity? That Crary
does not entertain such questions ironically shows that he has assumed the uninterrogated
position of the interiorized observer whose gaze is focused on the ‘out there’.
It nonetheless seems clear that while capitalism requires human insertions into
mechanical means of production and that it encourages the proliferation and consumption
of ever-new commodities and signs registered primarily through images, it is also
propelled by a desire to more accurately locate, specify and characterize labour, markets,
lands, and materials. The latter desire is, moreover, mediated at a distance through a
seemingly transcendent logic of capital accumulation which depends both on policing
‘correspondence’ of commodified image and object and on maintaining privileged and,
typically, masculine, spaces of interiority. It is within these places that ‘the logic’ (of
production and marketing, for example) are tabled, discussed and at some level worked
out.10
It is here that we re-introduce and re-work Merchant’s historical treatment of the Man/
Nature dichotomy to suggest that Crary’s geometrical and physiological visual regimes are
in fact different modalities of the same mechanistic model of objectivism. Obversely, we
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION/ 83
suggest that by incorporating notions of interiority and exteriority into Merchant’s Man/
Nature dichotomy, her social location of gender difference significantly changes.
OBJECTIVISM AND BODILY DEPLOYMENT OF THE MIND’S
EYE
We have argued that Crary’s work presents us with an interiorized subject of the camera
obscura who was—as bearer of the mind’s eye—representatively transcendent and even
divine; he was also male. Drawing upon Merchant’s work we suggest that it was exactly
this masculinist transcendence which was instrumental in forging mechanistic discourses
of, and interrelations between, science, capital and the state. Nonetheless, we would argue
that the interiority-exteriority divide is not equivalent to that of Man-Nature.
Discursively, for example, the interiorized god-subject is marked ostensibly by an
ungendered, universal logic. And (like the Wizard of Oz) the subject is disembodied to
the extent that he is hidden from view.11 Rarely seen patriarchs, for example, are written
in as rulers of Bacon’s utopian New Atlantis (1624). Carried around in gilded carriages, the
so-called ‘Fathers of Salomon’s House’ had jewelled fingers, priest-like robes and eyes
intriguingly shielded from view by Spanish helmets. One of their missions was to recreate
Nature under laboratory conditions according to a mechanistic hierarchy of apprentices,
novices and scientists (Merchant 1983:180–4).12
Within the camera obscura set-up, however, these man-god sites of transcendent logic
are decidedly distinct from the physical, discursive locations of so-called Man. Man, we
would argue, is positioned in the field of exteriority at some ontological distance from a
similarly exteriorized but feminized Nature (Figure 5.2). We would argue further that it
was (and is) in this exteriorized field of Man-Nature that physiological research was (and
is) located and practised. Taking the cover photograph of Crary’s The Techniques of the
Observer as an example—a close-up drawing of a man’s head held firmly by five hands of
science, all of which are probing and measuring the curvature of one of the man’s eyes—
one might say that physiological optics did not supersede, but was epistemically and
practically embedded within, the geometrical regime of vision; experimentation,
regulation and standardization was for the most part carried out by god-like logicians upon
corporeal (not-god) others—‘out there’. In metaphorical terms, then, our argument
requires that not only those enmeshed in the dioramas, stereoscopes or phenakistiscopes
be considered, but those who designed, produced and/or operated them.
Furthermore, we contest Crary’s (1993:35) claim that physiological research on the
eye heralded scientific ‘excitement and wonderment at the body’, arguing that he
conflates excitement with the eye with excitement at the body: mechanistic constructions
and treatments of the eye were in fact presaged in much earlier, similar treatments of
bodies. Royal College physician William Harvey, for example, conducted invasive
experiments on the heart in the 1630s, consequently comparing it to a pump. He likewise
dissected large numbers of deer on the estates of King Charles to study the mechanics of
biological reproduction, a logic he then transferred to humans (Merchant 1983:156–62).
Thus, while physiological research of the nineteenth century may have elaborated upon a
84 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
Figure 5.2 Socio-spatial positionings that at once define a particular episteme (objectivism) and geo-
political relations. Whereas Merchant focuses on the Man/Nature dichotomy, Crary elaborates
upon one defined through an interiorized subject and an exteriorized object. As we discuss in the
text, however, their works suggest that there are two masculinities, both of which are
overdetermined: one which occupies god-like positions of rationalizing authority (Father) and the
other which is (primarily through class) positioned at some distance in the field of exteriority,
defined geo-politically and epistemically (Son). The figure thus illustrates how heteropatriarchy
involves an assertion (externalization) of paternal authority over both wife (Woman, Mother) and
son (Man). Directional arrows represent geo-political forces and tensions constructing and
questioning the epistemic order. For the sake of our argument, we have shown only the dominant
forces involved in stabilizing these categories, but they by no means make up the entirety of socio-
spatial relations!
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION/ 85
mechanistic treatment of the body (cf. Crary 1993:88, 93–4, 148), it did not signal an
epistemic rupture with previous scientific paradigms or ways of gathering knowledge.
Similarly, mechanistic synchronization of eye movement in the service of capital was
preceded by, and logically congruent with, attempts to create mechanistic socio-spatial
divisions of labour. Clothier capitalists of seventeenth-century England, for example,
divided sorting, carding and spinning tasks of peasant cottagers from those of weaving,
dying and dressing of cloth, not only in labour terms, but spatially (Merchant 1983:177).
Analogously, elaborate and mechanistic divisions of labour were drawn and described by
Agricola with respect to mining and metallurgy in the sixteenth century (Hoover and
Hoover, 1950), while British colonial capitalists in the Caribbean set up the first slave-
based factory system of sugar production in the 1600s (Mintz 1985). Moreover, European
armies were reorganized explicitly through metaphors of the machine following the
success of the Prussian army in the Seven Years War (1756–63; Mitchell 1988; see note
4). In this sense, the eye was drawn into a process of regulation, experimentation and
normalization that had begun much earlier at the scale of the entire body and body politic
(see also Braverman 1974).
Finally, while Crary makes powerful arguments for how the camera obscura mediated
interiority, vision and knowledge, Crary treats the camera as paradigmatic of interiority,
privacy and knowledge in general. But as Wigley (1992:347) points out, ‘[t] he first truly
private space was the man’s study, a small locked room off his bedroom which no one else
ever enters, an intellectual space beyond that of sexuality’, such rooms becoming ‘a
commonplace in the fifteenth century [in Europe]’ (1992:347). Additionally, devices in
widespread use such as the astrolabe, quadrant and plane table provided greater mobility
to the interiorized mind’s eye, extending and inverting the spatial logic of the camera
obscura unevenly across mercantilist terrains (see Cosgrove 1985). Here, the discerning
mind’s eye was expected to measure the world without an image first being registered on
some distant surface—at least not in its entirety. In addition, the body stood outside the
devices rather than being enclosed by them. Nonetheless, these devices, like the camera
obscura, were (and are) grounded in a geometrical optics that assumes the presence of a
rationalizing, singular observer who judges and polices the truth.13 One might even argue
that surveying, as the basis of architectural drawing, urban and regional planning and
various kinds of mapping, has since the fifteenth century been of greater importance in
shaping our ways of knowing and negotiating the world than the camera obscura (see
Cosgrove 1985; Harley 1989).14
Rationalizing visual divides placed in the 1400s and 1500s between painter and painted
produced a similar kind of distance, if not interiority. These include the orthogonal grid
of Brunelleschi (142 5) placed between painter and painted. Similarly, Albrecht Durer
proposed that a glass plate divide the two and that the painter’s head be set in a chin rest
to make the painting process more exact by immobilizing the head. Alberti also
‘recommended a specially woven veil—called an “intersection”—which when worn over
the painter’s eyes, “divided” the visual field into square sections’ (Bordo 1987:64). Lastly,
Berkeley in The Theory of Vision Vindicated (1732) described how perspective could be
conceptually captured through imaging a gridded ‘diaphanous plain’ positioned at right
angles to the horizon (Crary 1993:55).
86 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
Thus, if we reconsider Crary’s and Merchant’s analyses in terms of a more fragmented
socio-spatial terrain (especially in terms of gender and class) and in terms of a variety of
geometricizing devices that historically promoted ontological distance and interiority, it
becomes obvious that the geometrical optics undergirding the camera obscura are still
fundamental to contemporary ways of knowing. Founding referents, correspondence
between images and objects, and the production of discrete, locatable sites of ‘subjects’
and ‘objects’ continue to be fundamental to the ‘transcendent’ rationalities of capitalism,
science and states (see also Lefebvre 1991). Laboratories, penthouse boardrooms and
Founding Fathers’ (governmental) chambers become contemporary camera obscura-like
rooms wherein logics that command and police correspondence between image and
world, signifier and signified, are lived out and circulated. ‘Targeting’ niche markets,
capital ‘penetration’ of new and especially rural areas, inter/transnational capitalist
production modes and investment profiles are all policed, judged and managed through
techniques underpinned by geometrical optics (Figure 5.2). Facts and figures, graphs and
photographs, surveys, quotas and forecasts are means for locating, registering and
controlling outside truths in rationalizing fashion.15 And even if constellations of objects
(human and non-human) are captured through commodification and practically and
symbolically intermeshed and controlled, total control is continually resisted through
consumption. Consumers wrest meaning out of mass-produced objects, objects which
Baudrillard—assuming a position of disembodied observer—can only script in terms of an
emptiness singularly determined by capitalism. In other words, while he defines mass-
produced series of objects as ‘undefined simulacra of each other’ (Crary 1993: 12), such
objects can also be consumed in ways that create new meanings and material referents
where none existed before.
What our discussion suggests, then, is that Crary’s physiological regime of visuality is in
practice deployed and circulated very differently across social fields. Through
consumption (of commodities, of scientific rationalities or inventions, and of state
representatives) or through certain forms of production (assembly lines), for example,
bodies are psychically and materially constituted and mechanistically enmeshed within an
ahistorical objective present. The present is in this case mediated by an ever-accelerating
circulation of visual (and virtual) images and signs. In contrast, those involved in hegemonic
forms of marketing, finance, science or politics are invested in visually, corporeally,
spatially (in short, epistemically) distancing—at the same time that they locate and capture
—others (cf. Rose 1993b; Haraway 1991b). Such activities to a large extent depend upon
a geometrical optics only partially captured by the workings of the camera obscura. The
divide is not at all absolute, and the scale and characteristics of the visual regimes vary,
but it is important to recognize the socio-spatial unevenness of the regimes and their
interconnectedness in contemporary social relations.
In so doing, we open up analytical and practical possibilities for analysing other kinds of
corporealities, subjectivities and eyes, especially in fields presently constituted as exterior
or ‘other’. Most importantly, the exteriorized field of our triangular model could be
reworked to include racialized/ethnicized others who have characteristically been cast as
both Man and Nature (Beasts or Monsters), depending on economic, political and cultural
conditions (Figure 5.3; see also Collins 1991). Slave women in the southern United
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION/ 87
States, for example, were considered mothers but also beasts (breeders); simultaneously
they might occupy masculinized positions as manual labourers in cotton fields or
feminized sites in the master’s household carrying out domestic functions having the least
social status.
CONCLUSION
This chapter has counterposed the works of Crary and Merchant to tease out
interconnections between spatiality and visuality, in the process showing how corporeality
is multiply constructed, deployed and experienced across a variegated social field.
Additionally, it shows that the epistemic framework of objectivism is equivalent to, and
thus sustained by, normative material positionings through which we are ‘named’,
experience and give meaning to the world. It is in the sense of linking the political and the
epistemic, positionality and the bodily, and the spatial and the visual, that we re-
corporealize vision.
We also showed that two taken-for-granted binaries in contemporary Western
scholarship (inside-outside and Man-Nature) do not in fact map directly onto each other.
Rather, through critically interrogating the bodies, visual regimes and spatialities involved in
their geo-political construction, the binaries map out a pyramidic socio-spatial terrain,
within which are situated two very different sorts of masculinities—Father and Son. Our
analysis thus complicates binary analyses of patriarchy. It also suggests an overdetermined
and heterosexualized subtext: hegemonic relations within Western socio-spatialities are
structured by the Oedipal triad Father-Mother-Son, which is in turn dependent upon a
realm of the repressed (Monsters). The masculinity of the third term (Father) is rarely
interrogated because it is characteristically displaced; it is hidden within the disembodying
rubric of transcendent ‘rationalities’ and logics, an obscurantism involving strenuous
cultural work. Consequently, Man (as labour, maleness, citizen or human object of the
scientific gaze) is confused with Maleness-as-God, maker and bearer of logic (or worse,
Logos itself). Nonetheless, we locate and name the third term (as Dorothy and Toto did the
invisible Wizard), in the process revealing merely another tier of the masculine, albeit one
that is purposefully de-gendered (science is neutral, capital is a logic without a gender,
state Fathers represent justice and are for and of ‘the people’).16 Distinguishing between
modalities of masculinities has important implications for resisting the dominant order of
things. It challenges us to interrogate in spatial ways the differences between masculinities
of Father and Son and to confront heterosexuality (heteropatriarchy) rather than the
vaguer (safer) notions of patriarchy. In this way we begin to describe the socio-spatiality
of Western male-male relations in terms other than simply contradictory, variable or
complicated.
Through re-corporealizing vision, then, we have mapped out hegemonic sexualizations
of the socio-spatial, a process that simultaneously shows the architectural artifice of the
latter’s force and which supports those who visualize and act upon a ‘beyond’. Such ‘going
beyond’ is not new but an intrinsic part of the dominant order of things; it is that which is
continually regulated, de-legitimated, and erased from normative view.
Overcoming erasure does not require new practices, then. Rather, it requires
88 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
Figure 5.3 Reworking the field of exteriority. Within the white oedipalized order of things (Father-
Mother-Son) ethnicized and/or racialized ‘Others’ occupy an ambiguous position, being drawn into
positions of Man, for example, according to economic exigencies. Slave women in the southern
United States, for example, were considered both Mothers but also Beasts (breeders) at the same
t ime t ha t th ey o ccup ied ma scu lin iz ed po sit ion s o f man ua l la bo urers in the field s
acknowledging, working with and supporting differences taking place outside the
dominant pyramidal paradigm. Those who have structurally occupied marginalized fields
of exteriority, for example, have also claimed and re-worked their outside place in terms of
an interiority, in the process destabilizing elitist and exclusionary private parts. The
nineteenth-century American slave woman Harriet Jacobs concealed herself inside a
cramped attic room for nine years to escape her master’s advances. Her rationalizing gaze
through a keyhole was mediated by a fear through which was borne an altogether different
sense of interiority. Nonetheless, it was from this different interior that she successfully
planned her escape (Jacobs 1988). Obversely, bell hooks’s (1990) work shows how
marginalized groups and places can inculcate psychical and material interiorities that are
oppositional (see also Rose 1993b).17
Interiority and exteriority, then, are complexly refracted across social fields and change
over time and in direction. Even though metaphors of interiority/ exteriority may underpin
an inadequate and exclusionary epistemic divide, causing us to seek alternatives (see Grosz
1994), the binary can in another sense be seen as innocuous. It is neither complete (in
terms of the hegemonic and heterosexualized (triadic) social terrain which it only helps to
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION/ 89
define) or absolute (see also Haraway 1991b:194; Rose 1993b). Its instabilities are,
moreover, especially prominent today. Global structural changes have opened up
numerous possibilities for recognizing, legitimating and supporting alternative socio-
spatial relations (epistemes) outside the dominant heterosexualized order of things. We
are today confronted with numerous possibilities for seeking ‘not the knowledges ruled by
phallogocentrism (nostalgia for the presence of the one true Word) and disembodied
vision, but those ruled by partial sight and limited voice’ (Haraway 1991b:196). Our
project here is thus one of disclosure—of locating and speaking about the socio-spatial
pervasiveness and artifice of heterosexuality, one underpinned by two very different sorts
of masculinities.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank the anonymous readers, Mike Dorn, Angela Martin, Alexis
Papadopoulos, Susan Roberts and Greg Waller, for their close, critical readings of the
text. Thanks also to Nancy Duncan for organizing the Space, Place and Gender seminar
series out of which this collection grew. Lastly many thanks to Dick Gilbreath and Gyula
Pauer for their patience, skills and creative inputs in the making of the figures.
NOTES
1 The term ‘visuality’ implies that there are different ways in which the visual field is, and has
been, culturally, epistemically, materially and historically apprehended and organized—all of
the latter being interconnected. Thus, persons who do not operate within visual regimes
structured predominantly by perspectivalism, for example, see the world differently.
Visuality also implies that there are differences in the techniques and technologies used to
support particular ways of seeing and thereby also in the power relations which undergird,
and are dispersed through, these differences.
2 By ‘geo-political field’ we mean all sites within, across and through which power is
materially deployed. Thus, the body is one geographical site, but so are various European
sites. Moreover, those material and discursive apparatuses which are used to code and
mediate socio-political relations but which are often less easy to ‘place’ are included here,
for example, the ‘state’, ‘science’ and ‘capital’—all of the latter ultimately being locatable.
3 Crary (1993:34) is careful to caution that the ontological distinctions that emerged through
the metaphor and use of the camera obscura should not be conflated with the technique of
linear perspective itself, in which the world is framed according to particular visual rules:
one must be wary of conflating the meanings and effects of the camera obscura
with techniques of linear perspective. Obviously the two are related, but it must be
stressed that the camera obscura defines the position of an interiorized observer to an
exterior world, not just to a two-dimensional representation, as is the case with
perspective… [I]t is far more than the relation of an observer to a certain procedure
of picture making… [T]he phenomenological differences between the experience of
a perspectival construction and the projection of the camera obscura are not even
comparable. What is crucial about the camera obscura is its relation of the observer
90 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
to the undemarcated, undifferentiated expanse of the world outside, and how its
apparatus makes an orderly cut or delimitation of that field allowing it to be viewed,
without sacrificing the vitality of its being.
This passage nevertheless becomes problematic when he asserts that the camera
obscura was singularly effective in making objectivism the dominant
epistemological mode of enquiry.
4 See Mitchell (1988) for a fascinating account of how machinic metaphors and practices
completely re-worked Egyptian society which had formerly been structured through organic
metaphors of the body. Beginning with the Ottomans, who adopted Prussian military
techniques after the French invasion in 1798, for example, the (all-male) military became:
a piece of machinery that could be ‘tuned with the precision of a watch.’ It could
be made to perform what the French officers in Egypt now called ‘manoeuvres,’ to
rotate, discharge weapons, contract, or expand on command… In such a machine,
every individual occupied a position, a space, created (as with the cog of a wheel) by
the identity of interval between each one… Order was a framework of lines and
spaces, created out of men, in which men could be distributed, manoeuvred, and
confined.
(Mitchell 1988:38)
Adoption of machinic ways in future colonial settings complicates both Merchant’s
and Crary’s analysis in that it shows the ways in which machinic ways were
dispersed for specifically military purposes. Moreover, it shows how persons were
embedded within machine-like contexts (what Crary, in the context of vision calls
the ‘physiological mode’) much earlier than the 1820s and for different reasons.
Mitchell (1988:37, 38) writes, for example, that:
[following] the dramatic Prussian victories in the Seven Years War (1756–63)…[t]
he Prussians had introduced revolutionary [military] techniques of precise timing, rapid
signalling, and rigorous conformity to discipline, out of which an army could be
manufactured as what the Prussian military instructions called an ‘artificial
machine’… Such a ‘machine’ could fire with a rapidity three times that of other
armies, making it three times as destructive, and could be expanded, wheeled, and
withdrawn with mechanical ease… The Prussian military regulations were adopted in
the decades after the Seven Years War by all the major armies of Europe, and
improved upon by the French in new regulations of 1791.
The officers of the new order…could ‘dispose of a large body of men in a circular
form, and then cause them to march round in such a manner, that as the circle turns
the soldiers incessantly discharge their muskets on the enemy and give no respite to
the combat, and having prepared their guns for a fresh discharge before they return
to the same place, they fire the moment they arrive in the face of the enemy. The
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION/ 91
result of this circular formation is, that the fire and slaughter do not cease for an
instant.’
5 Another instance of gender blindness occurs when Crary describes in universal terms how,
for Leibniz, to be in camera in the 1600s meant to be in the ‘inner space’ of a judge or other
person of title. He ignores the strikingly gendered class aspects of this scenario (judges of the
1600s were male and of high social rank) and merely posits a universal (male) figure. His
discussion of how the camera obscura infused popular notions of a room, therefore, does not
recognize that such rooms discursively and practically helped construct an elite male figure.
6 To some extent class and gender aspects are touched upon when he writes that, ‘[f] or those
who understood its optical underpinnings it [the camera obscura] offered the spectacle of
representation operating transparently, and for those ignorant of its principles it afforded the
pleasures of illusion’ (1993:33). But who was ignorant and who was knowledgeable is not
explicitly addressed, nor are the political and epistemological implications of this distinction
explored.
7 Crary (1993:34) to some extent acknowledges this point, but in an abstract way:
What is crucial about the camera obscura is its relation of the observer to the
undemarcated, undifferentiated expanse of the world outside, and how its apparatus
makes an orderly cut or delimitation of that field allowing it to be viewed, without
sacrificing the vitality of its being.
What Crary does not question is the ‘cut’ itself: on what or whom is the linear gaze
trained and what difference would this make to constructions of the visual field? He
also does not question whether there are differential qualities to exteriority and
interiority that help maintain or transform the objectivist order of things.
It is improbable, for example, that Vermeer’s paintings of The [male] Astronomer (1668)
and The [male] Geographer (1668–9) solemnly poring over charts and maps next to a single
window in a camera obscura-like room (paintings reproduced and discussed in Crary’s book)
invoked the same sense of inside and outside in women and in men. There were ideologies
of femininity and masculinity as well as of class that informed the looking, thereby enabling
different social groups to relate and mediate their social positions (of insiderness/
outsiderness) differently yet simultaneously. Moreover, men of lower social rank would
have lived out their lives feeling a greater sense of exclusion from the places of the juridical
eye, perhaps living more fully within the domain of exteriority. Lower-class women perhaps
also experienced a greater sense of exteriority/exclusion, but in ways different from those
of men, that is, according to constructions of gender.
8 Haraway (1991b:193–4), writing with reference to Western science states that, ‘[p]
ositioning is…the key practice grounding knowledge organized around the imagery of vision’
and that:
Technologies are skilled practices. How to See? Where to see from? What limits
to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one
point of view? Who gets blinkered? Who wears blinkers? Who interprets the visual
field? What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision? Moral and
92 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
political discourse should be the paradigm of rational discourse in the imagery and
technologies of vision.
Similarly, Haraway (1991b:193) writes that ‘[v]ision is always a question of the power
to see’ and that:
[the] eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity—honed to perfection in
the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy
—to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of
unfettered power.
(1988:198)
9 In capitalism, series of things are produced which appear identical such that:
[t]he relation between them [identical objects] is no longer that of an original to its
counterfeit. The relation is neither analogy nor reflection, but equivalence and
indifference. In a series, objects become undefined simulacra of each other.
(Baudrillard quoted in Crary 1993:12)
10 We purposefully use the word ‘table’ to draw attention to its epistemological links with the
camera obscura and especially its relation to the Cartesian table. Quoting Foucault, Crary
(1993:56) writes that, ‘The center of knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
is the table.’ In the case of one of Chardin’s eighteenth-century paintings, the table figures
prominently and has ‘less to do with sheer optical appearances than with knowledge of
isomorphisms and positions on a unified terrain’ (Crary 1993:63). We argue, then, that the
Cartesian table and geometrical optics still predominate today, whether they are used to
register and/or prove particular logical points in mathematics, cartography (including
Geographical Information Systems), corporate boardrooms, banks and stock exchanges or
governmental chambers.
11 Again, Haraway (1991b:193) writes similarly, but in the context of a critique of science:
‘Only those occupying the positions of the dominators are self-identical, unmarked,
disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again.’
12 Analogously, the forerunner to the Royal Society was the Invisible College, a name connoting
bodily transcendence and truth.
13 For a particularly relevant and contemporary example of continued scientific policing, see
Harley’s (1989:4–5) discussion of various forms of cartographic vigilantism. A French edited
collection, Cartographie dans les médias, for example, is said to ‘attempt to exorcise from “the
realm of cartography any graphic representation that is not a simple planimetric image and to
then classify all other maps as ‘decorative graphics masquerading as maps’ where the
‘bending of cartographic rules’ has taken place…”’ He also states that ‘in Britain…there was
set up a “Media Map Watch” in 1985’, an ‘example of cartographic vigilantism [in which] the
“ethic of accuracy” is being defended with some ideological fervor… The best maps are
[judged to be] those with an “authoritative image of self-evident factuality”’ (all quotes from
page 5).
14 Indeed, as Harley (1989:1) points out with respect to cartography, ‘Applying conceptions of
literary history to the history of cartography, it would appear that we are still working
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION/ 93
largely in either a “premodern” or “modern” rather than in a “postmodern” climate of
thought… [W]e are still, willingly or unwillingly, the prisoners of our own past’ For
Harley, cartographic pre-modernity is carried through staunchly defended disciplinary rules
which assume that ‘objects in the world to be mapped are real and objective, and that they
enjoy an existence independent of the cartographer; that their reality can be expressed in
mathematical terms; that systematic observation and measurement offer the only route to
cartographic truth… [M]imetic bondage has led to a tendency not only to look down on the
maps of the past (with a dismissive scientific chauvinism) but also to regard the maps of other
non-Western or early cultures…as inferior to European maps.’
15 A particularly graphic contemporary example of the omnipotent and rationalizing position of
capital is found in Natter and Jones’s (1993:141) article which in part describes the post-
recession, industrial ‘restructuring of Flint’s [Michigan] space into ever more distinct public
and private spheres’ following General Motors’ devastating plant closures which resulted in
the loss of 30,000 jobs. One indication of the resultant dichotomization was ‘that the
territories of the privileged, e.g., corporation headquarters and private clubs, are policed to
ensure that opposition is held at bay’. We would argue that this policed distancing not only
allows opposition to be managed, it disallows viewing of corporate capitalists’ bodies, in the
process promoting the myth of corporate omnipotence and reproducing a contemporary
version of a mind’s eye guarding a rationalizing logic bound to profit.
16 It would be interesting to see how our analysis might re-work the spatial dualisms feminist
geographers have typically posited and interrogated. Drawing on a number of feminist
theorists, for example, Rose (1993:74) lists some of the most common binaries typically
held up as constitutive of gendered differences.
17 Rose (1993b:151–2) might describe such contradictory constructions of interiority in terms
of ‘paradoxical space’ where:
The Other is not outside the discursive territory of the Same. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
has explored this paradox in the case of the homosexual and the trope of the closet;
she suggests that the image of the closet represents homosexuality as an open secret
around which a certain knowledgeable ignorance can centre. Diana Fuss has also
pointed out the complexity of this doubled position for gay men and lesbian women.
Their simultaneous inside-ness and outside-ness produces many unpredictable
paradoxes: for example, ‘to be out, in common gay parlance…is really to be in—
inside the realm of the visible, the speakable, the culturally intelligible…[but] to come
out can also work not to situate one on the inside but to jettison one from it.’ These
paradoxes of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ can painfully disempower those caught within
them but, as Fuss also argues, ‘one can, by using these contested words, use them
up, exhaust them, transform them into the historical concepts they are and always
have been’…[In like fashion] Patricia Hill Collins…describes the simultaneous
occupation of a position both inside and outside the centre as the ‘outside-within
stance’, and she suggests that it is a position articulated very often by black women
because of their role as domestic workers in white homes. There they were on
intimate terms with the children of the family…but were also made to know that
they did not belong… Frye suggests a similar subject position for white lesbians and
gays, but one which is enabled for different reasons; by acting straight they can be
inside but also watch as outsiders.
94 HEIDI J.NAST AND AUDREY KOBAYASHI/
It would also be interesting to explore why the masculinity of the Father is
interiorized and the femininity of Mother is exteriorized (in spatial terms) at the
same time that the Father is deemed phallic and the Mother castrated, reversing
associations of exteriority and interiority at the level of the body.
PART II
(RE)NEGOTIATIONS
96
6
GENDERING NATIONHOOD
A feminist engagement with national identity
Joanne R.Sharp
INTRODUCTION
Despite intellectual narratives that describe the increasing internationalization or
globalization of life, realpolitik would seem to suggest that nation-states continue to be
significant actors in the constitution of international society. National self-determination
has been a prevalent source of legitimation in many political struggles and national
statehood is a requirement for representation in many global bodies. National identity is a
central aspect of contemporary subjectivity and yet, certainly within the discipline of
geography, its articulation with gender has been largely ignored (but see Johnson 1995;
Marston 1990; Nash 1994). This chapter represents an investigation into some of the
genderings of nation in both academic theories of national identity and in the operation of
nationalisms in the materiality of everyday life.
The silencing of gendered identities of nationalism is due in part to the taken-for-
granted nature of national identity in the contemporary world system. Although the
gendering of nationalism has been interrogated from some post-colonial locations (for
example Chatterjee 1993; Spivak and Guha 1988) nationalism and gender in the ‘First’
and ‘Second’ Worlds has received much less coverage (but again see, for example,
Johnson 1995; Marston 1990; Nash 1994). I want to take examples of nationalism and
gender in the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe. Here nationalism is
foregrounded as the new communities seek to unite territory around old national and
ethnic identities that have been suppressed for half a century, and the tensions between
national and gendered identities are very clear indeed.
I will conclude with a short discussion of what my analysis of the relationship between
national and gendered communities might say to a radical democratic feminist politics.
THEORIES OF NATIONALISM
‘At the origin of every nation’, states Geoffrey Bennington (1990:121) ‘we find a story of
the nation’s origin.’ This seemingly paradoxical definition of the nation is central to my
argument about the convergence of national and gendered identities. Bennington’s
statement suggests that trying to find a national essence at the formative point of national
98 JOANNE P.SHARP/
history is a hopeless quest. The nation is created not through an originary moment or
culturally distinct essence but through the repetition of symbols that come to represent
the nation’s origin and its uniqueness. National culture and character are ritualistic so that
every repetition of its symbols serves to reinforce national identity. In his classic text What
is a Nation?, Ernest Renan (1990:19) claims that a ‘nation’s existence is…a daily
plebiscite’. Each drawing of maps of nation-state territory, each playing of the national
anthem or laying of wreaths at war memorials, every spectatorship of national sports
events and so on represents this daily affirmation of national identification. Traditions of
ceremony, monument and national celebration have instilled national identity into the
calendar and the landscape. National identity therefore becomes naturalized, its creation
is hidden so that it becomes an unquestioned facet of everyday life.
Bennington’s definition of national identity shares the same post-structural genealogy as
Judith Butler’s description of the social construction of gendered identity. She argues that
gender is constituted not by ‘a founding act but rather a regulated pattern or repetition’
(Butler 1990:145). Like national identity, gendered identity takes on its apparently
‘natural’ presence through the repeated performance of gender norms. In the
performance of identity in everyday life, the two identifications converge. The symbols of
nationalism are not gender neutral but in enforcing a national norm, they implicitly or
explicitly construct a set of gendered norms.
Typically however, intellectual analyses remain silent on the gendered construction of
nationalism. Take for example Benedict Anderson’s now classic analysis of nationalism,
Imagined Communities (1983/1991). The nation is imagined, he claims, because it is not
possible for all members of any nation to know even a small fraction of the other citizens
of the country; and yet nations are communities, very real bonds are perceived as linking
distant people in the same territory. Anderson points to the importance of mass-produced
books and newspapers in vernacular languages—print capitalism in his terms—in the
creation of the imagined community of nation. Books and especially newspapers help to
forge this national identity. They illustrate the coexistence of activities, concerns and
people within the nation-state territory. Readers become aware of a population which
shares their identity. The juxtaposition of stories in the media from various locations
within the nation produces a notion of simultaneity—an empty calendrical time—which
encompasses the entire citizenship in a rhetorical horizontal bond (Anderson 1983/1991).
Anderson’s description of the nation as the product of the imaginations of the citizens of
a territory has proved to be a brilliant insight into the origin and spread of modern
nationalism. He has highlighted the creativity of nation-building—nations are not entirely
invented but constructed out of already existent elements of culture, society and
mythology—aspects of the past and aspirations for the future are woven into the fabric of
daily life in a territory. However, I would suggest that Anderson’s account is
unidirectional. In his focus upon the construction of the nation, he silences the reverse
process, the construction of the national citizen. For not only is the nation imagined to
loom out of an immemorial past and glide towards a limitless future (Anderson 1991:11–
12), but at the same time, it is imagined to be peopled by citizens appropriately cultured
for this mission. Although he does not mention this explicitly, Anderson’s thesis of
imagined community assumes an imagined citizen, and this citizen is gendered.
GENDERING NATIONHOOD/ 99
The national citizen is invoked most vividly in the opening sentences of the second
chapter of Imagined Communities. Anderson (1991:9) claims the following: ‘No more
arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of
Unknown Soldiers.’ it is the very anonymity of the soldier, he continues, which insures
and represents the mythos of the nation: it could be any member in the fraternity of the
imagined community. But surely the Unknown Soldier is not entirely anonymous. We can
all be fairly sure that the soldier is not called Sarah or Lucy or Jane…
The imagined bonding between individuals and the nation in narratives of national
identification is differentiated by gender. Men are incorporated into the nation
metonymically. As the Unknown Soldier could potentially be any man who has laid down
his life for his nation, the nation is embodied within each man and each man comes to
embody the nation. This is the horizontal fraternity to which Anderson refers. Women
are scripted into the national imaginary in a different manner. Women are not equal to
the nation but symbolic of it. Many nations are figuratively female—Britannia, Marianne
and Mother Russia come immediately to mind. In the national imaginary, women are
mothers of the nation or vulnerable citizens to be protected. Anne McClintock has
observed that in this symbolic role, women ‘are typically construed as the symbolic
bearers of the nation but are denied any direct relation to national agency’ (McClintock
1993:62). It is the metonymic bond of male citizens who must act to save or promote the
female nation. Many commentators have mentioned, for example, women’s conspicuous
presence at demonstrations throughout Eastern Europe in 1989, and their equally
conspicuous absence from negotiating tables and governments ever since (see Einhorn
1991; Kiss 1991).
A number of commentators have recognized the importance of risking one’s life for
one’s country in the construction of national citizenship (see Tickner 1992; Yuval-Davis
1991). This role of good citizenship is not one generally offered to women. Although,
increasingly there are women in active military duty, recent media coverage has not
represented this trend as progressive. Matthew Sparke describes reactions to American
women in action during the Gulf War:
…the way the media focused on women who went away leaving children behind
brought to light the most hallowed and…significant of American concerns, the
demise of the nuclear family. The participation of women also helped make more
manifest the masculinity of the war machine in general, with grave faces of concern
at women going missing in action, and with men…bemoaning the ‘feminization of
the American military’.
(Sparke 1994:1072)
Much concern has been voiced over the dangers for women in front-line positions. This was
symbolized by reactions to the sexual assault of American army officer Rhonda Cornum
during capture by Iraqis. Despite her own professional downplaying of the experience,
and growing revelations of American non-combatant service-women assaulted by fellow
soldiers at the ‘Tailhook’ Convention and less publicized occasions,1 the danger of foreign
violation of female soldiers is one of the reasons why women ground troops have not been
100 JOANNE P.SHARP/
allowed to fight at the front line (Enloe 1993:223). Prevention of foreign penetration of
the motherland—and women’s bodies as symbols of it—is at the very heart of national-
state security. The female is a prominent symbol of nationalism and honour. But this is a
symbol to be protected by masculine agency.
THE BODY OF THE NATION
Nowhere is the nation more directly embodied as female than in debates over abortion. In
many places, including the re-emerging nation-states of Eastern Europe and the post-
Soviet Union, women’s bodies and the symbolic body of the nation become significantly
enmeshed both discursively and materially in hegemonic nationalist discourse. The
safeguarding of life of/in women is consistently written in terms of the security of the
nation.
Nanette Funk (1993:194) claims that ‘During the Cold War, competition between
East and West Germany had provided an incentive for East Germany to liberalize abortion
laws…’ In a sense, such liberalization symbolized a modern nation-state unfettered by the
demands of religious moralities. Now, as part of the backlash against communist regimes,
previous policies concerning morality, traditional family values or religion are being
overturned. These emotionally charged issues provided lines of resistance during
communist regimes and, in nations with a strong religious (especially Catholic) tradition,
are currently proving to be important elements of post-communist national identification
(Watson 1993:472). Communism is perceived to have eroded traditional values and now
these values are being recuperated, often in rather uncritical form.
In a number of Eastern European countries at the close of socialist or communist rule,
ethnic tensions have made women’s reproductive capabilities an issue of national interest,
even national survival. In Croatia, for example, the nationalist party outlawed abortion in
1992. Slavenka Drakuli (1993:125) has explained what she understands to be the logic of
the Croatians’ decision:
One cannot expect that such a nationalist party, worried that the Croatian nation is
soon going to disappear because Croatian women aren’t giving birth to more than
1.8 children, is going to promote anything progressive for women.
In Serbia on the other hand, there were covert ethnic policies in place which operated
through limitations to childcare and social security provision for women with more than
three children—a family structure characteristic of minority Albanians (Mili 1993:113).
These policies therefore have differential national effects. Here, nationalism is aimed
more consciously and overtly towards women’s bodies. In the war in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, the rape of Bosnian minority women by Serb soldiers—in many cases action
ordered of them—solidifies all too clearly the links between individual female bodies and
the nation in both nationalist rhetoric and realpolitik.
GENDERING NATIONHOOD/ 101
NATION, FAMILY AND FEMINISM
The revival of nationalism across Eastern Europe has made all too clear the tensions
between the requirements of national unity and feminist demands. Interpreters of post-
communism in Eastern Europe note that, despite cultural and historical differences
between individual states and nations, feminism is an identity that is consistently rejected
throughout the region. The presence of feminist movements is significant in my argument
for the construction of gendered subjects in that feminism represents a self-conscious
politicization of gendered identity.2 I think that it is first important to understand the
construction of gender relations under communism in order to explain why it is that
feminism does not have the prominence within contemporary nationalist debates there
that Western feminist analysts might expect.
In demarcating a distinctive communist and post-communist voice however, I am
silencing cultural differences among Eastern European states. There is a danger, when
talking of characteristics common to post-communist countries, of replicating the East-
West geo-political opposition of the Cold War period. There are significant cultural
differences among the countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR, including pre-
communist political structure, economic development, degree of liberalization permitted
after Stalin’s death, linkages between intellectual dissent and working-class movements,
influence of non-European cultures and so on. In addition, there are similarities between
gender relations in the (post-) communist countries and in the West. However, I believe
that there are sufficiently significant common trends in these countries emerging from
several decades of communist governance to justify a joint discussion of them. This shared
history offers an experience which differs from the scripting of gendered subjectivity in
other places.
Feminism has a different social location in European post-communist cultures than in
Western Europe. During the communist period, the primary division in society was not
public/private per se but a division ‘between public (mendacious, ideological) and private
(dignified, truthful) discourses’ (Einhorn 1993:3). The private sphere of the family provided
the space of resistance in opposition to the public space of the state. Václav Havel and
George Konrád cynically called this space ‘anti-politics’ to symbolize rejection of state
political action. In essence then the family provided a kind of civil society (Goven 1993).
Furthermore, the regaining of a ‘traditionally prescribed gender identity is an important
aspect of nostalgia for “normality’” which people anticipate current change will provide
(Watson 1993:473).
The domestic does not have the same connotations in Eastern Europe as it does in the
West. The commonplace binary which Doreen Massey (this volume) notes as existing
between home and work does not apply here: the dualisms immanent/transcendent,
emotional/rational, private/public, female/male do not correspond to distinctions
between domestic and work spheres in Eastern Europe. In the domestic sphere, political
discussions were conducted around the kitchen table, the home represented the only place
for open discussion like this; it was here rather than in any public sphere that the
possibility for transcendence occurred. This spatiality is bound to have influenced the
reproduction of gendered identities in a different way from those described by Massey.
102 JOANNE P.SHARP/
This alternative division of social spheres has had two significant effects on the
development of gendered consciousness in Eastern European countries. First, women’s
ability to leave the domestic sphere to find work is not the same symbol of liberation as it
is for middle-class liberal feminists3 in the West. Under communism, full employment did
not represent a fulfilment of the right to work; work outside the home was mandatory.
Women’s work was concentrated in blue-collar sectors of the economy (Dölling 1991:9).
Furthermore, in this mode of socialist equality, there was no reduction of women’s
domestic labour when they left the home to work; they had to shoulder this ‘double
burden’. Thus, movement outside the home was seen by women ambivalently. Hauser et
al. (1993:261) state that ‘[m] any Polish women cannot decide if their employment under
communism marked liberation or oppression’.
Second, because the family occupied the social space posed in opposition to the state,
women were able to effect few changes to familial or gender roles which would be
accepted as progressive by mainstream society. The family symbolized free space in
contrast to the state and this tended to deflect attention away from power dynamics
operating within the family. Because of the dualism family/state, women who criticized
the family were frequently presented as in collusion with the state and women’s
internalization of the dualism has made them reluctant to question this division. There has
in fact been a devaluation of the language of women’s emancipation because of its
association with the rhetoric of communist regimes (Anastasya Posadskaya in Molyneux
1991:135). In effect this has discouraged women from pressing for state intervention in
the ‘private sphere’ or family matters as is the case with many women’s movements in the
West (Einhorn 1993:6).
This tendency has continued into the present: the notion of female emancipation is
strongly associated with old communist regimes (Jankowska 1991:174) and, as a result, less
attractive to nationalist movements. Feminist issues are either considered leftist (Funk and
Mueller 1993) and as such become discredited by association with the old regimes, or
perceived as representing an unconditional acceptance of Western values (Fábián 1993:
74). Further, despite many apparently favourable conditions for the emergence of a
feminist consciousness across the former communist states, there has not been this
expression of identity. Kiss has suggested that this is because emancipation was granted by
the state—equality (or at least the rhetoric of equality) was imposed from above—rather
than women engaging in social change to achieve their own emancipation (Kiss 1991:51).
Women are often blamed for social problems. In his book Perestroika, Mikhail
Gorbachev (1987:117) claimed that ‘women no longer have time to perform their
everyday daily duties at home…many of our problems…are partially caused by the
weakening of family ties and slack attitude to family responsibilities’. Gorbachev,
evidently addressing a presumed male citizenry despite the universalistic aspirations of his
book, asked, ‘what we should do to make it possible for women to return to their purely
womanly mission’ (1987: 117; emphasis mine).
This attitude legitimates women’s return to the domestic sphere and helps to alleviate
high unemployment caused by the closure of state controlled industry by nationalist
governments. Furthermore, previously state-sponsored provision of childcare and
maternity leave are among the first services to be discontinued in the transition to a
GENDERING NATIONHOOD/ 103
capitalist economy. As I have already mentioned, this attitude is not held only by men.
Feminism is weak in Eastern European countries as it is widely regarded as anti-man or de-
feminizing.4 These feelings are enforced in attempts to unite the community in the face of
hardship. Bulgarian feminist Maria Todova (1993) tells of claims which state that since
Bulgaria is at such a low socioeconomic level, society cannot ‘afford’ to become divided
along sex or gender lines, as if somehow it were feminism not sexism which split the
community. What this represents is a movement of gender issues from the public sphere
of contested politics into a private sphere of cultural matters in the manner that Partha
Chatterjee (1993:133) has described during India’s struggle for national independence.
During the nationalist revolt the ‘women’s question’ disappeared as a political issue, he
observes, because this inner domain of sovereignty was removed from the public sphere
of political contest with the colonial state. It was argued that the ‘women’s question’
would return to the public sphere of politics once independence had been attained.
Cynthia Enloe, however, has questioned the tactics described by Todova and
Chatterjee. There is of course a rationality to the suppression of difference in the name of
unity when facing a common foe or struggling toward a common goal. But is it possible for
a change in leadership, however revolutionary, to facilitate emancipation for all if gender
problems are not addressed before and during the revolution (Enloe 1989:57)? Gender
cannot be teased out of other relations of power which constitute individual subjectivity
but must be seen to exist contingently in all situations—no one can be without gender and
in most social locations this is a powerful aspect of subjectivity. If this is the case then
surely the postponement of a consideration of gender issues in the name of the
construction of the nation-state will irrevocably alter the direction the emerging nation-
state will take. The very nature of national identity will be different depending upon
whether or not it deals with gender issues at the outset. National identity, therefore, is
not something which can be retrieved intact from the past and slotted back into the heart
of contemporary culture unchanged, it is constituted in particular times and places
through relations of power already existent in society.
Certainly this is a problem currently being faced by nationalisms across Eastern
Europe. Maria Todova (1993:30) describes what she sees as an irony in attempts at
moving towards democracy in what was Yugoslavia:
The illusion is that once democracy is achieved women, as part of the body politic,
will automatically benefit. This framework recalls classical socialist theory: once
socialism is installed, it is said, women will be automatically emancipated.
Anti (1991:150) has also noted the privileging of the national interest over the interests of
‘the so called “social minorities’”. In one sense, for women (as for other marginalized
groups), structurally nothing has changed in the move from socialist-communist societies
to national ones. Once again one subject dominates social identification—now the
national subject is preeminent whereas in the previous regime all subjectivities were
secondary to the worker (Anti 1991).
The question which immediately comes to mind is why it is that ‘one politics [is] to be
spoken in terms of an-other politics’ (Radhakrishnan 1992: 81). Why is it that the politics
104 JOANNE P.SHARP/
of gender relations should be forced into the mould of national identity? Expecting that
the achievement of democracy or socialism or national self-determination will
automatically produce equality is to rely upon too simplistic a notion of social change. It
assumes a binary of good system-bad system and, perhaps even more importantly,
assumes that democracy, socialism or national self-determination are static social
conditions rather than processes of social transformation. No society is entirely
democratic, socialist or self-determined; the regulation of social life is overdetermined so
that a state is constituted by an combination of ideal types.
It is clear that changes in Eastern Europe have been made to the social and economic
organization of countries but gender relations have remained relatively unchanged.
Presumably one explanation of this could be that these socioeconomic changes are not
sufficiently widespread for effects on gender relations to be noticeable at present.
Feminist issues will come later. But why should this be so? Will attitudes to women’s
roles in social life be transformed later so allowing the inclusion of women into the
national citizenship proper?
GENDER AND THE NATIONAL COMMUNITY
Iris Young (1990) has suggested that, from an orthodox point of view, communities are
based upon an argument which posits the necessity for the privileging of unity over
difference. The fear is that the alternative, the recognition of differences within the
community would destroy the agency of community identity. But it is not necessary to
chose either extreme of unitary identity or immeasurable difference. All subjects are
constituted through a plurality of facets, but, in Chantal Mouffe’s (1992:372) words,
this plurality does not involve the coexistence, one by one, of a plurality of subject
positions but rather the constant subversion and overdetermination of one by the
others, which make possible the generation of ‘totalizing effects’ within a field
characterized by open and indeterminate frontiers.
Although there are no pre-existent or inherent linkages between subject positions, this
does not mean that each exists in individual isolation. Contingent relations are constantly
forming, creating bonds and commonalties between these positions.
Following Mouffe’s argument, I believe that transformation to democracy cannot be
successful without the creation of a radical democratic process from the outset, a process
which acknowledges the diversity that must be addressed in creating equality: sameness in
treatment is not equivalent to the creation of equality. There is a danger that the general
good may be valued above that of any discernible group. Following this hierarchical logic,
the general good of women would come above any particular group of women so that
some (sex workers, for example) will be excluded from the construction of demands. I do
not argue against the social necessity of priorities in social reform, it would be utopian to
believe that everything can be changed at once. But I do believe that the making of
priorities should be open and negotiated rather than concealed under apparently universal
claims of a ‘true’ national interest and identity.
GENDERING NATIONHOOD/ 105
This discussion should not be taken to imply that the nation-state embodies some kind
of plot which is attempting to control women in the name of male supremacy. I have been
describing the national construction of women but this is only part of the constitution of
gender relations. The role of men in the reproduction of national cultures is similarly
constructed. Obviously not all men want to have to prove themselves part of their
national community by aggressively defending national borders, just as there are women
who do support this project. The modern nation-state should be viewed instead, I believe,
as a discursive practice in the manner that Foucault proposed. In such a practice, power is
not entirely concentrated in the hands of a ruling elite but is diffuse. All subjects, ruler
and ruled alike, are constrained by their location in the discursive networks underwriting
society. In Foucault’s (1980:188) own terms,
For the State to function in the way that it does, there must be, between male and
female…quite specific relations of domination which have their own configurations
and relative autonomy… Power is constructed and functions on the basis of particular
powers, myriad issues, myriad effects of power.
Nevertheless, in the present construction of gendered relations within the nation-state,
we can see a privileging of masculinity. Quite simply, the position of men in national
rhetoric grants them significantly more agency.
But just as this gendering of the national privileges the masculine over the feminine, so
too does it privilege one particular notion of masculinity. Nationalistic rhetoric is
characteristically heterosexual/heterosexist, most especially in its promotion of the
nuclear family. The Eastern European feminist writing that I read for this chapter, for
example, is consistent in its lack of concern for sexuality.
Thus far I have examined the scripting of the gendered subject into the narrative of
national community, but the constitution of nation is not only a process which occurs
within the confines of the nation itself: national identity is also constructed through
engagements with the international realm (see, for example, Campbell 1992). The daily
plebiscite of national identification constructs not only the national ‘us’ but also ‘them’,
those who are outside and different. War memorials for example do not celebrate the
victims of conflict but our dead. The nature of this construction of others is of
fundamental importance to national identification (Johnson 1995).
The boundary separating the national from the international is thus also dependent
upon gendered identities. Foreign territorial aspirations are usually described as being
aggressive, but unnaturally so, a perversion of the ‘normal’ manner. Drawing on the
traditions of Orientalism, Iraq was frequently evoked in gendered terms during the Gulf
War, most blatantly in its ‘rape of Kuwait’. Often perversity was defined from a
homophobic position which accounts for the multiple plays in jokes and cartoons on the
closeness of the name Saddam to the word sodomy (see Enloe 1993: Ch. 1). Also from
the Orientalist tradition, the rhetoric and military practice of the Gulf War demonstrated
a fear of an uncontrolled female sexuality, a sexuality which had to be disciplined and
domesticated (Sparke 1994).
106 JOANNE P.SHARP/
This discursive practice represents not only words but has significant material effect.
Women have been systematically excluded from the international realm. Few women
enter into the history of international relations, certainly after the age of European
diplomacy by intermarriage of royal families has passed. The arena of international
relations has been written as ‘high politics’:
This supposedly autonomous realm of raison d’état is now staffed by national
security managers, supposedly expert in the art of coordinating diplomacy, covert
action, intelligence, and military preparation… [A]rguments from the Oliver
Norths of this world inform us that this sphere of human activity is both beyond the
comprehension of most Western publics and far too important for democratic
oversight.
(Dalby 1994:534)
Yet the international system is dependent upon gender norms: by turning attention from
key leaders, and refocusing upon the lives of those who are excluded from the formal
sphere of high politics, it is possible to see the other side of the working of international
political (and representational) economy. Enloe (1989, 1993) indeed goes as far as to say
that international relations depend upon gender relations: the international division of
labour requires the feminization of labour forces and the privatization of reproductive
activities; tourism for example depends upon sensual mythologies of exotic places and
cheap labour to service tourists.
CONCLUSION
Gender and nationality are significant elements of contemporary subject identity and yet
neither gender nor nationality are a priori categories. Subjects are overdetermined by
locations in multiple groups and processes. These multiple identifications are not additive;
it is not possible to distil one aspect of identity such as gender or nationality for
examination independent of other aspects (socioeconomic position, race, nationality and
so forth). In other words, gender and national identities are, to an extent, constituted
differently in each location. Even in this initial account of nation and gender for example,
I have found it necessary to examine the construction of domesticity and international
politics. By way of a conclusion I would like to pull out two further themes which have
run through the chapter.
First, the unification of a people into nationhood is not a simple process. The creation
of the appearance of unity is only possible through struggle, in the case described here, a
contest between gendered identities. This is obviously not a simple case of men versus
women but instead a recognition of the pressures and divisions which arise from
employing ‘gender to fashion a national community in somebody’s, but not everybody’s
image’ (Enloe 1993: 250).
Second, I hope to have illustrated the ambivalence of certain categories traditionally
employed to discuss identity. The case of Eastern European feminisms has illustrated the
ambivalence of the domestic: it is not only a space of containment of women, it is in
GENDERING NATIONHOOD/ 107
certain places a site of resistance against state requirements for labour, and a space of
radical politics aiming to transcend the status quo. The militarization of national
citizenship has been exclusionary of women. Now, however, women are beginning to
challenge the naturalization of male dominance of the military. While this will erode the
masculinization of the military, providing women with more agency in this institution, it
will be at the expense of any strength that feminism can attain by positing the masculinity
of war, and feminism as an alternative citizenship based upon more peaceful
characteristics usually labelled ‘feminine’.
Out of this ambivalent political process there emerges a feminist analysis which is not
solely concerned with constructing an identity of ‘women as women’ (Mouffe 1992:382)
but with mapping the complex societal relationships which construct dominance and
subjugation: dominance not as a monolith but as overdetermined by a number of
subjugations, one of which is centred around the construction of gender norms and
differences. Feminism as I understand it then, is involved in this project of disentangling
power and dominance, in denaturalizing and opposing the apparently ‘natural’ gender
relations supporting of and supported by other forms of subjugation. Instead of trying to
prove that any given form or scale of feminist discourse is the only one that reveals the
‘real’ essence of womanhood, one might better adopt a perspective that opens up
possibilities for an understanding of the role of gendered identities in the construction of
the multiple forms of subordination underwriting society.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Nancy Duncan for encouraging me to write this paper, and for her
constructive comments on various drafts. Nirmala Ervelles, Doreen Massey and Paul
Routledge also provided invaluable critiques of earlier drafts. Of course, all the usual
disclaimers apply.
NOTES
1 Differential relations between men and women continue in the military, including sexual
harassment. Women’s access to the military does not therefore automatically guarantee
emancipation (Yuval-Davis 1991:64).
2 Communist imposition of women’s ‘liberation’ onto East European societies distorts this
politicization of identity.
3 Of course, going out of the home to find work is not a simple sense of liberation for poor
women in the West either; here too it represents an economic necessity.
4 This sentiment should be understood in the context of material shortages endemic in
communist and socialist countries of this century. Eastern European women often have
difficulty accepting Western feminist critiques of consumerism as manipulating of women’s
identity because of the time they expend attempting to purchase limited commodities.
108
7
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH
TECHNOLOGY
Doreen Massey
One important element in recent feminist analyses of gender has been the investigation
and deconstruction of dualistic thinking. This chapter takes up one aspect of this issue of
dualisms and the construction of gender. It examines the interplay between two particular
dualisms in the context of daily life in and around high-technology industry in the
Cambridge area of England. The focus on dualisms as lived, as an element of daily
practice, is important (see Bourdieu 1977; Moore 1986). For philosophical frameworks
do not ‘only’ exist as theoretical propositions or in the form of the written word. They
are both reproduced and, at least potentially, struggled with and rebelled against, in the
practice of living life. The focus here is on how particular dualisms may both support and
problematize certain forms of social organization around British high-technology industry.
High-technology industry in various guises is seen across the political spectrum as the
hope for the future of national, regional and local economies (Hall 1985) and it is
important therefore to be aware of the societal relations, including those around gender,
which it supports and encourages in its current form of organization.1 In the United
Kingdom ‘high-tech’ industry has been sought after by local areas across the country and
has been the centre-piece of some of the most spectacular local economic success stories of
recent years. In particular, it is the foundation of what has become known as the
Cambridge Phenomenon (Segal Quince & Partners 1985). The investigation reported on
here is of those highly qualified scientists and engineers, working in the private sector in a
range of companies from the tiny to the multinational, who form the core of this new
growth. These are people primarily involved in research, and in the design of new
products. This is the high-status end of high tech. The argument in this chapter takes off
from two important facts about this part of the economy and the scientists who work within
it: first, that the overwhelming majority of them are male; and second, that they work
extremely long hours and on a basis which demands from them very high degrees of both
temporal and spatial flexibility (see Henry and Massey, 1995). It was the conjunction of
these two things which led to the train of enquiry reported here.
REASONS FOR THE LONG HOURS OF WORK
There are three bundles of reasons for the long hours worked by employees in these parts
of the economy.2
110 DOREEN MASSEY/
The first bundle of reasons revolves around the nature of competition between companies
in these high-technology activities. This is the kind of competition which has frequently
been characterized as classically ‘post-Fordist’. Production frequently takes place on a
one-off basis, as the result of specifically negotiated, and competitive, tenders. High up
among the criteria on which tenders are judged is the time within which the contract will
be completed. Moreover, both during and after production there is a strong emphasis on
responsiveness to the customer: in answering enquiries, in solving problems which
emerge during and after installation/delivery of a product, in being there when needed—
even if the telephone call comes through from California in the middle of the night. It is
not so much the inherent unpredictability of R&D as the way in which it is compressed
into the spatio-temporal dimensions required by this particular social construction of
competition which is the issue. ‘Time’ is important to successful competition. The results
should give pause for thought. For these are high-status core workers in what is frequently
heralded as a promising flexible future. The demands which this flexibility places even on
these workers are considerable.3
Moreover, these pressures for long hours are added to by a second bundle of reasons:
those which revolve around the nature of competition within the labour market. There
are a number of strands to this, but the most significant derives from the general character
of this market as a knowledge-based labour market. It is a market in individualized labour
power, valued for its specific learning, experience and knowledge. In order to compete in
this labour market (and others like it) employees must, beyond the necessity of working
the already-long hours required by their companies, continue to reproduce and enhance
the value of their own labour power. They must keep up with the literature, go to
conferences, and maintain the performance of networking, and of talking to the right
people, and so forth. This is additional labour which is put in outside of the hours required
by the company and its success, but equally necessary for the success of the individual
employee. Within the workplaces, too, the interaction between employees can produce a
culture which glorifies long hours of work. Again, this may derive from competition
between individuals, but it may also result from various peer-group pressures —the need
‘not to let the team down’, for instance, can become a form of social compulsion (Halford
and Savage 1995).
But the third reason that the employees in these parts of the economy work such very
long hours is completely different. It is, quite simply, that they love their work.
Figure 7.1 illustrates some aspects of this; the first four quotations are from scientists
themselves, the last two from company representatives. These scientists and engineers
become absorbed by their work, caught up by the interest of it; they don’t like to leave an
element of a problem unsolved before they break off for the evening. The way this is
interpreted, or presented, by different groups varies. Thus, company representatives
speak of the kinds of people they seek to employ as committed and flexible, as
‘motivated’, as ‘able to take pressure’, as not being the kind to watch the clock, and they
not infrequently acknowledge that this characteristic may derive from pure interest in the
work itself. A number of company representatives were quite clear that their search for
employees was directed towards finding these characteristics. The scientists themselves
often talk of their delight in the nature of the work, of its intrinsic interest. Where these
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY/ 111
Figure 7.1 Enthusiasm for work leading to longer hours
male scientists have partners, however (and all the partners we identified were women),
the partner’s view of it was often more cynical, more tinged with the observation of
obsessiveness, or of workaholism.4
A couple of points are worth making at this juncture. First, one’s immediate response
to the working lives of these employees may well be critical. Certainly, as we carried out
the research, ours was so, in principle at least. Yet all of the reasons for this perhaps
excessive duration of work also have their other side: each is thoroughly ambiguous
though each in a different way. In terms of sectoral competition, ‘putting the customer
first’ is no bad thing (especially if you are the customer). Yet the demands placed on
employees can be enormous. In terms of the labour market, it has usually been
interpreted as an advance that one’s value is based on knowledge and experience rather
than, for example, on lack of unionization, or the low level of the wages one is prepared
to accept. Moreover, the individualization of the labour market must in some senses be an
advance, certainly over the treatment of workers as a mass, as an undifferentiated pool of
nameless labour power. The idea that we are heading towards an economy and society which
is based on knowledge, however unlikely in fact, has always been treated as a change for
the better. Finally, the fact that people enjoy their work, and that they enjoy it in part
112 DOREEN MASSEY/
precisely because it is knowledge-producing (in the employees themselves) can only be
seen as an improvement over the kinds of jobs which are characterized above all by mind-
numbing monotony and a desire to get to the end of the day. After years of exposing the
fact and the effects of deskilling I find it hard to criticize jobs because they are too
absorbing and demand too much in the way of skill-enhancement! (Yet this very dilemma
may point to the fact that the problem has been wrongly posed. Maybe it is the
polarization between deskilled and super-skilled which should be the focus of our
attention…?)
A second point worth noting is that the second and third of these reasons for long hours
(the nature of the labour market and the love of the work), though perhaps less so in its
particular articulation the first (the nature of competition in the sector), are shared by
many other occupations and parts of the economy, especially professional sectors and
perhaps most particularly academe. Some of the issues which arise are therefore of much
more general relevance, beyond the relatively small sectors of high technology in
Cambridge. Certainly, they posed questions to us personally, as we did the research. Yet
in other ways, the particular manner in which these pressures function, and the kinds of
social characteristics with which they are associated, are quite specific to individual parts of
the economy.
DUALISMS AND MASCULINITIES
One of the specificities of these high-technology sectors is bound up with the reasons why
the employees are so attached to their jobs and how these are interpreted. The dynamics
in play here are bound up with elements of masculinity, and of a very specific form of
masculinity. Above all, the attachment to these jobs is bound up with their character as
scientific, as being dependent upon (and, perhaps equally importantly, confined to) the
exercise of rationality and of logic. Within the structure of the economy, these jobs
represent an apex of the domination of reason and science. It is this which lends them
much of their status and which in part accounts for the triumphalist descriptions they are
so often accorded in journalistic accounts. What is demanded here is the ability to think
logically.5 It is, in other words, a sector of the economy whose prime characteristics, for
these employees, are structured around one of the oldest dualisms in Western thought—
that between Reason and non-Reason; and it is identified with that pole—Reason—which
has been socially constructed, and validated, as masculine (see, especially, Lloyd 1984).
Science, moreover, in this dualistic formulation is seen as being on the side of History
(capital H) as progression. It makes breakthroughs; it is involved in change, in progress. And
it is here that it links up to the second dualism which emerged as this research proceeded:
that between transcendence and immanence. In its aspect of transcendence, science is
deeply opposed to that supposed opposite, the static realm of living-in-the-present, of
simple reproduction, which has been termed immanence. This opposition between
transcendence and immanence is also a dualism with a long history in Western thought.
And again it is transcendence which has been identified as masculine (he who goes out and
makes history) as against a feminine who ‘merely’ lives and reproduces. As Lloyd (1984:
101) argues:
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY/ 113
Transcendence’, in its origins, is a transcendence of the feminine. In its Hegelian
version, it is associated with a repudiation of what is supposedly signified by the
female body, the ‘holes’ and ‘slime’ which threaten to engulf free subjecthood (see
Sartre, 1943, pp. 613–14) … In both cases, of course, it is only from a male
perspective that the feminine can be seen as what must be transcended. But the
male perspective has left its marks on the very concepts of ‘transcendence’ and
‘immanence’.
The two dualisms (Reason : non-Reason, and Transcendence : Immanence) are thus not
the same, though there are interrelations between them.
The reasons for these characterizations, and for the construction of these dichotomies
in the first place, and their relationship to gender, have been much investigated (see, for
instance, Dinnerstein 1987; Easlea 1981; Hartsock 1985; Keller 1982, 1985; O’Brien,
1981; Wajcman 1991). Many of these authors have examined the relation between the
constitution of science on the one hand and of gender on the other. David Noble’s (1992)
history of ‘a world without women’ tells the long story of the capturing by enclosed
masculine societies of the kind of knowledge production which was to receive the highest
social valuation.
Such dualist thinking has, as has already been said, been subject to much criticism.
However, the nature of the criticism has changed and been disputed. In The Second Sex
(1949/1972) Simone de Beauvoir famously urged women to enter the sphere of
transcendence. In recent years, however, it has rather been the fact of thinking
dualistically which has been objected to. Dualistic thinking has been criticized both in
general as a mode of conceptualizing the world and in particular in its relation to gender
and sexual politics. In general terms, dualistic thinking leads to the closing-off of options,
and to the structuring of the world in terms of either/or. In relation to gender and
sexuality it leads, likewise, to the construction of heterosexual opposites and to the
reduction of genders and sexualities to two counterposed possibilities. Moreover, even
when at first sight they may seem to have little to do with gender, a wide range of such
dualisms are in fact thoroughly imbued with gender connotations, one side being socially
characterized as masculine, the other as feminine, and the former being accordingly
socially valorized. The power of these connotational structures is immense, and it is
apparently not much lessened—indeed it is possibly only rendered more flexible—by the
existence among them of inconsistencies and contradictions.
It was only gradually, in the course of considering the interview material and the nature
of work in the scientific sectors of the economy, that the issue of dualisms emerged as
significant in this research. It was the things which people said, the way life was organized
and conceptualized, the unspoken assumptions which repeatedly emerged, which pushed
the enquiry in this direction.
Thus, for example, it was evident that in Cambridge these scientific employees were
specifically attached to those aspects of their work which embody ‘Reason’ and
‘Transcendence’. What they really enjoy is its logical and scientific nature. They
themselves when talking may glory in the scientificity of their work, and frequently
exhibit delight in the puzzle-solving logical-game nature of it all.6 Their partners
114 DOREEN MASSEY/
comment upon their obsession with their computers, and both partners and company
representatives talk of boys with toys (one representative candidly pointing out that these
guys like their jobs because the company can buy far more expensive toys than the men
themselves could ever afford):
‘We have toys which they can’t afford. You know engineers, big kids really; buy
them a computer, you know you’ve got them…you know [they are] quite happy if
you can give them the toys to play with.’
This attachment to computers may be seen in this context as reflecting two rather different
things, both of which are distinct from the more technologically oriented love of ‘fiddling
about with machines’. On the one hand these machines, and what can be done with them,
embody the science in which the employees are involved. They are aids and stimuli to
logical thought. On the other hand their relative predictability (and thus controllability) as
machines insulates them from the uncertainties, and possibly the emotional demands, of
the social sphere.
The aspect of transcendence comes through in the characterizations of the job as
‘struggling’ with problems, as ‘making breakthroughs’; whether they think of themselves
as far from it or right up against it there is the notion of a scientific-technical ‘frontier’.
One scientist, reflecting on the reasons for his long hours of work, talked of being ‘driven
by success’ and the fact that he was ‘always reaching higher’. Another scientist in the same
company, but who was quite critical of the hours worked by others, argued that for some
people crisis is part of the job culture: ‘it’s a sort of badge of courage’. Other words, too,
reflect the effort and the struggle of it all: ‘If I stagger out of here at 11 o’clock at night I
really don’t feel like going home and cooking’. There’s the quest: ‘As a parent I try to
spend as much time as I can with [the child] but in my quest for whatever it is I tend to
work very hard’. There’s the compulsion: ‘if you’ve gotta do it then you’ve gotta do it’.
And, hopefully, there’s the triumph:
‘his wife is much more even-tempered than my wife who says sort of “What the
hell, Friday night we have got to go out and don’t you forget it”, but [my wife]
accepts the fact that if there is nothing on specifically and nothing to be done, that
the chances are that I will disappear, and reappear looking cross-eyed and what not,
with a slightly triumphant smile or look downcast.’
That quotation illustrates also a further phenomenon: that the self-conception of many of
these employees is built around this work that they do and around this work specifically as
scientific activity:
‘the machine in front of them is their home…’
‘It is their science which dominates their lives and interests…’
Moreover, this glorification of their scientific/research and development capabilities on
the part of the scientists can go along with a quite contrasting deprecation of their ability
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY/ 115
to do other things, especially (in the context of our interviews) their incompetence in the
face of domestic labour. This is work which it is quite acceptable not to be good at. Thus:
laundry? ‘I shove it in the machine’; cleaning? ‘I do it when it gets too much’;
shopping? ‘Tescos, Friday or Saturday’; cooking? ‘I put something in the microwave.
Nothing special. As long as it’s quick and easy that’s good enough for me’;
gardening then? ‘when necessary’.
There is here none of the pleasurable elaboration on the nature of the tasks which typifies
descriptions of the paid scientific work. The answers are short and dismissive.
Such attitudes are important in indicating what is considered acceptable as part of this
scientist’s own presentation of himself. Not only is the identification with scientific
research very strong and positive, but it seems equally important for him to establish what
is not part of his picture of himself. Domestic labour and caring for his daily needs and
living environment is definitely out. It is not just that scientific activity is positively rated
which is significant but the fact that it is sharply cut off from other aspects of life. This is
precisely the old dualism showing its head in personal self-identification and daily life.
What was going on was a real rejection of the possibility of being good at both science and
domestic labour. A framing of life in terms of ‘either/or’.
In this case, and in some others, such downplaying of the rest of life extended to all
non-work/scientific activities. But such extreme positions were not common and seem to
be more evident among single men than those with partners, and, even more markedly,
than among those with children. Some men were clearly aware of the issue. For one
scientist, a new baby had ‘completely changed his life’ (what this meant was that he went
home early almost every other night), and yet the difficulty of balancing or integrating the
sides of life was evident:
‘I feel frustrated…when…after this baby that’s changed my life… I go home early
every other day (almost) and pick her up at 4.35, take her home, play with her
until bedtime, and… I find that sometimes that’s quite frustrating, and keeps me
away from work. I mean—it’s fulfilling in its own right, but it’s… I’m conscious
of the fact that… I call it a half-day, you know. I find it frustrating.’
Finally, some of the comments made about the scientists by (some of) the partners were
particularly sharp and revealing:
They’re
‘…not very socially adequate.’
‘…better with things than with people.’
‘Work gets the best of him.’
‘Work is the centre of his life.’
One of the very few female company representatives (that is, a member of management,
not of the scientific team) reflected: ‘Well, when I first joined the company there were
116 DOREEN MASSEY/
twelve people here and they stuck me in an office with the development team and it was a
nightmare. I really hated it. They didn’t talk, they didn’t know how to talk to a woman,
they really didn’t.’
What appears to be going on, in and around these jobs, is the construction/ reinforcement
of a particular kind of masculinity (that is, of characteristics which are socially coded
masculine) around reason and scientificity, abstract thought and transcendence. It is a
process which relates to some of the dualisms of Western thought and which, as we shall
see further, has concrete effects in people’s lives.
Such characteristics of the employees, it must be stressed, relate to the more general
nature of these jobs. These are jobs which derive their prestige precisely from their
abstract and theoretical nature. They are jobs the very construction and content of which
are the result of a long process of separation of conception from execution (and of the
further reinforcement of this distinction through social and spatial distancing). They are
jobs, in other words, which enable and encourage the flourishing of these kinds of social
characteristics. Moreover the long hours which, for the various reasons discussed above,
are worked in them enforce both their centrality within the employees’ lives and a passing
on of the bulk of the work of reproduction to others. In Cynthia Cockburn’s words:
‘Family commitments must come second. Such work is clearly predicated on not having
responsibility for childcare, indeed on having no one to look after, and ideally someone to
look after you’ (Cockburn 1985:181). The implication of all this is not only that these
jobs are an embodiment in working life of science and transcendence, but also that in their
very construction and the importance in life which they thereby come to attain, they
enforce a separation of these things from other possible sides of life (the Other sides of
Reason and of Transcendence) and thus embody these characteristics as part of a dualism.
Moreover by expelling the other poles of these dualisms into the peripheral margins of
life, and frequently on to other people (whether unpaid partner or paid services), they
establish the dualisms as a social division of labour. The pressure is for someone else to
carry the other side of life.
Moreover, if there is indeed a form of masculinity bound up with all this, then the
companies in these parts of the economy let it have its head; they trade on it and benefit
from it, and—most significantly from the point of view of the argument in this chapter—
they thereby reinforce it. Furthermore, the possession of these characteristics, which are
socially coded masculine and which are related to forms of codification which resonate with
dichotomous distinctions between two genders, makes people more easily exploitable by
these forms of capital. There is here a convergence of desires/interests between a certain
sort of masculinity and a certain sort of capital.7
This is not to say that what is at issue here is simple ‘sexism’. Our interviews —
certainly as analysed so far—did not reveal the explicit sexism found in some other
studies, including Cockburn’s (1985). We did not encounter much in the way of strong
statements about the unsuitability of women for these jobs. There were a few such
statements but they were infrequent in the overall context of our interviews. Nor was it
clear that the male scientists who displayed the characteristics which have been described
always recognized them explicitly as masculine (although further probing may well have
unearthed more evidence on this score). The point, however, is that what is at issue here
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY/ 117
is not so much overt discrimination or sexism as deeply internalized dualisms which
structure personal identities and daily lives, which have effects upon the lives of others
through structuring the operation of social relations and social dynamics, and which derive
their masculine/feminine coding from the deep socio-philosophical underpinnings of
Western society.
THE WORK/HOME BOUNDARY
The boundary between work and ‘home’ has often been seen, and in this case can be seen,
as an instantiation of the dualism between transcendence and immanence.8 At work the
frontiers of history are pushed forward; at home (or so the formulation would have us
believe) there is a world of feelings, emotions and (simple) reproduction. Lloyd (1984:
50) once again, summarizes the complex arguments which have evolved:
We owe to Descartes an influential and pervasive theory of mind, which provides
support for a powerful version of the sexual division of mental labour. Women
have been assigned responsibility for that realm of the sensuous which the Cartesian
Man of Reason must transcend, if he is to have true knowledge of things. He must
move on to the exercise of disciplined imagination, in most of scientific activity;
and to the rigours of pure intellect, if he would grasp the ultimate foundations of
science. Woman’s task is to preserve the sphere of the intermingling of mind and
body, to which the Man of Reason will repair for solace, warmth and relaxation. If
he is to exercise the most exalted form of Reason, he must leave soft emotions and
sensuousness behind; woman will keep them intact for him.
The fact that all this can be, and has been, severely criticized in terms simply of its
descriptive accuracy, most particularly from a feminist perspective, has not destroyed its
power as a connotational system. What is at issue in the ideological power of these
dualisms is not only the material facts to which they (often only very imperfectly) relate
(many women don’t like housework either, and many female paid employees negotiate a
work: home boundary), but the complex connotational systems to which they refer.
Moreover, the negotiation of this boundary has emerged in our research as a crucial
element in the construction of these men’s attitude to their work, and in their
construction of themselves.
One of the avenues of enquiry which originally sparked my interest in designing this
research derived from statements made in interviews in a previous project (Massey et al.
1992). That project also was concerned with investigating high-tech firms, in this case
specifically those located on science parks, and one of the recurring themes in a number
of the interviews concerned the blurring of boundaries. ‘The boundary between work and
play disappears’ was a formulation which stuck in my mind. What absorbed me at that
point was the characterization of everything outside of paid work as ‘play’ and, especially
given the very long hours worked in the companies we were investigating, it prompted
me to wonder who it was that performed the domestic labour which was necessary to
keep these guys fed and watered and able to turn up for work each morning. (The work
118 DOREEN MASSEY/
of ‘domestic labour’, who performs it and how, and the complex intra-household
negotiations over it, is the subject of another forthcoming paper.) But what the
interviewee had in mind was the fact that work itself had many of the characteristics of
play: that you get paid for doing things you enjoy, you have flexible working
arrangements, you take work home, you are provided with expensive toys. In this
formulation, there really is no boundary between paid work and play. In this way of
understanding things, ‘the home’ in the sense of the domestic, of reproduction, of the
sphere of emotions, sensuality and feelings, or of immanence, does not enter the picture at
all.
How then do we interpret what actually happens to the boundary between work and
home in the case of these scientists in Cambridge? There are two stages to the argument.
First, there is indeed a dislocation of the boundary between work and home. Most
particularly, this is true in a temporal and spatial sense. Moreover it is a dislocation which
primarily takes the form of an invasion of the space and time of one sphere (the home) by
the priorities and preoccupations of the other (paid work). This can be illustrated in a
whole range of ways. The high degree of temporal flexibility in terms of numbers of hours
worked turns out in practice to be a flexibility far more in one direction than in the other.
While the demands, and attractions, of work are responded to by working evenings,
weekends, Bank Holidays and so forth—and it is expected that this will be so, it is the
‘commitment’, and ‘flexibility’ required to be an accepted member of this part of the
economy—the ‘time-in-lieu’ thereby in principle accrued is far less often taken and
indeed has to be more formally negotiated, and the demands of home intrude into work
far less than vice versa (see Henry and Massey, 1995). Or again, spatially, work is very
frequently taken home. A high proportion of these employees have machines, modems
and/or studies, in the space of the domestic sphere, but there is no equivalent presence of
the concerns of home within the central space of paid work (at the most obvious level, for
example, not one of the companies we investigated had a creche). One of the company
representatives we interviewed spoke of the employees being ‘virtually here’ (in the
workplace) even when working at home, because of the telecommunications links
installed between the two places. Moreover this raises a third and very significant aspect
of this one-way invasion. A lot of our interviewees spoke of the scientists’ difficulty in
turning off thoughts about work, of not thinking about the problem you are puzzling
over, even when physically doing something quite different. The men wondered if they
should charge to the company time spent thinking in the bath. A few of both men
and partners spoke of episodes when he would get up in the middle of the night to go and
fiddle with some puzzle. Men, partners and sometimes children, commented on minds
being elsewhere while officially this was time for playing with the children or driving the
car on a day out. Here there is a real ‘spatial’ split between mind and body. Here there
really is a capsule of Virtual’ time-space of work within the material place of the home. While
the body performs the rituals of the domestic sphere the mind is preoccupied with the
interests and worries of work.
‘I am well aware of the fact that in many areas, that you are better having the 9–5
pm and everything like that, but I have never found it at all compatible with trying
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY/ 119
to work or trying to pursue a bit of research or a bit of development, to have to
give up at the magic hour or whatever…and I mean you can’t say to somebody you
will think between 9 and 5 pm and you will not think between 5.05 pm and 8.55
am.’
This is eminently understandable, and in many ways an attractive situation —it is good to
have paid employment which is interesting, and it is a challenge to resist the
compartmentalization of life into mutually sealed-off time-spaces. But what is important is
that once again this only works one way. While domestic time is in this sense porous,
work time is not. Indeed, and this is the significant point, it cannot be so. While it is assumed
that one may think about work while playing with the children or while out for the day
with the partner, the reverse is not the case. Indeed a reason quite frequently given for
working late nights and weekends at the office is that the time-space is less disturbed then
—even if other people are doing the same thing there is less in the way of incoming ‘phone-
calls and so forth. One of the dominant characteristics of this kind of work is that it
demands, and induces, total concentration. The above quotation is interesting in its
implication that ‘thought’ is involved only in paid work.9 Moreover it is the kind of
thought which requires a lack of intrusion; it is totally absorbing. Even the reservations to
this ‘all-work’ atmosphere of the workplace in a sense reinforce its truth. Thus one or two
workplaces had a gym and elaborate catering facilities on site, the aim being to aid rather
than detract from the overall ability to concentrate. And in one company, partners—
seemingly in despair at ever seeing their men—came into the office:
‘…they have children and wives and they are always retailing the complaints from
their wives…’
‘This is a constant complaint…there is a perennial complaint that the partner
never sees them and they are always in here. In fact, partners tend to come in here
and work in the evenings because that’s where the other one is; they have different
kinds of jobs but they can bring their work with them and do it here.’
In fact, it is hardly an invasion: she is conforming to the norms of the workplace; what she
has brought in with her is her ‘work’, not the sphere of the domestic, and he can carry on
with what he has to do.
This does not mean that levels of concentration within the workplace do not vary, nor
that time-out cannot be taken. Indeed time-in-lieu, trips to the shops, etc., provide
occasional windows within the working day. But within the workplace, everything, even
the exercise of the body, is geared to the productivity of the intellect:
‘I was amazed when I went there—I’d been working at [major corporation]. This
huge factory in Lancashire had shut and I came down here to the interview with
[smaller company, Cambridge-based] and I walked up the stairway and on every
floor there was a series of little offices and ramps around the edge and the middle
of each floor was open and there was a ping-pong table or a snooker table and
everybody seemed to be playing games and I thought that this is supposed to be a
120 DOREEN MASSEY/
place of work—and then when I saw all the things they were doing—a chap put his
bat down and [would] go off and design an IC in a little room in the corner.’
What we have here, then, is the workplace constructed as a highly specialized envelope of
space-time, into which the intrusion of other activities and interests is unwanted and
limited.10 ‘The home’, however, for most of these scientists, is constructed entirely
differently. Both temporally and spatially it is porous, and in particular it is invaded by the
sphere of paid work.
One way of beginning to conceptualize the difference between these two kinds of
spaces is through the work of Henri Lefebvre. In his account of The Production of Space
(1991), he characterizes the space of current Western society as ‘abstract space’ and
discusses (and criticizes) as one of its defining features its fragmentation, its division into
sub-spaces devoted to the performance of specialized activities. His historical analysis
explains this process as the result of aspects both of modernity and capitalism on the one hand
and of currently dominant forms of masculinity on the other. Although Lefebvre’s
historical account, and the supposed newness of abstract spaces, may be questioned, his
examples of such specialized and fragmented spaces/space-times resemble very strongly
the specialized space-times constructed in high-tech workplaces. They seem to have many
of the characteristics of abstract space: they are demarcated against an outside, they are
specialized, they are masculine. Yet in the story we are telling here they are not coexisting
with other similarly specialized and sealed-off time-spaces but with a time-space, that of
the domestic sphere, which is porous, which allows entry from other spheres, which is
perhaps in Lefebvre’s terms characteristic of an older, and yet possibly at the same time more
potentially progressive, kind of time-space. Lloyd, it might be recalled, contrasted the
wholly rational sphere of Reason/ Transcendence (i.e. evacuated of other things) with
‘woman’s task’ of preserving ‘the sphere of the intermingling of mind and body’ (1984:50;
my emphasis).
Further, Lefebvre pointedly asks
Is not social space always, and simultaneously, both a field of action (offering its
extension to the deployment of projects and practical intentions) and a basis of action
(a set of places whence energies derive and whither energies are directed)?
(1991:191)
In other words, social space is both an arena of action and potentially enabling/productive
of further effects. Just so the places of work in these hightech parts of the economy: they
are not merely spaces where things may happen but spaces which in the nature of their
construction (as specialized, as closed-off from intrusion, and in the nature of the things in
which they are specialized) themselves have effects—in the structuring of the daily lives
and the identities of the scientists who work within them. Most particularly, in their
boundedness and in their dedication to abstract thought to the exclusion of other things,
these workplaces both reflect and provide a material basis for the particular form of
masculinity which hegemonizes this form of employment. Not only the nature of the
work and the culture of the workplace but also the construction of the space of work
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY/ 121
itself, therefore, contributes to the moulding and reinforcement of this masculinity (see
also Massey and Henry, forthcoming). As Lefebvre writes: ‘The dominant tendency
fragments space and cuts it up into pieces… Specializations divide space among them and
act upon its truncated parts, setting up mental barriers and practico-social frontiers’
(1991:89). Lefebvre would argue that the currently dominant tendency towards the
homogenization/fragmentation and specialization of space is something which should be
opposed. This relates to the second stage in the argument here about what is happening to
the work/home boundary among the scientists of the Cambridge phenomenon.
For what has been discussed so far is an alteration in the boundary between home and
work which consists of nothing more than the spatio-temporal transgression by one sphere
(one side of the dualism) into the other. The first point to have been noted is that this
transgression is all one way. The second stage of the argument, however, is that in
whatever manner one interprets this ‘blurring’ of boundaries it does not entail any kind of
overcoming of the dualism itself. Yet it is the fact of dichotomy itself (Reason/non-
Reason; Transcendence/Immanence) which has been criticized as being part of that same
mode of thinking which also polarizes genders and the characteristics so frequently
ascribed to them. And it is the parallel fragmentation/specialization which came in for
criticism from Lefebvre. What, then, can be learned about the possibility of unification
from this study of Cambridge scientists?
RESISTANCE
The characteristics which have been described above are traits of masculinity, not of men.
As already implied there is no simple homogeneity among the men we studied. However,
these characteristics are strongly embedded within the culture of this part of the economy
(with some variation in detail between different types of jobs). Moreover, the strength of
this embeddedness means that these characteristics ‘pull’ all its participants towards them.
Individual men have relations to these characteristics which are more or less celebratory
or painful. Many of them recognize the need to negotiate the very different personas they
inhabit at home and at work—the scientist with the new baby (quoted earlier) was doing
just that. And what he was confronting there was precisely the difficulty of preventing his
dominant self-conception as a scientist from completely overriding those other potential
sides of himself. Other men actively try to resist his potential domination. Their number
is small and their reasons varied. Most commonly resistance is a response to stress or to
strongly articulated objections on the part of the partner, or to a genuine sensitivity to the
men’s felt need to live a more varied life, not to miss out on the children growing up, and
so forth.
Moreover, the resistance takes a particular form. It is almost entirely to do with
working hours, and with the time and space which work occupies, rather than with wider
characteristics of the job. It also takes place almost entirely at the individual level. These
workplaces are not unionized. Moreover, at a more general social level, while there are
trade-union campaigns and feminist arguments for a shorter working day and week, they
have as yet made very little progress. Certainly there seems to have been no
thoroughgoing cultural shift, in spite of the increasing proportion of employment which is
122 DOREEN MASSEY/
part time, in favour of shorter working hours. Indeed, since in these parts of the economy
at least some of the compulsion to work long days comes from the interest in and
commitment to the work itself it is not clear how such jobs and others like them relate to
the wider arguments about working time.
Given all this, it is the scientists individually who decide how they are going to respond
to the pressures and attractions of their jobs, and how they will negotiate the work/home
boundary and the different identities they may imply.
In this context it is deeply ironic that one of the important mechanisms of resistance,
and one adopted by a number of the men, is precisely to insist on the necessity for and the
impermeability of the boundary between work and home. Given the fact that the
tendency is for work to invade home life one obvious mechanism for resistance is to
protect home life from intrusion. This happens in a number of ways. Some men (a few
only, but then the resisters in total are not a high proportion of the whole) have decided
not to take work home, thereby preserving the space of home and the time spent in it
from the intrusion of the demands of paid work. Sometimes this will involve an intrusion
in time terms, maybe involving staying longer at the workplace in order to finish a task
there rather than take it home. It is here the space of home which is seen as being the most
important not to violate. Other men, though again only a few, have made themselves
rules about time and insist on keeping to a regular daily routine and on arriving and leaving
the workplace at set times. Over the long term it is possible that this will be detrimental
to their careers (see Henry and Massey, 1995), but the men are aware of this and indeed
in some cases have adopted the strategy because of other problems (personal stress,
problems with health or personal relationships) which had been produced by a previous
commitment to the high pressure and long hours more typical of these companies in
general. It must be emphasized that this is not the only way of coping with the pressures
of this work where they are experienced as a problem. Other scientists, and couples, have
found other ways of dealing with the demands and compulsions of this kind of work but what
is significant about this one is its irony. The ‘problem’, as we have argued above, has been
posed through the working out in everyday life of some of the major dualisms of Western
ways of thinking. Yet, in the absence of collective resistance, legislative action or wider
cultural shifts, individual attempts to deal with some of the conflicts thus provoked may
result in a reinforcement of the expression of those very dualisms. The dichotomies are
rigidified in order to protect one sphere (the home, the ‘rest of life’) from invasion by the
other (scientific abstraction, transcendence). The problems posed by the dualisms result in
their reinforcement.
CONCLUSIONS
The last section concluded on an irony: that those who were attempting to resist the
domination of their lives by one side of a dualistic separation most often found themselves
reinforcing the divide between the two poles of the dualism. This was one among a
number of ironies in the situation analysed in the chapter. What such Catch-22 situations
indicate is that the way out of the conundrums does not lie at that level. The ‘solution’
must be sought in a deeper challenge to the situation.
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY/ 123
Similarly, the empirical material discussed here raises a number of confusions and
complexities around the politics of campaigns for a shorter working day/week. They are
issues, too, which relate as much to academe, especially in its present increasingly
intensified and individually competitive form, as they do to the high-tech work discussed
in the chapter. They are issues which touched me personally as an academic and which
made me think about my own life as I did the research. It is a privilege to have work
which we find interesting. At a recent meeting of feminist academics, where we discussed
an early version of this paper, none of us wanted our ‘work’ to be restricted to 3 5
specified hours in each week. While all of us wanted to resist the current pressures on
hours produced by the reinforcement of competitive structures, we did not want to lose
either the feeling of autonomous commitment or the possibility of temporal flexibility. But
neither did we like the actual way in which this ‘flexibility’ currently works—the
pressure towards what can only be called a competitive workaholism and the inability to
keep things under control. These are things which we as academics, as well as those in the
high-technology sectors discussed here, need to confront. For when an important element
of the pressure on time results from personal commitment on the one hand and
individualized competition on the other, as well as from sectoral and workplace cultures,
how can any form of collective resistance be organized?
In the longer term the aim must be to push the questioning further, to try to find those
solutions which may exist at ‘deeper’ levels. In particular, I suggest, it means questioning
the dualisms themselves. That is, instead of endlessly trying to juggle incompatibilities, and to
resolve ambiguities which in reality point to contradictions, it is important to undermine
and disrupt the polarizations which are producing the problem in the first place.
In philosophy, and in particular in feminist critical philosophy, this position is by now
well established. The aim in general is not now only to valorize the previously
deprioritized pole of a dualism (as Simone de Beauvoir did) but to undermine the dualistic
structure altogether.
Such more fundamental critiques may be carried into other areas. Thus, in the early
part of this chapter I wrote of the difficulty I had found, after years of criticizing deskilling
within industry, in finding myself criticizing jobs for being too absorbing. This was
another irony indeed! However, as was hinted there, it may be that the very dilemma
points to the fact that the issue would be better posed in another way. Rather than being
critical of deskilling or super-skilling as such, it is the polarization between them which
should be the focus of critical attention. What is at issue here—and it is an issue which
again involves us as academics—is the social division between conception and execution,
between intellectuals and the rest.
What I find more problematical as a political issue is the division of the lives of the
scientists described in this chapter between abstract and completely ‘mental’ labour, on
the one hand, and the ‘rest of life’ on the other. In the version of this chapter which was
sent to referees I had unreservedly applauded those few attempts which we had come
across to resist the compartmentalization of life into mutually sealed-off time-spaces. At
least one referee questioned this, asking simply ‘Why is it good to resist
compartmentalization?’ And I know for myself that one thing I thoroughly enjoy is to sit
down in the secluded and excluding space of the Reading Room at the British Museum
124 DOREEN MASSEY/
and devote myself entirely to thinking and writing. And yet…to return to Lefebvre, do we
want lives sectioned-off into compartments, into exclusive time-spaces: for the intellect,
for leisure, for shopping…?
This dilemma might relate to, and be partially addressed by, considering the major
dualism discussed in this chapter—that in which ‘Science’ itself is involved. It is perhaps
that the problem lies most fundamentally in the postulated separation-off of the isolated
intellect from the rest of one’s being, and calling the product of the working of that
(supposedly) isolated intellect ‘knowledge’. Among many others Ho (1993:168) has
argued for an alternative:
This manner of knowing—with one’s entire being, rather than just the isolated
intellect—is foreign to the scientific tradition of the west. But… it is the only
authentic way of knowing, if we [are] to follow to logical conclusion the
implications of the development of western scientific ideas since the beginning of
the present century. We have come full circle to validating the participatory
framework that is universal to all indigenous knowledge systems the world over. I
find this very agreeable and quite exciting.
The real irony, then, may be that the long-standing Western (though not only Western)
dualism between abstract thought and materiality/the body may lead through its own
logic to its own undermining. And it is on that dualism that much of the separation within
the economy between conception and execution—and thus these ‘high-tech’ jobs
themselves—has been founded.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would particularly like to thank Nick Henry, with whom much of the empirical work for
this paper was done, for much discussion and comment. I also had the benefit of four
extremely thoughtful sets of referees’ comments —many thanks. A first version of this
paper was presented in a seminar series at Syracuse University. I should like to thank
Nancy Duncan for her invitation. The paper has been published in Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers, NS 20:487–99, 1995.
NOTES
1 Only one aspect of these relations is explored in this chapter. The work forms part of a
wider project on high technology and the social relations which surround it. This research
was funded by the ESRC: R000233004: ‘High-status growth? Aspects of home and work
around high-technology sectors’ and is being carried out with Nick Henry, now at the
Department of Geography, University of Birmingham.
The project forms part of a wider programme of five pieces of research on the nature and
consequences of growth in the South-East of England in the 1980s. The programme is based
in the Geography Discipline, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, from
where further information, and a series of Occasional Papers, are available.
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY/ 125
2 The first two of these reasons are explored in more detail in Henry and Massey (1995). As
part of the research we interviewed representatives of 19 companies, 60 male scientists and
38 partners, all of whom were female. ‘Partnership’ was defined in terms of cohabitation.
About one-third of the scientists were not cohabiting. The quotations from interviews which
are cited in this paper have been selected as symptomatic. They capture, or express with
precision, points or attitudes which were typical or widely prevalent or, if indicated so in the
text, which characterized attitudes held by some among the interviewees.
3 In a paper currently in production this characterization of the work as ‘flexible’ is itself being
questioned (see Massey and Henry, forthcoming). Thanks to one of the referees for
extended and constructive thoughts on aspects of this issue.
4 One result of this absorption in their work is of course that these men have less time over
than they otherwise might for life in the domestic sphere. A future paper deals directly with
this issue. In discussions on the present chapter, Cynthia Cockburn wondered
whether the time stolen by these men to sustain their addictive habit may actually
not be stolen from the home (other men don’t spend more time than they have to in
the home), but rather stolen from pub, club and trade union.
(personal communication)
There is probably a lot in this. The point in the present chapter is precisely to
emphasize that what characterizes these sectors is a particular form of masculinity.
5 Cynthia Cockburn has pointed to some of the inconsistencies and contradictions even here—
see her treatment of the concept of ‘intuition’, and of the scientists’ ambiguous relation to
it, in Cockburn (1985). Indeed, the very fact that the men ‘really love’ their work, are
‘obsessive’ and so forth touches on realms outside that of pure Reason. But as pointed out in
the opening paragraph, consistency has never been the outstanding attribute of the
functioning of these dualisms, nor has inconsistency seemed much impediment to their
social power.
6 Similar worlds have been described by Tracey Kidder (1982) and Sherry Turkle (1984).
7 These interconnections between gender analysis and aspects of economic growth, and
specifically economic geography, are explored further in a forthcoming paper.
8 While the home/work distinction may validly be read as an instantiation of this dichotomy it
must be stressed that there is far more to the possibilities of ‘immanence’ than having
children and doing the housework.
9 This view was reinforced in some cases by the contrast in attitude to the skills of paid work
on the one hand and the domestic sphere on the other. Thus a number of the scientists
ascribed the fact of their partner doing almost all of the housework to the fact that ‘she’s
better at it’. The interesting thing here is that there seems to be no understanding that this
skill is one which could be learned. In contrast to the highly intellectual paid jobs, for which
much learning was necessary, this skill seems to be seen, although implicitly, as innate.
10 This is broadly true of most workplaces, though to different degrees. The windowless boxes
of so many modern factories precisely demonstrate the desire not to let the eye/mind
wander ‘outside’ during working hours. But in the kinds of employment under discussion here,
together with some others, it is especially marked.
126
8
RENEGOTIATING GENDER AND SEXUALITY
IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES
Nancy Duncan
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter I offer a general introduction to the issues of regulating and negotiating
gender and sexuality through the opposition of the public and the private. I argue that the
binary distinction between private and public spaces and the relation of this to private and
public spheres is highly problematic. Although it is a distinction encoded in law and
deeply rooted in North American and British cultures, it is nevertheless unstable and often
problematically conflated with related distinctions such as that between domestic or
familial autonomy and public spheres. Increasing privatization, commercialization and
aestheticization of public space has tended to depoliticize space and shrink public spheres.
However, I will discuss various ways that the spatial and political practices of marginalized
groups such as abused women and sexual minorities (lesbians, gays and sex workers) work
to undermine the (always already unstable) coherence of this binary and related binaries.
The destabilizing of this boundary is a countervailing force working to open up not only
private space but to reopen public space to public debate and contestation.
One could choose other groups such as the homeless1 with an interest in transgressing
the public/private dichotomy. However, I have chosen abused women and sexual
minorities because members of such marginalized groups have experienced acute spatial
dissonance and in some cases have found workable strategies for resisting the spatial
framework and dominant spatial practices of Anglo-American society. I will also discuss
various spatial practices that work to reinforce this boundary and some of the tensions
surrounding the concept of privacy implied by the boundary. By pointing to examples
drawn from these marginalized groups I attempt to show some of the complexities and
subtleties of oppression on the basis of spatially constituted gender and sexuality. I then
conclude with a discussion of the need to further unpack and destabilize this binary
distinction. My focus will be on contemporary North America and Britain.
THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE
The distinction between the public and the private is deeply rooted in political
philosophy, law, popular discourse and recurrent spatial structuring practices. These
practices demarcate and isolate a private sphere of domestic, embodied activity from an
128 NANCY DUNCAN/
allegedly disembodied political sphere that is predominantly located in public space. The
public/private dichotomy (both the political and spatial dimensions) is frequently
employed to construct, control, discipline, confine, exclude and suppress gender and
sexual difference preserving traditional patriarchal and heterosexist power structures.2
Although the social and political problems to which I refer clearly have spatial (material,
corporeal) components, the solutions to these problems will by no means be purely
spatial or environmental ones. There is no question, however, that confinement
(voluntary and forced) in private spaces contributes to a reduction in the vitality of the
public sphere as a political site and diminishes the ability of marginalized groups to claim a
share in power.
It is clear that the public-private distinction is gendered. This binary opposition is
employed to legitimate oppression and dependence on the basis of gender; it has also been
used to regulate sexuality. The private as an ideal type has traditionally been associated and
conflated with: the domestic, the embodied, the natural, the family, property, the
‘shadowy interior of the household’, personal life, intimacy, passion, sexuality, ‘the good
life’, care, a haven, unwaged labour, reproduction and immanence.3 The public as an ideal
type has traditionally been the domain of the disembodied, the abstract, the cultural,
rationality, critical public discourse, citizenship, civil society, justice, the market place,
waged labour, production, the polis, the state, action, militarism, heroism and
transcendence.4
The idea of privacy is deeply embedded in Western political theories of freedom,
personal autonomy, patriarchal familial sovereignty and private property. Traditionally
there have been spatial and corporeal components to the idea of autonomy. The linkage
between individual, family and group autonomy and privatization, localization and other
exclusionary spatial strategies is one of the most important and interesting aspects of
political geography. However, this linkage is one that is often taken for granted and
therefore tends to be naturalized or depoliticized. The idea of spaces (material and
metaphorical) hidden from the light of public view in which autonomy is most effectively
enacted is widely respected. However, this idea is also highly charged and tension filled
for many across the political spectrum.
Lawrence Stone and others have suggested that the perceived need for increased
privacy in domestic spaces arose with the European nation-state. Attempts were made by
both the state and private households to strengthen the institution of the family and to
limit the space of state authority over the reproductive family unit (Stone 1977:133–42).
The home was accordingly considered a microcosm of the political order with the male
head of household as ruler.5 While modern liberal notions of individual freedom and rights
within the family or household as well as within society clearly differ from these earlier
ideas of paternal dominance, the latter are still quite evident in contemporary culture and
the administration of justice. As Judith Squires (1994:394) puts it:
the preliberal antiliberal patriarchal tradition of family sovereignty has, for reasons
not inherent to the liberal tradition itself, been incorporated —tortuously—into
the liberal rhetoric and legislation on privacy rights. Individual autonomy, which is
the bedrock of liberal theory, has in practice been conflated with family autonomy.
SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES/ 129
Historically, in legal terms at least, women have been treated as private and embodied, in
the sense of apolitical. They have long been treated as if not fully capable of independent
disembodied political thought and objectivity as evidenced by the fact that it was relatively
recently that women were given the vote. Still today most men6 move between public and
private spaces and spheres with more legitimacy and physical safety (see Pain 1991;
Valentine 1989), and less burdened by responsibilities as caregivers of children and the
elderly than most women.
Both private and public spaces are heterogeneous and not all space is clearly private or
public. Space is thus subject to various territorializing and deterritorializing processes
whereby local control is fixed, claimed, challenged, forfeited and privatized. In some
cases this may have socially progressive results in terms of providing a safe base (site of
resistance) from which previously disempowered groups may become empowered. On
the other hand, isolation in a private or quasi-private space or sphere may have an
undesirable depoliticizing effect on a group, fortifying it against challenges from, and
allowing it to inadvertantly assume independence from, a wider public sphere. However,
as Brian Massumi, in his interpretation of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, says, there
is an important difference between ‘entrenching one’s self in a closed space (hold the
fort)’ and ‘arraying one’s self in an open space (hold the street)’ (Massumi 1992:6). The
street serves here as a metaphor for sites of resistance that are part of a rhizome-like
process of deterritorializing and a progressive opening up to the political sphere. The fort
signifies territories, securely established centres of domination. (On the political
ambiguity of place and localizing processes and whether they are conservative or
progressive see Massey 1993.)
There are many privatized or quasi-privatized, commercialized public spaces including
shopping malls and exclusionary suburbs. This privatization of ostensibly public places has
very uneven consequences for the population as a whole because groups with greater
resources can more easily privatize spaces. Such privatizing of space is often accompanied
by aestheticization as for example when urban space is cleared of marginalized people and
political activities and redesigned as a spectacle for the consumption of affluent classes.
Furthermore by privatizing (depoliticizing) these spaces, the owners and users of such
spaces more easily free themselves from various types of public surveillance, regulation
and public contestation.
The private is a sphere where those families who are not dependent on the state for
welfare have relative autonomy. Those who are dependent, however, are often subject to
unwarranted intrusion and surveillance.7 In general, however, liberal political and legal
theory can be seen as a territorializing spatial practice that attempts to differentiate the
public and private by erecting a boundary around a private sphere of relative non-
interference by civil society or the state.
PUBLIC SPHERE
The public sphere is not just the site of state politics and regulation, nor is it limited to the
market place or the economy;8 it is also the site of oppositional social movements. In fact,
under many definitions, the public sphere is a political site separate from, and often
130 NANCY DUNCAN/
critical of, the state and the economy.9 As opposed to the private sphere, it is the
discursive and material space where the state and its powers, as well as oppressive aspects
of the dominant culture (misogyny, homophobia, racism), are open to challenge by those
who have been marginalized in various ways. Don Mitchell gives an example from
Berkeley, California.
The People’s Park was working as it should: as a truly political space. It was a
political space that encouraged unmediated interaction, a place where the power of
the state could be held at bay.
(Mitchell 1995:110)
According to Mitchell ideally public space is ‘unconstrained space within which political
movements can organize and expand into wider arenas’ (Mitchell 1995:115). However,
he says that most often public space is constituted as ‘a controlled and orderly retreat
where a properly behaved public might experience the spectacle of the city’. In this view
public space is seen as politically neutral. Although somewhat more likely to become a site
of political organizing than private space, public space is very often planned and controlled
for non-political purposes. Public spaces and public spheres often do not map neatly onto
one another.
As a normative ideal the public sphere is open to all; in practice, however, it is much more
restricted. In fact, Habermas (1991) would argue, the public sphere no longer functions
effectively in the interest of any group. Examples of recently increased restrictions on the
public sphere as a place where groups can meet to protest and publicize their views is the
introduction in Britain of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. This law
includes limitations on the right to assemble for peaceful political protests. It is
noteworthy that such increased regulation of public behaviour (allegedly for fear of potential
violence) is not matched with a similar increase in the regulation of actual violence in the
private sphere.10 This is not to say, of course, that violence in public is adequately
controlled or that provisions should not be made to control politically motivated
violence.
Moreover, the ideal of a single public sphere that serves as a site of political
contestation is considered by some to be either utopian or deceitful in its pretence of
homogeneity and inclusiveness (Fraser 1993; Howell 1993; Robbins 1993; Young 1990).
There are some very persuasive arguments for the expansion and repoliticization of the
notion of public sphere into a multiplicity of heterogeneous publics also known as
‘alternative or counter public spheres’ or ‘counterpublics’ or ‘critical publics’ (Cohen and
Arato 1992; Fraser 1993; Robbins 1993). Such counter public spheres can be seen to
develop out of social movements. Iris Marion Young (1990:120) states that:
the concept of a heterogeneous public implies two political principles: (a) no
persons, actions, or aspects of a person’s life should be forced into privacy; and (b)
no social institutions or practices should be excluded a priori from being a proper
subject for public discussion and expression.
SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES/ 131
Although in practice various critical publics would never be equal in influence or
legitimacy, they could ideally all have access to the public sphere and public spaces (where
they could challenge, and be exposed to challenges by, members of other counterpublics).
PRIVACY AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Paradoxically the home which is usually thought to be gendered feminine has also
traditionally been subject to the patriarchal authority of the husband and father. Personal
freedoms of the male head of household often impinge on, or in extreme cases, negate the
rights, autonomy and safety of women and children who also occupy these spaces. The
designation of the home as private space limits the role of political institutions and social
movements in changing power relations within the family. ‘A man’s home is his castle’ —
this familiar expression reveals the important historical link between masculinity,
patriarchal autonomy and its spatial expression in the form of private property. As a
relatively unregulated sphere the private is a place where men have traditionally
dominated their families and the privacy to do so has been jealously protected. Legal
definitions of privacy thus gender space and tend to reproduce inequalities. As Schneider
(1991:978) put it:
the interrelationship between what is understood and experienced as private and
public is particularly complex in the area of gender where the rhetoric of privacy
has masked inequality and subordination. The decision about what we protect as
private is a political decision that always has important public ramifications.
Although legal ideas of privacy were established to protect civil liberties under certain
circumstances they can also:
mask physical abuse and other manifestations of power and inequality within the
family… The belief is that it is for family members to sort out their personal
relationships. What this overlooks is the power inequalities inside the family that
are of course affected by structures external to it.
(O’Donovan 1993:272)
The private home has been historically seen as a place where men have assumed their right
to sexual intercourse. Problematic questions of genuine consent on the part of partners
have only recently begun to be addressed with any frequency. The private space of the
home can also be a place where aggressive forms of misogynous masculinity are often
exercised with impunity. It is a place where rape and other forms of non-consensual sexual
activity take place more often than many people realize (see Edwards 1989). Although I
recognize that the private space of the home is a place where some men use violence as a
way to control women,11 I wish to distance myself from arguments made by radical
feminists such as Brownmiller (1975) and MacKinnon (1989) who argue that violence,
especially sexual violence, is used by men collectively as a way to control women. This is
to implicate many innocent men who abhor violence and it assumes a narrow view of power
132 NANCY DUNCAN/
—one that sees it as primarily coercive. (On this issue see Pain 1991:425; however, Pain
does not take a stand on whether there is a conscious conspiracy among all men and not just
sex offenders to intimidate women.)
Instead, I would choose to explore the idea of a complicity which includes men and
women who fail to act decisively against both public and private sexual violence, resorting
instead to staying at home at night or encouraging wives, daughters and women friends to
do so. Here I am not suggesting that individuals place themselves in the ‘sucker position’
of risking their own safety. Quite the contrary, I am suggesting that such violence directed
against women in both public and private spaces is a problem requiring highly organized,
structural solutions, not isolated individualistic ones. The feminist slogan ‘Take Back the
Night’ should be seen as a suggestion not for women to disregard personal safety, but for
all those who can (not just women) to organize and ask for public funds to transform
public spaces to make them safe and accessible to everyone at night as well as during the
day.
Because it is very often invisible and inaudible, domestic violence remains a privatized
problem. Unanswered questions remain: to what extent is the home an oppressive site of
sexual power and pathological types of masculinity? To what extent is domestic violence
explained by historically persistent perceptions of masculine autonomy and entitlement
within the space of the home? To what extent does the privacy of private property allow
or even legitimate misogynistic violence? One reason why the underlying explanations and
motivations of domestic violence are unclear is that such abuse has generally been a
private and hidden problem. It is a good example of Berger’s dictum elaborated by Soja,
that it is space more than time that hides the consequences from us (Soja 1989:22).
Feminists ‘discovered’ wife beating in the late nineteenth century as they attempted to
open up the realm of the private and patriarchal family affairs to public discourse (see
Cobbe 1868). Although since the nineteenth century wife beating has been formally
outlawed,12 the issue still does not receive the public attention it deserves. Enforcement of
laws is highly inadequate.13 According to the Surgeon General of the United States, the
battering of women by partners and ex-partners is the ‘single largest cause of injury to
women in the US’ accounting for one-fifth of all hospital emergency cases (Zorza 1992:83).
According to the FBI, roughly 6 million women are abused and 4,000 women are killed
by their partners or ex-partners in America each year (Saland 1994). These statistics
suggest that domestic violence cannot be dismissed as something private and beyond the
scope of public responsibility (Thomas and Beasley 1993:45). Clearly there are
contradictions between ideas of privacy, which assume autonomy of male heads of
household, and the prevention of ‘the violence of privacy’ (Schneider 1994).
Police officers in many places are given a great deal of discretion in dealing with
‘domestic disturbances’. Often such ‘domestic’ calls are not taken seriously. When the
police do go to a house, they usually do not make an arrest. Wives may not decide to
press charges fearing the alien world of courts, police stations and publicity, even more
than the familiar, private violence of the home. The police may understandably fear for
their own safety or even their lives.14 Furthermore the police sometimes share the
misogynous views of the batterer, believing, for example, in corporal punishment for
‘nagging’ wives or at least sympathizing with an overstressed husband.
SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES/ 133
Many programmes to aid battered women have focused on establishing outside moral
as well as material support in order to counter the batterer’s often strenuous attempts to
privatize the problem by cutting his partner off from contact with relatives, friends and
public institutions (Pence and Shepard 1988:291). One can clearly see spatial strategies at
work in the abuser’s attempt to isolate his partner from extended family and other social
networks by confining her in private spaces. This makes it difficult for her to seek outside
support or to organize politically with other battered women. Answers may lie, in part at
least, in deterritorializing public and private spheres—that is in questioning the links
between individualism, privacy, autonomy and allegedly apolitical private spaces.
Making contacts and establishing outside support networks is a crucial step for a
woman who seeks to escape a violent home. It is often difficult to break the financial and
emotional dependence on the family home and husband. The need for alternative housing
is paramount. Women’s shelters often provide temporary accommodation. Daycare, peer
and professional counselling, and various training programmes are sometimes available
through such organizations.
Women’s shelters provide a site of resistance against the imprisoning strategies of the
battering partner. While the names of shelters sometimes convey the idea of much-needed
social networks—Friends of the Family, Woman to Woman and Good Neighbors
Unlimited—often they reflect this spatial dimension—Womanspace, Women’s Survival
Space, Safe House and Safespace.
Beyond the lack of sufficient funding for shelters and limited space availability, and
beyond psychological and economic dependence of women on abusive partners, there are
many other reasons why shelters do not always provide an effective solution to isolation
and violence. Many woman do not take advantage of the opportunity to remove
themselves physically from violent situations for various geographical reasons. Women
from rural areas may have to travel long distances to find a shelter and women from non-
English-speaking communities may be reluctant to leave a neighbourhood where they have
some degree of language and cultural support. However, a much more pervasive
sentiment that affects not only the willingness of a woman to go to a shelter, but also
interest in funding such shelters, is the individualism and privatism of British and North
American society. People who must depend on the help of strangers often feel shame. The
ideal of the private family home is so deeply ingrained that even temporary residence
outside of such private spaces can be highly embarrassing and stigmatizing. The idea of
communal living and sharing of tasks which is encouraged in such shelters is unfamiliar.
The fact that shelters are outside the norms of Anglo-American society is also reflected in
the names of the shelters—many of which make reference to the temporary, crisis-
induced nature of these shelters: Women in Crisis, Transitional Living Center, Assault
Crisis Center, Crisis Intervention, Guest House, Emergency House, Sojourn Women’s
Center, Victim’s Crisis Center and Women’s Transition House.15
While many feminists wish to expose the abuses of masculine privilege in the home,
others worry about the opening up of the private to public surveillance, because it could
simultaneously open up the realm of individual reproductive rights to state interference.
However, Elizabeth Schneider argues for a right to privacy that is not ‘synonymous with
the right to state non-interference with actions within the family’ (1994:53). Recalling
134 NANCY DUNCAN/
Justice Douglas’ opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973) she suggests that the concept of privacy has
the potential to be defined affirmatively as the right to autonomy for all family members
which requires freedom from battering and coercion by partners.
Judith Squires also argues for a notion of privacy closely linked to individual autonomy
on empowerment. She writes:
there are very strong grounds for articulating a specifically embedded and
embodied conception of privacy as a means of conferring autonomy. For the body
can be viewed as one of the core territories of the self: control over one’s own
body is crucial to the maintenance of a sense of self and hence the ability to interact
openly with others. To have control over own’s bodily integrity (to regulate access
to it) and to have this integrity recognised, is a minimal precondition for free and
equal social interaction. To ensure the possibility of such an embodied autonomy for
all persons in contemporary society—with all its multifarious mechanisms of
observation and control—we will need a political defence of privacy rights.
(1994:399)
Others argue for the necessity of private spaces for protection against an overly aggressive
state. However, despite this very real consideration, I would argue that the existence of
relatively unregulated spaces is a political arrangement that tends to hide the causes as
well as the consequences of oppressive power relations within the family from a wider
public. It protects particularly those who have the resources to most effectively privatize
space. Intrusive or even fascistic state practices (and all their hidden and privatized
manifestations) might better be opened up to scrutiny in the public sphere (or counter
public spheres) under more informal, unconstrained and inclusive conditions of discourse
and debate within civil society.
I suggest, then, that there is a positive concept of privacy related to the autonomy of
individuals which allows for and may even require the opening up of private spaces to the
public sphere in order to protect individuals whose autonomy is compromised by the
concept of unregulated private space, especially when that space is constituted by unequal
power relations or outmoded ideas of domestic patriarchal sovereignty.
Early feminism concentrated so much energy on opening up the public sphere to
women through the use of sex-discrimination legislation that the question of how the
private sphere might be reconstituted through law was rarely addressed. Only a few basic
steps have been taken in this direction. An example is the elimination of spousal exclusion
from the possibility of rape.
A broadly Foucauldian conception of (albeit highly uneven) relations of power as
suffused throughout society and across space can aid in undermining the public/private
dichotomy. The personal is the political’ is a proclamation commonly heard among
feminists, gays and lesbians that challenges the public/private dichotomy as it has
traditionally been formulated. This phrase serves as an evocative reminder of the
artificiality of such a clear-cut distinction despite its long history and naturalization in legal
discourse. It is a statement of the fact that personal relationships are also power
relationships and that everyone is implicated in the production and reproduction of power
SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES/ 135
relations. Domestic and even intimate relations are political relations that can be
transformed through political means. Although places may be more or less overtly
politicized, there are no politically neutral spaces. Similarly, whether or not embodiment
is explicitly recognized—whether or not a disembodied, allegedly objective perspective is
claimed—the spatial and social situatedness which comes from necessary corporeality is
inescapable. Foucault (1980:187) argues power relations emanate not only from state or
juridical sources, but concern:
our bodies, our lives, our day-to-day existences… Between every point of a social
body, between the members of a family, between a master and his pupil…there
exist relations of power.
Furthermore, Foucault argues, such power is met with a multitude of points of resistance
throughout a network that encompasses the whole of a society.
One important form of resistance is to bring issues of privatized power relations into a
public forum where efforts to bring about structural change in these relations can be more
easily organized. There has always been a close relation between the degree of women’s
confinement in private space and their relative exclusion from the public sphere of
organized social movements and political action. Thus a smoothing out of the public/
private boundary and an opening up of privatized problems to public contestation is
necessary despite risks of facilitating undue state intervention. Non-progressive state
intervention into private lives can theoretically be prevented through the increased use of
the critical functions of publicity and strengthened, increasingly heterogeneous public
spheres.
PRIVACY AND RESISTANCE
Doreen Massey (this volume) speaks of the problematic boundary between workplace and
home as reinforcing the gendered distinction between transcendence and immanence.
Transcendence is the use of Reason in the production of History, Knowledge, Science and
Progress; immanence is ‘the static realm of living-in-the-present’, of reproduction, of
servicing those who make history. Contrasting this public/transcendence private/
immanence correlation in the US and Britain with examples from Eastern Europe, Joanne
Sharp (this volume) points to cases in which the identification of private space with
immanence and public space with transcendence was inverted. During the communist
period a major site of resistance and political organization was in the private space of the
home. Civil society was spatially marginalized by powerful governments forcing it into a
repoliticized private sphere of the home: ‘It was here rather than in any formally public
sphere that the possibility for transcendence occurred.’ She adds, however, that the
opposition of family to state served only to deflect attention away from uneven power
relations within the family.
bell hooks offers another destabilizing perspective on the idea of the traditional home as
a place of immanence rather than transcendence. She says that because public space can be
very hostile to African Americans (men as well as women), the home can be an important
136 NANCY DUNCAN/
site of resistance. She sees the homeplace as having a radical political dimension. It’s a
place where, as she says, ‘we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the
outside in the public world’ (hooks 1990:42). hooks, however, makes it clear that while
the home can be a site for organizing subversive activity, it is often viewed as a politically
neutral space where the political role of black women is devalued (hooks 1990:47). She
blames the influence of white, bourgeois norms (which produce domestic space as an
aestheticized space of consumption and reproduction) for redefining the home as a
depoliticized site.
hooks acknowledges of course that the black home can also be the site of patriarchal
domination. Kimberlé Crenshaw sees it as a site of multiple oppressions where women of
colour sometimes face an ‘intersectional disempowerment of race and gender’. She states
that women of colour who are subjected to domestic violence are often reluctant to call
the police as there is:
a general unwillingness among people of color to subject their private lives to the
scrutiny and control of a police force that is frequently hostile. There is a more
generalized community ethic against public intervention, the product of a desire to
create a private world free from the diverse assaults on the public lives of racially
subordinated people.
(1994:103)
But, as Crenshaw states: ‘this sense of isolation compounds efforts to politicize gender
violence within communities of color, and permits the deadly silence surrounding these
issues to continue’ (1994:111).
Nevertheless, hooks argues for the need to reaffirm the home as a site of organizing,
affirming political solidarity and regrouping for resistance in spite of the fact that from the
standpoint of the relatively more powerful this may seem a minor political resource. hooks
(1990:45) argues that: ‘the devaluation of the role black women have played in
constructing for us homeplaces that are the site for resistance undermines our efforts to
resist racism and the colonizing mentality which promotes internalized self-hatred’.
Habermas (1991) also sees certain private sphere institutions as having served, in the
past at least, important political purposes. He points to the literary salon, club, cafe and
lodge as semi-private political spaces with a public sphere critical function. I cite these
various examples to show that there is often no clear-cut distinction between the private as
a site of immanence and the public as a site of transcendence. These examples should not
be interpreted as showing that private spaces (which have a tendency to be exclusionary
and isolating) are ideal sites of liberation struggle, however.
Supportive home environments can, of course, also reproduce white racism. Iris
Marion Young argues that private, homogeneous, and exclusionary spaces provide
autonomy that should be distinguished from empowerment. While she sees autonomy as a
closed concept referring to non-interference, empowerment is an open concept allowing
agents to participate in democratic decision making (Young 1990:251). Possibly a
distinction should be made between private spaces that are sites of empowerment and
resistance (becoming open, publicized and political) and private territories that are
SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES/ 137
exclusionary or oppressive (remaining closed and private in the sense of spaces where the
privacy of some to oppress others—who for various reasons may share the privatized
spaces—is protected from public or state regulation). This distinction may be useful in
conceptually opening up the boundary between the public and private.
THE SPATIAL REGULATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY
Like gender, sexuality is often regulated by the binary distinction between public and
private. It is usually assumed that sexuality is (and should be) confined to private spaces.
This is based on the naturalization of heterosexual norms. Naturalized heterosexuality
makes sexuality in public spaces nearly invisible to the straight population (Valentine
1993). Surveys have shown that the majority of respondents have no objection to
homosexuals as long as they ‘do not flaunt their sexuality in public’ (Herek 1987 as
quoted in Valentine 1993). ‘What they do in private is nobody’s business’, is a commonly
heard, well-intentioned expression. However, as Gill Valentine puts it, the idea of
homosexuality as appropriate only to private spaces:
is based on the false premise that heterosexuality is also defined by private sexual
acts and is not expressed in the public arena… This therefore highlights the error
of drawing a simple polar distinction between public and private activities, for
heterosexuality is clearly the dominant sexuality in most everyday environments,
not just private spaces, with all interactions taking place between sexed actors.
(1992:396)
While public space appears heterosexist to gays and lesbians, many expressions of
sexuality are so naturalized as to be virtually invisible to the straight population. As
Valentine points out: ‘heterosexuality is institutionalized in marriage and the law, tax, and
welfare systems, and is celebrated in public rituals such as weddings’ (1992:396).
Valentine and others have pointed out that suburban housing developments as sites of
overtly heterosexual as well as familial sentiments and rituals are generally considered
alienating environments by lesbians and gays. While the home may be a haven for some
gay couples, the family home is often an extremely heterosexist and alienating site for
gays.
Gloria Anzaldua speaks of a former student, a lesbian, who said that she connected the
word homophobia with ‘fear of going home’ (Anzaldua 1987: 20). Here, in the home, the
patriarchal, heterosexist exercise of territorialized power and regulatory practices freed
from public intervention and political contestation may be especially threatening, keeping
gay identities in the closet. The spatial metaphor of the closet is a particularly telling one
in this context where gays may not be ‘out’ even to their own families within their own
home.
Although many would think of workplaces as generally asexual (except for occasional
sexual harassment) these are nevertheless also heterosexual and often heterosexist spaces.
Nearly invisible because it is universalized and naturalized, heterosexuality is inscribed in
public as well as private spaces as the dominant ideology. Like trying to convince WASPs
138 NANCY DUNCAN/
(White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) that they have an ethnicity, it is difficult to make
heterosexuals aware that their spaces invoke a sexuality. Naturalizing one’s own
heterosexuality means imposing one’s own inability to see him or herself as Other on
one’s surroundings. Failing to notice your own difference as heterosexual is an act with
significance. It leads to the heterosexing of space.
An interesting article by Bell et al. (1994) addresses the issue of various ways the
heterosexuality of public space might be resisted. The authors examine the performance of
two types of homosexual identities, the hyperfeminine ‘lipstick lesbian’ and the
hypermasculine gay ‘skinhead’ that serve (often unintentionally) to parody heterosexual
identities. They ask, however, whether such stylistic transgressions of popularly held
stereotypes of lesbians and gays can actually have any significant destabilizing effect on
heterosexism and the assumption of public spaces as generally asexual. They worry about
the danger of celebrating transgression for transgression’s sake. I share the latter concern
and argue that there is a danger of the aestheticization of politics whenever style is used as
a mode of transgression. However, I argue, once again, that significant social change
requires organized action in the public sphere and access to various resources, including
the media, rather than individualistic, privatized action.
Thus, I suggest that lesbian and gay practices which potentially denaturalize the
sexuality of public places could be more effective if they were widely publicized. If they were
made more explicit and readable then contests around sexuality would become more visible
to the straight population. Furthermore, one would expect that such denaturalizing tactics
would work for the gay population as well, by pointing to the fluidity of identity and
helping to transgress clear-cut heterosexual/homosexual dichotomies including stifling
codes of dress and behaviour sometimes imposed in an attempt to stabilize an internally
coherent identity politics.16 The media could also do more to publicize some of the
complex and challenging questions about the performance and the reconstitution of gender
and sexuality in public spaces that are raised in this article and in the work of Judith Butler
(1990, 1994) upon which Bell et al. (1994) draw.
Public space can be used as a site for the destabilization of unarticulated norms, or as Munt
calls it, the ‘politics of dislocation’ (Munt 1995:124). Deconstructive spatial tactics can
take the form of marches, Gay Pride parades, public protests, performance art and street
theatre as well as overtly homosexual behaviour such as kissing in public. An example
cited by Bell and Valentine (1995) of such tactics is the ‘queering’ of space by Queer
Nation Rose (QNR) and ACT-UP who refused to allow the Montreal Pride Parade to be
ghettoized in the gay village as it had in past years. Instead they marched through the
downtown streets. Furthermore, they ignored the anti-drag, anti-leather parade rules by
declaring ‘If you’re in clothes you’re in drag’: ‘irreverent combinations of identities
proliferated, including fags posing as dykes, dykes dressed as clone fags, and bisexuals
pretending to be fags pretending to be lipstick lesbians’ (Bell and Valentine 1995:14).
Tim Cresswell makes the important point that it is difficult to get people to recognize
normative geographies until these are transgressed. ‘By looking at events which upset the
balance of common sense’, he says:
SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES/ 139
I let events themselves become the questions. The occurrence of ‘out-of-place’
phenomena leads people to question behavior and define what is and what is not
appropriate for a setting. The examination of commonsense becomes a public issue
in the speeches of politicians and the words of the media.
(Cresswell, 1996)
When spatial tactics of queer politics become what Cresswell (in another context) calls
‘crisis points in the normal functioning of everyday expectations’ for the mainstream
heterosexual population—then normative heterosexual geographies become more clear.
This is the first step towards destabilizing and eventually overturning such repressively
striated geographies of gender and sexuality.
SPATIAL MARGINALIZATION OF SEX WORKERS
Prostitutes also offend the aesthetic sensibilities of the upholders of the public/private
dichotomy. They upset the ‘everything in its place’ mentality that reproduces the public/
private spatial dichotomy. They threaten notions of ‘respectable’ and ‘orderly’ behaviour
on the part of women who, it is thought, should be escorted at night in public spaces.
Because of women’s traditional exclusion from the political sphere, the term ‘public
woman’ in dominant discourse has traditionally meant ‘not respectable’, a prostitute,
whereas a public man was a statesman (Matthews 1992). To be a respectable woman was
to sexually serve one man—a husband at home. While this ideal need no longer be strictly
adhered to for a woman to be considered respectable in Anglo-American society, all
forms of commercial sex are generally considered beyond the bounds of respectability.
Glenna Matthews (1992) surveys many sites of resistance against this definition of
public woman that have accompanied the rise of women in the public sphere. However,
there are other agents and sites of resistance against the gendered public/private dichotomy.
There are many women with a strong sense of agency who are proud to be public women
in the traditional sense of the term. In many cases they would not wish to join the ranks of
establishment feminism or the political elite. Many (but certainly not all)17 adult
prostitutes and other sex workers freely choose18 marginal or eccentric locations from which
to claim their rights as sexual minorities and challenge the very structures which elite
women employ to get ahead. They also challenge the narrow definitions of politics and
power employed by those who seek public office. However, their views have only just
begun to be heard as they have long been silenced by members of the dominant culture,
including many prominent feminists who see their work and lifestyles as epitomizing
oppression by men.
Prostitution is a good example of a practice both spatially and socially marginalized by
societal attitudes and the law. There are complex spatial implications in the laws regarding
its practice. The laws in Canada and Britain make prostitution itself legal in principle but all
but impossible to practice without breaking one of many laws. These laws regard such
issues as solicitation or procuring in public places, where prostitution may be practised
and who may benefit from the profits gained.19 This latter restriction makes it illegal for a
prostitute to live with members of her family if they benefit from her earnings.
140 NANCY DUNCAN/
These externally imposed spatial limits to the legal practice of prostitution again deny
the sexuality of public places by imposing greater spatial restrictions on sexual minorities
than on those who conform to the societal standards. In some places these limits serve to
hide from public view and thus privatize many of the aesthetically and morally offensive
physical, psychological, medical and social problems surrounding the highly marginalized
identities of prostitutes. In other places, they force prostitutes onto the street where they
can be subjected to surveillance and segregating practices of the police.
The state and public morality (the latter represented by the religious right and certain
radical feminists20 among others) define prostitutes as either deviant and immoral or
victims suffering from false consciousness who symbolize the oppression of all women by
all men. Such characterizations succeed in cutting them off from having an effective role
as public women in the political sense of speaking on their own behalf and reclaiming their
civil rights. These include their right to citizenship,21 to work in safe conditions, their
right to exercise control over their own bodies and to earn respect as healers, sex experts
and business women as well as the right to freedom from harassment by police and self-
proclaimed upholders of public morality (Bell 1994:100).
If prostitutes could safely ‘come out’ in the public sphere and speak on their own
behalf there would be many benefits, including the opportunity to add some new,
knowledgeable voices to the debates over the meaning of choice and consent, personal
autonomy, sexual exploitation, victim identities, false consciousness and power relations,
structural explanations for what are all too often seen as individual problems.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, I would say that the public/private distinction is still among the most
important spatial ordering principles in North America and Britain today. Public space is
regulated by keeping it relatively free of passion or expressions of sexuality that are not
naturalized, normalized or condoned. It is further regulated by banishing from sight
behaviours that are in various cases repugnant either rightly (as in the case of domestic
violence) or wrongly (as in the case of publicly expressed homosexuality or unforced
adult prostitution) to many members of the dominant groups in society. The
institutionalized dividing off of critical public debate and political expression into
specialized and increasingly controlled spaces allegedly allows for the possibility of
disembodied dispassionate rational discourse and formal political decision making under
conditions of public order. This has left the private domestic sphere to remain invisible,
relatively unregulated (i.e. selectively regulated) and generally free from public scrutiny.
However, we argue that certain so-called private issues need to be deterritorialized, that
is more thoroughly public (ized) and legitimated as appropriate to public discourse. As
Benhabib puts it, ‘the struggle to make something public is a struggle for justice’ (1992:
94). This should certainly not be taken to mean that justice is necessarily served when an
issue becomes publicized. It is, however, more likely to be served in a truly open public
debate where no parties affected by an issue are excluded.
Subversive discourses first articulated in private spaces may eventually become public.
Members of various marginalized social movements eventually learn to negotiate their
SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES/ 141
way into the public sphere. However, feminist political practice has begun to tackle the
problem of the public/private sphere distinction itself as a gender-biased spatial practice
which facilitates what are largely gender-specific abuses and also the marginalization and
enforced privatization of sexualities which do not conform to dominant ideas of ‘natural’
dynamics of heterosexual love. Their explicit intent is to reveal exactly how
disempowering it can be for those who differ from the allegedly neutral norms and
therefore cannot act with the same degree of autonomy or protection assumed by
established models of the democratic society.
The goal is to mount a multi-pronged attack on the spatial and discursive boundaries
that regulate behaviour and discipline difference. This would entail among other things an
‘outing of everybody’. By ‘outing’ here I do not refer to the highly problematic practice
of the outing of individual gays. I think that the practice of publicly identifying the sexual
orientation of individuals against their wishes cannot be considered a just or effective
solution to the problem of homophobia. Nor do I mean to say that privacy should not be
respected when it does not harm others. Rather, I suggest that the boundaries between
the private and public can be destabilized by being actively questioned and placed in the
public consciousness through the media, through challenges in the courts and through the
efforts of social movements. The physical design of our societies’ highly privatized
landscapes however, have been shaped not only to protect those whose privacy should
rightfully be respected, but also to secure the privacy and autonomy of the abusers of the
women and children who share their domestic spaces.
By ‘outing’, then, I am talking in very general terms about a transformed spatiality—an
empowering deterritorialization, the creation of smooth, less striated space. Here I refer
to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notions of smooth or open-ended space as opposed to
state space which they describe as striated or gridded. Smooth space is contrasted with
defended, exclusionary, confining spaces where oppressive patriarchal and heterosexist
practices can become entrenched. These terms are highly abstract and meant to be
evocative. Allowed to wash over one, listened to like music, as Deleuze and Guattari
suggest, their writings provide inspiration to rethink conventional notions of space. I refer
to a potential spatial revolution that would conceive of physical and political or discursive
space as less clearly divided between publicly recognized territories of formal power,
depoliticized spaces of urban spectacle and protected domestic spaces of uneven privatized
power relations. This would enable the consequences of our individual and collective
actions to be made more visible and accountable to critical public debate and oppositional
social movements. To quote Seyla Benhabib once again:
All struggles against oppression in the modern world begin by redefining what had
previously been considered ‘private,’ non-public and non-political issues as matters
of public concern, as issues of justice, [and] as sites of power.
(1992:100)
Although privacy has always been a contingent rather than an absolute right, it is widely
cherished and seen as indispensable for the protection of individual autonomy. However,
privacy is closely associated with highly privatized spatial arrangements and social codes of
142 NANCY DUNCAN/
‘civil inattention’ which facilitate the violation of the rights of a significant percentage of
the population. Thus we must stop to ask ourselves if there are not better ways to control
the abuses of state and other public manifestations of power. Should each individual and
social movement be left to individually renegotiate the public/private spatial and
discursive boundaries for themselves? Or should this deeply rooted division (so sacred and
central to understandings of personal freedom) be radically rethought? I would argue for
the latter.
I do not endorse spatial or political anarchism. There is clearly a need for effective
government at a range of scales (see Penrose 1993:46), various types of regulation, a
progressive redistribution of power and resources, and expanded, multi-scale welfare
programmes. However, the ideal geography would work to minimize: household
autonomy as opposed to the empowerment of its individual members, place-based
identity and privilege, local control which has highly uneven consequences for social
justice across communities,22 nationalism, and other territorializing and confining
exclusionary processes. The creation of progressive geographies would require
deterritorialization—the creation of open-ended, proliferating and inclusive sites of
empowerment and resistance against exclusionary, reterritorializing processes: place
essentialism and homogenizing identity politics or coerced assimilation. These would be
sites of ‘radical openness’ as bell hooks (1990) puts it—sites which may be nurturing—
which may serve as havens, but which are opened up to the public sphere and politicized
(or repoliticized) as the case may be. On the other hand while deterritorialized
geographies would encourage heterogeneity they would also discourage the
naturalization, reification and ghettoization of differences—including, importantly,
differences of gender and sexuality. Fluid geographies would construct and in turn be
constructed by fluid identities.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier version of this paper was the introduction to a three-part presentation by Lynn
Levey, Beth Wolgemuth and myself for the symposium ‘Place, Space and Gender’ held at
Syracuse University in the Spring of 1994. I would like to thank Beth for ideas and
inspiration especially on the sex worker section and Lynn whose unpublished paper ‘No
place like home: shifting legal paradigms to make women safer’ provided me with
references and information on domestic violence. I would also like to thank Joanne Sharp,
Michael Landzelius and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on an earlier draft.
NOTES
1 A study which looks at the homeless as an example of another marginalized group which has
developed spatial strategies that transgress the public/private distinction, politicize space,
and attempt to claim sites of resistance against the regulation of behaviour in public spaces is
Mitchell (1995).
SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES/ 143
2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988:103) consequently goes so far as to claim that ‘the
deconstruction of the opposition between the private and the public is implicit in all, and
explicit in some, feminist activity’.
3 On immanence as distinguished from transcendence see de Beauvoir (19 74), Lloyd (1984)
and Massey (this volume).
4 There are in fact a number of different public/private distinctions; these include the state
versus the market, citizenship versus both the state and the economy, and domestic versus
waged labour. See Robbins (1993:xiii) who draws on an essay by Jeff Weintraub.
5 It should be noted that over the centuries the role of the male head of household as well as
the very notion of masculinity itself has varied considerably, and it differs by class as well.
See Tosh (1994) for a review of the literature on this subject.
6 But see Myslik (this volume) on the limitations placed upon the free movement of gay men
by those who harass and violently attack them.
7 Such intrusion points to the downside of increased state regulation of the private sphere.
One would hope however that this might be rectified through more enlightened public
policies which distinguish between areas of public concern and people’s legitimately
personal affairs.
8 As stated in note 3, the public is sometimes defined as the state in opposition to civil society,
sometimes the public includes the market. The market sometimes is seen as private,
however.
9 On the history—and normative theory—of the public sphere see Habermas (1991). For
debates around Habermas’s concept see Calhoun (1993) and Robbins (1993).
10 Ironically, while rape and assault is often ignored if it takes place in private
spaces, consensual and private sexual practices among gays are sometimes not tolerated.
Operation Spanner was a recent police operation in Britain designed to catch and arrest men
participating in sadomasochistic activities in private spaces. Sixteen arrests were upheld in
court on the grounds that sadomasochistic practices among consenting adults can not be
afforded protection by laws of privacy (on this see Bell 1995:305).
11 In fact it was not until the twentieth century (1922) that wife beating had become illegal in
all US states (Pleck 1987:108–21).
12 For example in Britain the Matrimonial Clause Act which dates from 1878 (see Hammerton
1992).
13 Buel (1988:217) states that police officers fail to arrest in the majority of cases where
battered women request an arrest be made. Some policemen say that they arrest depending
upon the reason the man hit his partner, perpetuating the notion that some women deserve
to be beaten.
14 According to the United States Commission on Civil Rights (1982:12–22) a majority of the
police who have been killed on duty were handling ‘domestic disturbance’ cases.
15 Women’s shelters first opened in Britain in 1971, spread to Europe and then to the US. It is
not surprising that the US would be slower to accept the idea of shelters in that individualism
and privatism are even stronger than in Britain. And the public spheres are weak in
comparison with Britain.
16 Oppressive dress codes was the topic of a paper by Gill Valentine presented at the
Association of American Geographer’s national meeting in San Francisco, April 1994.
17 The World Charter of Prostitutes’ Rights distinguishes between voluntary and coerced
prostitution: ‘Voluntary prostitution is the mutually voluntary exchange of services for
money or other consideration; it is a form of work, and like most work in our capitalist
society, it is often alienated, that is, the worker/prostitute has too little control over her/his
144 NANCY DUNCAN/
working conditions and the way the work is organized. Forced prostitution is a form of
aggravated sexual assault’ (quoted in Bell 1994:114). It calls for the decriminalization of all
aspects of voluntary adult prostitution. The Charter also states the need for help and
retraining for prostitutes wishing to leave prostitution. It states, ‘The right not to be a
prostitute is as important as the right to be one’ (quoted in Bell 1994:116).
18 By using the words ‘freely choose’ here I am not suggesting any kind of radical freedom.
Freedom to choose work in a capitalist society is of course highly contingent. Most choices
are accompanied by some degree of alienation and contradictory consciousness.
Furthermore, prostitutes typically (but not always) have fewer choices than the majority of
individuals in society.
19 Prostitution is illegal in 49 out of 50 states of the US.
20 The MacKinnon-Dworkin wing of feminism is often referred to as radical feminism. It is
known for its campaigns against pornography and prostitution and their affinity with the
organization WHISPER (Women Hurt in Systems of Prostitution and Engaged in Revolt).
Such feminists construct prostitutes as victims of male oppression by definition and thus seek
to end prostitution. They stand in opposition to prostitutes’ rights groups which seek to
empower prostitutes and politicize sex work (Bell 1994:99–102). The latter are represented
by the International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights and two World Whores’ Congresses
and groups such as the San Francisco-based COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and
Toronto-based CORP (Canadian Organization of Prostitutes’ Rights).
21 Various prostitutes’ rights groups in North America and Europe have been campaigning for
legal and human rights including freedom of speech, travel, immigration, work, unionizing,
marriage and motherhood, employment insurance, health insurance and housing. The World
Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights seeks decriminalization of ‘all aspects of adult prostitution
resulting from individual decision’ (i.e. based on either free choice or necessity) (see Bell
1994:113).
22 This is especially true in the US as opposed to Britain. In Britain local government is far less
dependent upon locally generated funding for various community projects; local control
means control over funds largely generated at the national as opposed to the local level, thus
there is not the same inequality between communities.
9
(RE)NEGOTIATING THE ‘HETEROSEXUAL
STREET’
Lesbian productions of space
Gill Valentine
THE HETEROSEXUAL STREET
In November 1991 a lesbian couple made the headlines in the British gay press when they
were thrown out of a supermarket in Nottingham for kissing in the store (Scene Out
1991). What their experience demonstrates is that the street1—and I mean this to include
not only the pavement/sidewalk, but also the places, such as shops and cafes, which the
street contains—is not an asexual space. Rather, it is commonly assumed to be ‘naturally’
or ‘authentically’ heterosexual (Bell et al. 1994). Whilst couples of the opposite sex are
free to embrace over the supermarket trolley, the lesbian kiss caused panic because
‘images of selves trouble as they cut into spaces where they don’t “belong’” (Probyn 1992:
505).
Judith Butler has famously argued in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity that: ‘gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within
a highly rigid regulatory framework that congeal over time to produce the appearance of
substance, of a natural sort of being’ (1990:33). In the same way the heterosexing of space
is a performative act naturalized through repetition and regulation (Bell et al. 1994; Bell
and Valentine 1995). This repetition takes the form of many acts: from heterosexual
couples kissing and holding hands as they make their way down the street, to
advertisements and window displays which present images of contented ‘nuclear’
families; and from heterosexualized conversations that permeate queues at bus stops and
banks, to the piped music articulating heterosexual desires that fill shops, bars and
restaurants (Valentine 1993). These acts produce ‘a host of assumptions embedded in the
practices of public life about what constitutes proper behaviour’ (Weeks 1992:5) and
which congeal over time to give the appearance of a ‘proper’ or ‘normal’ production of
space.
Whilst heterosexuals have the freedom to perform their heterosexuality in the street—
because the street is presumed to be a heterosexual space—sexual dissidents, as the
Nottingham lesbians found out, are only allowed ‘to be gay in specific spaces and places’
(Bristow 1989:74). Whilst the space of the centre—the street—is produced as
heterosexual, the production of ‘authentic’ lesbian and gay space is relegated to the
margins of the ‘ghetto’ and the back street bar and preferably, the closeted or private
space of the ‘home’ (although even this is not always acceptable, as David Bell, 1995,
146 LESBIAN PRODUCTIONS OF SPACE/
argues concerning the complex ways that the state regulates sexual citizenship). Thus the
London Lesbian Offensive Group claim that ‘Heterosexual privilege is about having, and
assuming, the right to be more “normal” in both public and private. (Public not meaning
outside your home, but in absolutely all dealings with the everyday world)’ (London
Lesbian Offensive Group 1984:257).
But the production of heterosexual space is not only tied up with the performance of
heterosexual desire but also with the performance of gender identities. Despite Gayle
Rubin’s claim that ‘it is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically to more
accurately reflect their separate social existence’ (1984:308), it is hard to escape the role
gender identities play in the production of heterosexual space. On the one hand, gender
and sexuality are not the same thing but on the other hand they are certainly closely
related, mutually constitutive perhaps, as Vron Ware (1992) has argued about gender and
race. Certainly, Judith Butler makes a convincing case for the argument that binary
gender identities only make sense within a heterosexual framework or matrix. She writes:
The institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and
regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated
from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices
of heterosexual desire. The act of differentiating the two oppositional moments of
the binary results in a consolidation of each term, the respective internal coherence
of sex, gender and desire.
(Butler 1990:22–3)
The specific ‘feminine’ ‘shape’ and ‘look’ that is perceived as heterosexually desirable and
that is (re)presented and (re)produced through the bio-power channels of fashion, health,
diet, fitness and so on (Evans 1993) may change over space and time but essentially being
a woman is about performing a gender identity that is perceived to maintain the unity or
coherence of gender, sex, desire by articulating a discrete asymmetrical opposition
between the ‘feminine’ self and ‘masculine’ other (so that, to paraphrase Rosalind
Coward (1984:42) ‘sexuality pervades our bodies almost in spite of ourselves’).
Lesbians and gay men have historically been assumed to have ‘twisted’ gender
identities, so that gay men are labelled as effeminate and lesbians as butch just as
effeminate men and masculine women are perceived to be gay. This despite plenty of
evidence to the contrary; for example, lipstick lesbians are the embodiment of femininity
and ‘many heterosexuals are not respectively masculine and feminine, or not in certain
respects all the time’ (Sinfield 1993:22). Thus repetitive performances of hegemonic
asymmetrical gender identities, like repetitive performances of heterosexualities, also
produce a host of assumptions about what constitutes ‘proper’ behaviour/dress in
everyday spaces which congeal over time to produce the appearance of ‘proper’, i.e.
heterosexual, space. In this way ‘the lesbian subject is always a doubled subject caught up
in the doubling of being a woman and a lesbian’ (Probyn 1995:81). For example Linda
McDowell’s (1995) study of merchant bankers demonstrates the way that working in the
city involves the construction of an embodied gender performance, in which attributes of
masculinity and femininity, including a more or less authentic presentation of sexual
GILL VALENTINE/ 147
identity, are not only an integral part of doing business but also produce the bank as a
heterosexual space.
But sex, gender and desire do not necessarily map coherently onto each other to
maintain the logic of heterosexuality. As Alan Sinfield argues ‘ideological categories fail to
contain the confusions that they must release in the attempt to achieve control. That is
why we observe heterosexuality plunged into inconsistency and anxiety; it is aggressive
because it is insecure’ (Sinfield 1993:22). This insecurity often manifests itself in the form
of regulatory regimes that constrain the possible performances of gender and sexual
identities, in order to maintain the ‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality. These are regimes
which take the form of multiple ‘processes, of different origin and scattered location,
regulating the most intimate and minute elements of the construction of space, time,
desire and embodiment’ (Foucault 1979:138).
One such process, as the Nottingham lesbians trying to shop for groceries found out, is
the simple removal of those who cut into and disrupt the ‘normality’ of heterosexual
space by performing their desires in a way that produces (an)other space. In the UK, for
example, a number of statutory and common laws can be and often are, used to
criminalize public displays of same sex desire on the streets. Although these laws do not
explicitly single out lesbians and gays, they are often interpreted and applied in an
extremely discriminatory way against sexual dissidents (Foley 1994). Public order laws,
for example, have been invoked to threaten a couple walking hand in hand with
prosecution, and have been used to obtain a conviction for ‘insulting behaviour’ against
two sexual dissidents seen kissing at a bus stop in the early hours of the morning (Foley
1994).
Often, however, anxious straight citizens don’t wait for the police or private security
forces to step in and stabilize the heterosexuality of the street, rather they actively
regulate it through aggression (Herek 1988). As Virginia Apuzzo, former executive
director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has pointed out, ‘To be gay or lesbian
in America is to live in the shadow of violence’ (Comstock 1991:54). For example, levels
of victimization reported by lesbians in a survey in Philadelphia were twice as high as
those recorded for women in the general urban population (Aurand et al. 1985; Comstock
1989, 1991). Dr Stewart Flemming describes the type of injuries sustained by sexual
dissidents who are brought into his San Francisco medical centre for treatment as:
vicious in scope and the intent is to kill and maim… Weapons include knives,
guns, brass knuckles, tire irons, baseball bats, broken bottles, metal chains, and
metal pipes. Injuries include severe lacerations requiring extensive plastic surgery;
head injuries, at times requiring surgery; puncture wounds of the chest, requiring
insertion of chest tubes; removal of the spleen for traumatic rupture; multiple
fractures of the extremities, jaws, ribs and facial bones; severe eye injuries, in two
cases resulting in permanent loss of vision; as well as severe psychological trauma
the level of which would be difficult to measure.
(Comstock 1991:46)
148 LESBIAN PRODUCTIONS OF SPACE/
Whilst gay men are primarily attacked by other men, the perpetrators of violence against
lesbians include not only men (alone and in groups with other men and/or women), but also
women (alone and in groups). There are also gender differences in the geography of
homophobic assaults—lesbians report more violent encounters in the ‘heterosexual
street’ than gay men, who are more likely to be victimized in cruising areas, or gay-
identified neighbourhoods (Berrill 1992; Comstock 1991; Valentine 1993).
In many cases these incidents are not ‘provoked’ because lesbians are articulating their
sexuality, for example by kissing or cuddling, but rather because they are not performing
their gender identity in an ‘appropriate’ heterosexually identified way. Similarly, many
women who identify as heterosexual but who do not perform their gender in a way that
can be read as differentiated from the opposite sex in a heterosexually desirable way also
encounter harassment in the form of anti-lesbian abuse (Bunch 1991), whilst very
‘feminine’ lesbians can be taken for heterosexual. In these cases you don’t have to be ‘one’
just to look like ‘one’ to be seen as a threat to the heterosexuality of the street. This just goes
to show how the identity of those present in a space, and thus the identity of the space
being produced, can sometimes be constructed by the gaze of others present rather than
the performers.
Not all the processes at work maintaining the heterosexuality of the street directly involve
violence and aggression. There are many other more subtle omni-present regulatory
regimes constraining performative possibilities which pass unnoticed by those not subject
to their pressures. Heterosexual looks of disapproval, whispers and stares are used to
spread discomfort and make lesbians feel ‘out of place’ in everyday spaces. These in turn
pressurize many women into policing their own desires and hence reinforce the
appearance that ‘normal’ space is straight space (Valentine 1993). In this way, whilst
sexual dissidents are constantly aware of the performative nature of identities and spaces,
heterosexuals are often completely oblivious to this because they rarely have to be
conscious of, or examine their own performativity. They can take the street for granted as
a ‘commonsense’ heterosexual space precisely because they take for granted their freedom
to perform their own identities. In contrast many dykes exercise constant self vigilance,
policing their own dress, behaviour and desires to avoid confrontation. As Sally Munt
describes:
There’s nothing like being contained in its [Nottingham’s] two large shopping malls
on a Saturday morning to make one feel queer. Inside again, this pseudo-public
space is sexualized as privately heterosexual. Displays of intimacy over the purchase
of family-sized commodities are exchanges of gazes calculated to exclude. When
the gaze turns, its intent is hostile; visual and verbal harassment make me avert my
eyes. I don’t loiter, ever, the surveillance is turned upon myself, as the panopticon
imposes self vigilance.
(Munt 1995:115)
As this quote neatly articulates, repetitive performances of hegemonic asymmetrical
gender identities and heterosexual desires congeal over time to produce the appearance that
the street is normally a heterosexual space. But, as the quote also demonstrates, this is an
GILL VALENTINE/ 149
insecure appearance which has to be maintained through regulatory (including self-
regulatory) regimes because the production of the heterosexual street is always under
threat from sexual dissidents (re)negotiating the way everyday spaces are produced.
NOW YOU SEE US, NOW YOU DON’T: (RE)NEGOTIATIONS
OF THE HETEROSEXUAL STREET
The identity of spaces and places, like the identities of individuals are ‘frequently riven
with internal tensions and conflicts’ (Massey 1991:276). Spaces are rarely being produced
in a singular, uniform way as heterosexual (even though this is usually the hegemonic
performance of space). Rather, as the quote above demonstrates, there are usually ‘others’
present who are producing their own relational spaces, or who are reading ‘heterosexual’
space against the grain—experiencing it differently.
‘Lesbian desires and manners of being can restructure space’ (Probyn 1995: 81) in many
different ways. One of these is through dress. Subtle signifiers of lesbian identity, such as
pinkie rings, labris earrings and rainbow ribbons; or lesbian dress codes such as butch-
femme style, articulate subtly different spaces. Dress and body language (such as gestures,
a glance, an independent or confident manner) also help dykes to ‘spot’ each other, to
recognize a sense of sameness—she’s like me—even though no words may be spoken.
‘These features are not perceived or interpreted as indicators of lesbianism by straight
women, because identifying lesbians is not relevant or necessary for them’ (Painter 1981:
77). This is neatly captured by author Katherine Forrest in this excerpt from her lesbian
crime novel Amateur City, when Ellen a gay woman caught up in a murder meets lesbian
sleuth, Detective Kate Delafield for the first time:
Ellen opened the door. ‘Detective Delafield’, she said.
The woman sitting across from her at the conference table, her dark hair salted
with gray, her corduroy jacket a light soft green, was examining a sketch, holding a
leather-bound notebook sideways in strong square hands. She looked at Ellen with
light blue eyes that were cool, level, and candid.
Ellen stared at her. Stephie can talk all she wants about not being able to tell for sure,
but if this woman’s not a lesbian then neither am I.
(Forrest 1984:32, original emphasis)
Often it may be not so much what is there but what is missing, the wedding ring for example,
that marks out (an)other identity. Thus through these fleeting glances or cruising, dykes
can produce ‘gay(ze) space’ (Walker 1995:75). Or as Probyn has argued ‘space is sexed
through the relational movements of one lesbian body to another’ (Probyn 1995:81).
Sometimes the object of the gay(ze) doesn’t reciprocate ‘the look’, rather a lesbian
reading is imposed upon her, more in hope than anticipation. But the voyeur can still
momentarily imagine the space as her own, producing a small fissure in hegemonic
heterosexual space.
Lesbian spaces are also mobilized through linguistic structures of meaning. By
‘dropping pins’ for example, by referring to lesbian cultural icons or appropriated films,
150 LESBIAN PRODUCTIONS OF SPACE/
books or music, dykes can establish contact with other gay women, subverting
heterosexual spaces with their own meaning.
Lesbian social knowledge is used to interpret verbal and non-verbal behaviour [of
others] such that the reality of one’s lesbianism is not tied to external acts, but
instead to the unquestioned and unquestionable propositions of the community
itself. The woman, whether she perceives herself as a lesbian or not, is verbally
constituted as a lesbian through the indexical use of members’ talk.
(Painter 1981:72)
Hayes (1976) even goes so far as to suggest that there is a gay speech ‘community’ and gay
lexicon—‘gayspeak’. Whilst language is undoubtedly important in constructing lesbian
meanings, however, all sexual dissidents do not speak with one voice but are polyvocal.
Silence can also be a powerful way of articulating an identity: ‘the lesbian, who does not
engage in subtle verbal…patterns in straight settings to attract members of the opposite
sex, notices or identifies other women who are also not engaging in these types of
behaviour’ (Painter 1981:79)—and, again, can use these clues to establish a gay(ze) or
relational space.
Like language, music also has the power to produce space. The music of artists such as
kd lang and Melissa Etheridge, becomes infused with their lesbian sexuality, even though
their lyrics and the sounds they make may have no explicit lesbian content and the artists
themselves may resist this reading of their work (Valentine 1995). A lang track playing in
street space, like a shop or a bar, can therefore facilitate the materialization of a lesbian
space by causing two women to catch each other’s eye and establish fleeting contact or
even long-term friendships (Bradby 1993; Valentine 1995). ‘Do you like kd lang?’ is,
after all, Cherry Smyth argues, the litmus test of a woman’s sexuality.
Music also has the power to act as a vehicle that can transport the listener to another
place and time. This use of music with fantasy allows women to use Walkmans to escape
the street into imaginary lesbian spaces. Similarly, by playing music that has lesbian
meaning publicly on tapedecks in shops or bars, or by using ‘boom boxes’ on the street,
women can subvert straight space (Valentine 1995).
What these examples show is that:
Lesbian identity is constructed in the temporal and linguistic mobilization of space,
and as we move through space we imprint utopian and dystopian moments upon
urban life. Our bodies are vital signs of this temporality and intersubjective
location. In an instant, a freeze-frame, a lesbian is occupying space as it occupies
her. Space teems with…‘possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, u-
turns, dead-ends [and] one-way streets’, it is never still.
(Munt 1995:125)
However, these subtle possibilities and singular productions of relational sexed and
gendered spaces often pass unnoticed by heterosexuals, either because overwhelming
repetitive performances of heterosexuality swamp out these articulations of difference or
GILL VALENTINE/ 151
because these subtle signifiers of ‘otherness’ are not read or understood by a heterosexual
audience. Some lesbians therefore are actively using more ‘in your face’ tactics to
challenge the stability of heterosexual productions of space.
‘IN YOUR FACE’: (RE)NEGOTIATIONS OF THE
HETEROSEXUAL STREET
Don Mitchell has argued that public spaces are
very importantly, spaces for representation. That is, public space is a place within
which a political movement can stake out the space that allows it to be seen. In
public space, political organisations can represent themselves to a larger
population. By claiming space in public, by creating public spaces, social groups
themselves become public.
(Mitchell 1995:115)
Lesbian and gay pride marches, held annually in Europe and the US, are one example of
sexual dissidents being seen. By numerically appropriating the streets (and surrounding
transport system, car parks, pubs, parks, shops, McDonalds and so on) and filling them
with lesbian and gay meaning for one day, marchers pierce the complacency of
heterosexual space. Sally Munt describes this spectacle as ‘fifty thousand homosexuals
parading through the city streets, of every type, presenting the Other of heterosexuality,
from Gay Bankers to Gay Men’s Chorus singing “It’s Raining Men”, a carnival image of
space being permeated by its antithesis’ (Munt 1995:123). But as this quote implies, Pride
marches also achieve more than just visibility, they also challenge the production of
everyday spaces as heterosexual. The importance of space is something that has
particularly been seized on by queer activists.
In the early 1990s, impatient with lesbian and gay assimilationist tactics and inspired by
aggressive unapologetic political tactics of AIDS activists such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition
To Unleash Power), a group met in New York to discuss how to resist the growing
number of assaults against lesbians and gay men in East Village. Under the slogan of
‘queers bash back’, Queer Nation was born (Smyth 1992). This shift in politics (that
quickly spread to Europe) away from integration and equality issues towards an ‘in your
face’ confrontational tactics has also brought with it a recognition, to paraphrase Tim
Davis, that heterosexism is a spatially constituted discourse that can be interrupted and
undermined (Davis 1995:287). Rather than merely trespassing in heterosexual public
space with the political intention of staking out or gaining a share of it, queer is also about
confronting and contesting the very production of public space.
Describing a hypothetical scenario of two lesbians in a pub kissing in front of a bar full
of men, Elspeth Probyn explains how sexual dissidents can rearticulate space. She writes:
while their kiss cannot undo the historicity of the ways in which men produce their
space as the site of the production of gender (Woman) for another (men), the fact
that a woman materialises another woman as the object of her desire does go some
152 LESBIAN PRODUCTIONS OF SPACE/
way in rearticulating that space. The enactment of desire here can begin to skewer
the lines of force that seek to constitute women as Woman, as object of the
masculine gaze…making out in straight space can be a turn-on, one articulation of
desire that bends and queers a masculine place allowing for a momentarily sexed
lesbian space.
(Probyn 1995:81)
One group that has set out not only to be seen, but also to bend and queer space, are the
Lesbian Avengers. The notion of a lesbian direct action group was the brainchild of Sarah
Schulman, an American writer and activist, who developed Lesbian Avengers with five
friends, with the intention of prioritizing lesbians’ needs and making lesbians visible (in both
heterosexual and queer spaces). They began by recruiting activists at the New York
Lesbian and Gay Pride where they circulated flyers stating: ‘We want revenge and we
want it now!’ and with the invitation to Imagine what your lives could be. Aren’t you
ready to make it happen?’ (Hopkins 1994:18). This was rapidly followed by a series of
actions to challenge heterosexism in everyday places, in which the Avengers sometimes
joined forces with other groups, such as Las Buenas Amigas and African Ancestral
Lesbians for Societal Change, to target specific organizations or places for protests
(Meono-Picado 1995).
These tactics quickly spilled over into the UK. In July 1994 the birth of a UK version of
the Lesbian Avengers was announced in the magazine Rouge: ‘A new dyke direct action
group has arrived, bringing with it style from AIDS activism, theatricality from queer and,
above all, determination and bravado from suffragists, Greenham women and a long
tradition of anger and action’ (Hopkins 1994:18).
The first action of the British group was to target the memorial to Queen Victoria (who
famously denied that lesbians existed) near tourist focal point, Buckingham Palace. The
statue was circled by over fifty women, chanting and banging drums and carrying banners
such as ‘Lie back and think of Lesbians’ and ‘The Lesbians are not amused’ (Diva 1994). In
September they followed up this action by taking over another space colonized with
heterosexual meaning—the shop window (Reekie 1993). Invading window displays in
one of London’s major shopping streets, Oxford Street, lesbians posed next to the
mannequins with labels such as ‘Designer Dyke’, ‘Lesbian Boy’ and ‘Funky Femme’.
These ‘in your face’, aggressive tactics both raise the visibility of lesbians but also
rupture the taken-for-granted heterosexuality of these spaces by disrupting the repetitive
performances of the mall and the shopping street as heterosexual places and (re)imagining/
(re)producing them as queer sites. Implicit in these ‘other’ performances of the street is a
recognition that control over the way that space is produced is fundamental to
heterosexuals’ ability to reproduce their hegemony. The insecurity and anxiety of
straights in the face of this challenge is evident in the heteropatriarchal jeers of passers-by
and attempts to police such actions.
Disruptive performances of dissident sexualities on the street are therefore about
empowerment and being ‘in control’. These actions are also not only transgressive, in
that they trespass on territory that is taken for granted as heterosexual, but also
transformative, in that they publicly articulate sexualities (both lesbian and, by exposing
GILL VALENTINE/ 153
its taken-for-granted presence in everyday spaces, heterosexuality) that are assumed to be
‘private’ (and in the case of lesbians also invisible) and thus change the way we understand
space by exposing its performative nature and the artifice of the public/private dichotomy.
CONCLUSION: A KISS IS NOT JUST A KISS
The experience of the two Nottingham lesbians which opened this chapter demonstrates
that a kiss is not just a kiss when it is performed by a same-sex couple in an everyday
location. Rather, repetitive performances of hegemonic asymmetrical gender identities
and heterosexual desires congeal over time to produce the appearance that street spaces
(such as shops, parks and bars) are normally or naturally heterosexual spaces. The
heterosexuality of the street is, however, as the response of the store manager to the
lesbian embrace demonstrates, an insecure appearance that has to be maintained by
regulatory regimes (from harassment and violence, to jeers and stares). It is insecure
because space teems with many other possibilities. As Elspeth Probyn has argued ‘we need
to think about how space presses upon bodies differently; to realize the singularities of
space that are produced as bodies press against space’ (Probyn 1995:83).
This chapter has tried to highlight two contrasting ways that lesbian bodies (re)produce
space; first, by picking out some of the subtle ways women use lesbian manners and styles
to fleetingly produce relational sexed and gendered spaces; second, by examining the
more ‘in your face’ efforts of lesbian activists to visibly replace heterosexual space with
other performances. These spaces are ‘multiple and intersecting, provisional and shifting,
and they require ever more intricate skills in cartography’ (Rose 1993:55) if we as
geographers are to begin to try to map them.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Peter Jackson for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, David
Bell for his legal advice and Nancy Duncan for her patience with my habit of missing
deadlines.
NOTE
1 I’m using the term street in place of the word ‘public space’ to describe everyday publicly
accessible places. This is because the term ‘public’ now seems inappropriate given, first, the
way that many so-called ‘public’ spaces are now semi-privatized (i.e. are privately owned,
controlled and managed); second, the fact these places are often not ‘public’ in that many
people are excluded from them on the grounds of age, ‘race’, sexuality and so on; and third,
because the term ‘public’ obscures the fact that many so-called ‘private’ relationships, such
as sexualities, are actually part of ‘public’ space.
154
10
RENEGOTIATI NG THE SOCIAL/SEXUAL
IDENTITIES OF PLACES
Gay communities as safe havens or sites of resistance?
Wayne D.Myslik
INTRODUCTION
It was late at night. I was walking to my car. At first they followed me in
their car for a couple of blocks. I tried to lose them. Then they cut me off
and got out of the car and chased me down. They kept screaming ‘rich
faggot’. I think there were four of them. They were wearing high school
football jackets. They beat me up pretty bad.
(Don, 27)
I was walking down Connecticut Ave [near Dupont Circle] with another
man…people driving down the street hanging out of the car screamed
‘faggot’ and threw a bottle…young high-school kids. A friend was physically
beaten up outside the DC Eagle twice by groups of people who knocked him
down. I know about a stabbing and drive-by shootings at Tracks.
(David, 37)
I was walking down the street at Dupont Circle, not doing anything overt.
Two young white men in their twenties yelled out ‘faggot’. A friend walked
through P Street Beach [near Dupont Circle] and was assaulted. They broke
his jaw.
(Glenn, 40)
For a two-year period you didn’t go into [Dupont Circle] at night… There
were serious bashings around the P Street area.
(Whit, 47)
A friend was assaulted and raped on the western edge of Dupont. You aren’t
as safe as you think you are.
(Peter, 25)
156 THE SOCIAL/SEXUA L IDENTITIES OF PLACES/
Most major American cities have neighbourhoods that are popular with gay men or that
are predominantly gay. Exhibiting varying degrees of gay commercial and residential
concentration, these areas offer opportunities for socialization with other gay men and
provide access to specialized services ranging from bookstores to bars to clinics. In this
chapter, I am particularly concerned with what I will call ‘queer spaces’. These are areas
that, being more than just concentrations of gay men, have come to be identified in and
outside the gay community as gay spaces. By exhibiting a degree of social control by the
gay community, queer spaces create the perception of being ‘safe spaces’.
The concept of a ‘safe space’ is an important one for gay men, who are at risk of prejudice,
discrimination and physical and verbal violence throughout their daily lives. Queer spaces
are generally perceived as safe havens from this discrimination and violence, but they
often serve as destinations of choice for ‘gay bashers’. The experiences of Don, David,
Glenn and Whit above refer to events in such queer spaces, near gay establishments, or
near the homes of gay people. They portray the reality that incidents of heterosexist
violence are common in these ‘safe havens’. Why do gay men continue to identify queer
spaces as safe spaces? To answer this question, we must consider the concepts of fear and
safety and focus on the social contexts in which heterosexist violence, and reactions to
such violence, take place. To do this, I will explore the following themes: (1)
heterosexism as a cultural system and its enforcement, (2) violence against gay men, (3)
issues of crime, safety, fear and vulnerability, (4) gay men’s perceptions of straight places
and queer places, and (5) power, politics, and territory as expressed in the landscape.
In approaching this issue from a geographical perspective, I intend to provide some
insight into the role queer spaces play in helping gay men cope with the realities of
heterosexism, and the violence that often accompanies it. This study discusses the
experiences and perceptions of the white gay men who in many ways dominate the
cultural landscape of the Dupont Circle neighbourhood of Washington, DC. Although
many of these observations are not generalizable to other groups, they do raise important
questions about how all of us perceive our places in the cities in which we live.
THE STUDY
Because gay men vary in the degree to which they are visible and there is, of course, no
directory of gay men, it is impossible to know the size or location of the universe for this
study. It was therefore impossible to use a true random sample. A quota sample was
considered, but deemed unnecessary as the purpose of the study was to understand the
individual experiences of each community, not to find a representative sample of the
entire city. More significantly, it would be necessary to designate quota sizes based on the
entire population of the city (e.g. percentage of total city population that is working-class,
etc.). It is highly questionable, however, whether the demographic characteristics of the
gay population of the city mirror those of the greater city population, particularly by age.
The technique chosen for determining the characteristics of the sample, therefore, was
judgement sampling, but individual sample units were identified through snowball
sampling. Through my familiarity with the gay communities of Washington, I had access
to a significant number of individuals who were willing to assist in this study. These
WAYNE D.MYSLIK/ 157
individuals, in turn, were asked to identify others like themselves who would be
interested in participating in the survey. A particular concern in this process was to avoid
the dangers of choosing a sample made exclusively of activists or otherwise extroverted
individuals who would be unusually inclined to volunteer for such a survey. In order to
obtain as broad a sample as possible, I placed advertisements in the city’s gay newspaper
(The Washington Blade), the city’s free newspaper (The City Paper) and the neighbourhood
paper (The InTowner). I also posted flyers at local supermarkets, bookstores, bars, discos,
restaurants, coffee houses, video stores and sex shops frequented by gay clientele.
The final sample included fifty gay white men between the ages of 23 and 48.
Approximately 75 per cent of them identified themselves as middle class, the remaining
25 per cent as working class or ‘blue collar’. Approximately 70 per cent were living in
Dupont Circle or in the process of moving into the neighbourhood from elsewhere in the
city. The remaining 30 per cent worked in the neighbourhood or spent all of their free
time there. The interviews, although based on a survey guide, took the form of open
conversations lasting upwards of one and a half hours each. Most interviews were
conducted at a restaurant or coffee house chosen by the subject. A few were done at the
subject’s home or over the phone, as they felt most comfortable. Approximately 30 per
cent of the subjects contacted me on the recommendation of a friend who had already
been interviewed; 30 per cent responded to advertisements and flyers; 30 per cent were
contacts I had made socially or professionally while living previously in the Dupont Circle
neighbourhood.
HETEROSEXISM
It’s so oppressively straight there [Georgetown].1 If feel out of my element.
They don’t even conceive of it…that gay people might exist. I’m scared, I
guess.
(Geoffrey, 27)
I cease anything that may be construed as gay behaviour. You have to act
asexual.
(Ron, 23)
I’m supposed to act a certain way. I’m only tolerated within certain
parameters.
(Frank, 37)
I always feel like when I walk through a het crowd, maybe someone can tell
something is different. I can’t relax for fear that I will get a verbal attack, a
strange or awkward look.
(David, 37)
158 THE SOCIAL/SEXUA L IDENTITIES OF PLACES/
The system
Feminist theorists have demonstrated the degree to which gender relations are reflected in
and constitutive of the patriarchal organization of space in Western culture (see, for
example, England 1991; McDowell 1983). Intersecting this gender-ordered construction
of society is the sexual ordering of space and place under what Valentine has called
‘heteropatriarchy, that is, a process of sociosexual power relations which reflects and
reproduces male dominance’ (1993:396).
Western society is based on the notion that the natural purpose of sexuality is for
reproduction and that sexual identity is linked inextricably to the individual’s role in the
reproductive family. Organized around the construction of heterosexuality as the
dominant and ‘normal’ form of sexual identity, this view of sexuality is directly
dependent upon a binary system of masculine and feminine gender identities that are
believed to coincide directly with male-and female-sexed bodies. Gay men thus become
outlaws, alien to this heteropatriarchal system.
The current use of the term ‘family values’ by the religious right in attacks against gay civil
rights is a cogent example of the extent to which a heteropatriarchal society sees gay men
as alien to the familial system. Sexual relations between gay lovers are illegal in many
areas, gay marriages are not recognized and the courts frequently deny the rights of gay
men to be parents by taking their children from them. With vicious irony, the religious
right then labels gays as ‘anti-family’.
Providing abundant evidence of the gendering of urban public space, feminist
geographers have been very successful in breaking down the traditional distinction
between public and private space that sees sexuality as limited to the private domain (see
Duncan, this volume; Peake 1993; Valentine 1993). They have shown that all space has a
gender identity and that most spaces, public and private, are masculine dominated. Just as
spaces may be identified as masculine or male-dominated, though, urban spaces also have
a sexual identity. Virtually all such space is heterosexually dominated. As Davis has
pointed out, however, ‘heterosexism and homophobia are social constructions with
spatial impacts that are not always clearly visible in the physical landscape’ (1994:2).
Indeed, as Geoffrey notes when he says ‘they don’t even conceive of it…that gay people
might exist’, most people are blissfully ignorant of the degree to which sexuality, and in
particularly, heterosexuality, permeates space. Illustrative of this ignorance is the often
heard statement that gays would be tolerated if they didn’t ‘flaunt’ their homosexuality.
Inherent in this statement is the assumption that heterosexuality is itself not flaunted or
expressed outside the home. However, engagement announcements, bridal showers,
wedding ceremonies and rings, joint tax returns, booking a double bed at a hotel, shopping
together for a new mattress, casual references in conversation to a husband or wife, a
brief peck on the cheek when greeting or leaving a spouse, photos of spouses on desks at
work, holding hands at the beach, and even divorces are all public announcements and
affirmations of one’s heterosexuality. The ‘normality’ of heterosexuality is so deeply
ingrained in Western culture that it is not even seen. Gay men, though, are keenly aware
of this ‘heterosexual assumption’, its visibility, and its impact on their lives. As Ron and
Frank have noticed, gay men are tolerated only so long as their gay identity, their
WAYNE D.MYSLIK/ 159
homosexuality, remains hidden. When it becomes visible, one is at risk of attack. A t-shirt
popular among many gay men states, ‘I don’t mind straight people, as long as they act gay
in public.’
In nearly all public spaces, then, there is no tolerance for departure from a
heterosexual gender-identity and its attendant patterns of behaviour. Gay men learn that
in the workplace, in bars, in shopping malls, on the street, in virtually every physical or
social space in which they travel, sexual orientation must never be visible. For most gay men,
adapting behaviour between gay and straight spaces to hide their sexual identity becomes
natural and nearly unconscious. They do it as automatically as other men change their
behaviour when they take off a sweatshirt and put on a business suit.
The enforcement
According to Gary Comstock’s extensive survey of male victims of anti-gay violence,
perpetrators are typically white (67 per cent) males (99 per cent) under 21 years old (50
per cent) and outnumber their victims. This observation is supported by the survey I
conducted of gay men in Washington. Of those who were victimized and knew the race
and age of the perpetrator, nearly all identified their attackers as white, male, teenaged or
early twenties. All were outnumbered by their attackers. It is perhaps most significant
that perpetrators of anti-gay violence do not typically exhibit expected criminal attitudes
and behaviours. They rarely have the histories of criminal activity or psychological
disorders typical of other violent criminals. It is commonly observed, by victims as well as
defence attorneys, that perpetrators of anti-gay violence are ‘average boys exhibiting
typical behavior’ (Comstock 1991:93).
The explanation of how such violent behaviour can be deemed ‘typical’ must be found
in the socialization of men in American society. Men are socialized to be dominant and
aggressive, to conform strongly to established sex roles and to ridicule or punish those
who deviate from those roles. Most American men continue to identify gay men and women
according to stereotypes of the effeminate ‘sissy’ or the masculine ‘bull dyke’. This
association of homosexuality with deviation from accepted gender roles and violation of
mandatory heterosexuality interacts with the gender-role socialization of men. Gay men
thus become identified as a group requiring ridicule, policing and/or punishment.
Furthermore, the role of adolescence in modern Western society interacts with male
socialization to produce a group of people with a greater social incentive to target gay
men. Since the nineteenth century, adolescence has become a ‘kind of temporal
warehouse or greenhouse in which young people are parked until needed’ (Comstock
1991:103). Here they are forced to wait for social maturity, before they are told that they
may fully participate in society in the roles of wife, husband, parent or worker. Although
at their sexual prime, adolescents are told that they are not ready to take on the
responsibilities of family. Furthermore, they are forced to compete for boring, part-time
and temporary work in the service sector. ‘Ready to develop primary and independent
affective relationships and to take on occupational challenges, they remain their parents’
children, dependents with minimal earning power’ (Comstock 1991:103).
160 THE SOCIAL/SEXUA L IDENTITIES OF PLACES/
Placed in this frustrating position, denied any sense of power or control over their lives,
but encouraged to anticipate such control and responsibility in the future, it is hardly
surprising that adolescents should resort to activities and behaviours that strengthen and
affirm their social status. The socially constructed powerlessness of adolescents, then, is a
partial cause of problem behaviour, which can be understood as identity-building and power-
seeking at the expense of others who also lack power in the social order. Such adolescents
can affirm their power only over others with similar or lower status in society. Their
targets, therefore, are members of groups shunned and denigrated by adults. Their
violent actions are perversions and exaggerations of that adult behaviour.
Gay men thus serve as a fixed low-status standard away from which adolescents move
up in social standing. Those with the highest social expectations, white males who are held
back from high-status positions they are told they deserve by virtue of gender and race,
are most likely to express frustration and demonstrate power over lower-status groups. It
is not surprising, then, that middle-class adolescents, with the highest expectations for the
future, are disproportionately represented among the perpetrators of heterosexist
violence. It would be particularly interesting to see what percentage of these adolescent
males also commit hate-based crimes against groups such as blacks and Jews, or develop
histories of violence against women.
These behaviours are often ignored or even condoned by parents and reinforced by the
institutions of society. Churches preach that homosexuality is a sin, schools fail to protect
gay youths from harassment, police inadequately respond to assaults, and the courts give
perpetrators light sentences. Victims are often blamed for their attacks, and often suffer
secondary victimization at the hands of police, medical and judicial officials (Anderson
1982:146). It is well known that the majority of incidents of heterosexual violence go
unreported, the victims often fearing further abuse from the justice system (Herek and
Berrill 1992:289). Most of the men who spoke to me in Washington expressed a cautious
optimism about relations between the police and the gay community. Several believed the
situation has improved in the past few years. However, even the most optimistic men who
spoke to me are reluctant to give the police the benefit of the doubt. Incidents of
discrimination or ill treatment by the police are quickly reported throughout the community
and are not forgotten for years. Although the police are seen as potentially helpful, it
would be unsafe to trust or rely upon them.
We can thus see most incidents of anti-gay violence as the acts of young men
attempting to affirm their individual status within their peer group and their group status
in society. They accomplish this by demonstrating their adherence to gender roles and
asserting social and sexual dominance over a lower-status group whose marginalization by
society identifies them as acceptable targets. Attacks on such groups are inadequately
proscribed by society and may even be rewarded. These acts of violence are not personal
expressions of intolerance of homosexuality, but of societal intolerance, or cultural
heterosexism, which grants permission for their actions and mitigates their responsibility
for the consequences. Heterosexist violence, therefore, like violence against women,
must be understood in the broader context of social dominance based within the structures
of privilege derived from race, gender and sexuality.
WAYNE D.MYSLIK/ 161
The violence
Since the Second World War, gay men have made significant progress in increasing their
visibility in American society and in creating organizations that are fighting for their civil
rights. Since the Stonewall Riots of 1969, gay social, cultural and political organizations
have appeared in nearly every major city, moving out of rented halls and private homes
into permanent office spaces and purchased buildings.2 This creation of visible queer
spaces has been met with a drastic increase in violence against gay men and their property.
In their comparison of thirteen major surveys of anti-gay violence, Herek and Berrill
found that 80 per cent of gay men and women surveyed had been verbally harassed, 44
per cent were threatened with violence, 33 per cent had been chased or followed, 25 per
cent were pelted with objects and 19 per cent were physically assaulted (Berrill 1992:26).
Another study found that gay men are at least four times as likely as the general
population to be violently attacked (Comstock 1991:55).
A report put out by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in early 1994 reports that
incidents of violence against gay men increased by 127 per cent between 1988 and 1993.
This study has suggested that, for the first time since such surveys have been conducted,
reports of certain types of anti-gay incidents have decreased (NGLTF 1994). Although the
NGLTF has been wary of drawing conclusions from this study, it would appear that a
pattern of hotspots is developing. Reports of minor harassment have declined, while
reports of physical violence are increasing in certain local communities, particularly in those
where gay rights issues are being confronted. In Washington, DC, the organization Gays
and Lesbians Opposing Violence has issued a report in response to the NGLTF survey
which indicates that violence in the District of Columbia continues to increase.
Queer spaces, those areas in which gay men are known to congregate and have been
designated as safe spaces, are, ironically, the most frequent settings for this violence,
exceeding by 28 per cent straight public areas. As an area becomes more generally
recognized as a gay neighbourhood or queer space, the violence increases and perpetrators
travel in search of their targets. The Castro District in San Francisco illustrates this point
well. Statistics gathered by the grassroots organization Communities United Against
Violence showed that in the 1970s 93 per cent of reported assailants were youths from the
neighbouring Mission and Filmore districts. By 1981, when the Castro had a well-
established reputation as a gay neighbourhood, the percentage of perpetrators who were
travelling from more distant areas had more than doubled (Comstock 1991:61). It is clear
that as the reputation spreads in the media that an area is a gay neighbourhood or queer
space, the violence increases. Queer spaces become hunting grounds.
CRIME AND SAFETY
I fully expect to be harassed sometime.
(Robert, 32)
I expect that as long as I live there will be homophobes trying to
outmanoeuvre me.
(Scott, 42)
162 THE SOCIAL/SEXUA L IDENTITIES OF PLACES/
I don’t think this problem is going to get any better… There are going to be
more and more gangs and gay bashing.
(Rod, 28)
I always have the feeling that if I were recognized as gay, chances are it
would happen.
(Bob, 44)
I’m afraid whenever I walk down an unfamiliar street and I don’t see any
other gay people.
(Frank, 37)
Gay men are not unaware of their risk of victimization. In a national survey conducted in
1984, 83 per cent of gay men said they believe they might become the victim of heterosexist
violence in the future (Comstock 1991). In my survey of gay men in the Dupont Circle
neighbourhood of Washington, DC, nearly 85 per cent said they expect to be victimized
in the future. The perception of vulnerability expressed in the quotations above can affect
an individual in many different ways. It can be related to fear, anxiety and stress which can
affect the personal and professional life. It can lead to editing behaviour, forgoing
activities and severely limiting the quality of life. Along with the effect on an individual’s
quality of life, limiting behaviour in response to such crime serves to perpetuate the
invisibility of gay men, strengthening the heterosexist and homophobic system that gives
rise to the violence in the first place.
Fear, vulnerability and behaviour
Since the early 1970s, several disciplines including criminology, sociology, psychology and
geography have recognized that fear of crime is an important social problem and that
numerous social, spatial and psychological factors contribute to the phenomenon.
Understanding in particular that fear of crime is only loosely linked to the real presence of
crime in an area, most studies since the late 1970s have focused on the independence of
fear from victimization. The empirical research has typically examined communities
experiencing socioeconomic decline, characterized by a low rate of crime but a very high
fear of crime.
Few studies, however, have examined the inverse of this relationship, in communities
where there is a high crime rate of high expectation of crime but low level of fear. It is
not difficult to imagine how a community with a low crime rate can nonetheless come to
experience fear. However, it seems counter-intuitive that a community with a high crime
rate, in which individuals expect to be victimized, could be characterized by the absence of
any fear or anxiety and the presence of a strong sense of safety. I found just such a counter-
intuitive relationship in the gay community of Dupont Circle.
WAYNE D.MYSLIK/ 163
Most early studies of fear of crime relied on national or city-wide crime surveys, did
little to distinguish between fear of different types of crime and were generally concerned
with determining the predictive value of certain demographic characteristics, such as age,
sex or income. These studies provide little explanatory insight. Studies by social
psychologists are more useful in explaining the relationship between perceptions of crime,
fear and precautionary behaviour (see, for example, van der Wurff 1989). However, such
studies rarely have looked beyond individual cognitive processes to place fear of crime in a
broader societal context.
Geographers and their spatially minded colleagues have understood for some time that
the physical and social environments interact to produce certain perceptions of crime or
safety. This view, referred to as the disorder model, is described succinctly by Bursik and
Grasmick, ‘Fear is a response to the perception that the area is becoming characterized by
a growing number of signs of disorder and incivility…that indicate that the social order of
the neighborhood is eroding’ (1991:101). Residents cannot be assured that others will
adhere to a shared set of expectations about behaviour. At least three broad aspects of the
social environment can be identified as contributing to fear of crime relatively independently
of the experience of victimization. The first is environmental incivility, in the form of
abandoned buildings, vandalism and graffiti; the second is a lack of community spirit or
community satisfaction; and the third is racial tension, most often the result of changes in
the racial composition of the area (Smith 1986).
More recently, feminist researchers have created a significant literature on women’s
fear of crime which analyses the position of women in society and its significance for fear
of crime (see, for example, Pain 1991; Riger 1991; Valentine 1989). These studies
recognize that women are subject to a form of violent crime, rape, which is rarely a
concern for men. Women express strong feelings of vulnerability to rape because of the
likelihood of serious injury in addition to the rape, the perception that they could not
physically defend themselves and the lack of protection they receive from society.
Few of these studies, however, have been able to separate perception of crime, feelings
of vulnerability, fear and behaviour changes from each other. Although difficult to discern
from a study of a group that experiences high levels of vulnerability, fear and behaviour
modification, this distinction is significant. Not all groups are socialized to experience or
express emotions such as fear in the same way. For example, many men will recognize
that crime is a hazard in their neighbourhood and take steps to prevent their victimization,
but they will be loath to admit that they experience fear, much less that it is a significant
motivation for their behaviour. Women, however, are more likely to identify fear as a
motivating factor. Furthermore, many men are not even consciously aware of the
behaviour changes they do make. When these changes are observed, many men will
attribute them to ‘common sense’ rather than a reaction to fear or concern for crime. It is
misleading, therefore, to rely on the term ‘fear’ in discussion of crime perception. It is
more accurate to discuss the breakdown of feelings of safety or security. Their absence
from a neighbourhood can be expected to reflect the presence of a general sense of safety
in the community.
164 THE SOCIAL/SEXUA L IDENTITIES OF PLACES/
Straight places
Like women, gay men are confronted with a particularly dangerous crime, bashing, which
is associated with high levels of injury but little societal protection. Gay men’s perception
of their risk is particularly high and, like women, they report feelings of vulnerability in most
parts of the city. Gay men, however, are men. As Robert, Scott, Rod, Bob and Frank
illustrate, they express their concern in many ways, but few will admit feeling fear. Had I
limited my question to ‘Are you ever afraid…’ as many surveys do, it is unlikely I would
have discovered the degree of concern shown by these men.
I don’t act any differently… No, I wouldn’t show affection to a man. Yes, I would
in a gay place. I guess I do act differently!
(Bob, 44)
I edit a small amount of my behaviour.
(Glenn, 40)
I am less leisurely, more businesslike. I avoid touching other men or ‘showing
queer’.
(Basil, 44)
I don’t hold hands. I just don’t even think about it.
(Ron, 23)
I never show affection.
(John, 48)
Like straight men, gay men frequently are not conscious of the limits they place on their
behaviour, and are likely to claim such behaviour is ‘common sense’, or ‘just the way
things are’, rather than attributing it to concern over crime. When asked in general terms
if they change their behaviour at all, nearly 60 per cent told me they do not. When asked
about specific behaviours, such as ‘Do you hold your lover’s hand when you are out at a
gay bar, or on the street in Dupont Circle?’ and ‘Do you ever hold your lover’s hand
when you are in a restaurant or on the street in Georgetown?’ they became aware of their
behaviour. Outside the gay neighbourhood or gay establishments, more than 80 per cent
avoid shows of affection, physical contact with other men, speech patterns or vocabulary
considered stereotypical, and clothes or other signs that they are gay. Because this editing
of behaviour has been the norm for most of these men’s lives (their openness around
other gays is the exception), it is usually unconscious, or associated with ‘normal’
behaviour in certain circumstances. Often they commented that Georgetown, for
instance, just is not a place men show affection. They seemed unaware they were
changing their behaviour or why. As Bob’s statement above illustrates, during the
interview, many of men realized for the first time what they were doing.
WAYNE D.MYSLIK/ 165
Queer places
I feel safer…around people tolerant of my identity.
(Frank, 37)
I’m not preoccupied with the place I’m in or how I’m being perceived.
(Charles, 24)
Most gay men who spoke to me realize that the danger of heterosexist violence is greatest
in queer spaces. However, all the men who spoke to me said they feel safer in Dupont
Circle than in any other part of the city. What is so special about queer spaces? Why do
gay men identify the most dangerous neighbourhood as their ‘safe space’? To answer this
question, we must understand how feelings of vulnerability, fear and safety are related to
feelings of social control and to the construction of power and privilege in society.
Looking for signs of disorder which might be related to feelings of safety or security in
Dupont Circle, one finds that homes and businesses are well maintained and there are no
abandoned buildings or vandalism. Furthermore, the area is, on the whole, racially
homogeneous. Not surprisingly, then, one does not find a high degree of fear over general
crime.
Of particular importance to the gay community and its attitudes toward heterosexist
violence, one finds a very strong sense of community spirit in Dupont Circle. Of the men
I interviewed who live in the area, over 80 per cent identified a desire to be among other
gay men as a major factor in their choice of neighbourhood. Of those who do not live in
the area, more than half said their next move would be to Dupont Circle for these
reasons. It is to visit gay friends and partake in this community spirit that most non-
resident gays come to the neighbourhood. Moreover, although one often finds graffiti on
the sidewalk or lamp-posts, they are usually pro-gay statements by an activist group such
as Queer Nation or Act Up. These graffiti reinforce a sense of community territory among
gay residents.
Despite the problem of anti-gay violence and harassment, Dupont Circle maintains a
sense of social order and control which is partly responsible for feelings of general safety.
However, one must remember that nearly all the men surveyed expect to be victimized
by heterosexist violence, report general feelings of vulnerability to such crimes and are
aware that these crimes are most frequent in this neighbourhood. But all feel safest in this
neighbourhood. No matter how clean the streets or how well maintained the homes, the
simple lack of signs of disorder is not enough to account for such a contradiction in attitudes.
To understand the magnitude of gay men’s sense of safety and control, one must
understand the broader context of social power, what it means to be gay in the city, and
what it means to be a gay man in a queer place.
166 THE SOCIAL/SEXUA L IDENTITIES OF PLACES/
POWER
You come up the escalator out of that dark [metro] tunnel at Q Street, and
you see where you are, and there’s such a sense of…empowerment.
(George, 25)
It was like stepping out of the closet!
(Don, 27)
As George described how he feels when he visits Dupont Circle his face lit up and his whole
body became animated. His trip out of the dark metro tunnel had meaning for many of
the gay men with whom I spoke, such as Don, who also was describing the first time he
came out of that dark metro tunnel into the sunlight. For these men, Dupont Circle is
more than just a residential or commercial concentration of gay men. It is a political and
cultural centre with great emotional significance.
Politics
For over twenty-five years, the gay neighbourhood has served as the gay community’s
centre for political activity and electoral power. Davis, however, provides evidence that
the day of queer space as the centre of political influence for gay men has passed, for
the power to create real social and political change…has been dispersed in such a
manner as to make it impossible to create wholesale change through progressive
legislation… Legislative victories are increasingly symbolic, when real acceptance
can only be created in the cultural sphere.
(Davis 1994:1)
In Davis’s estimation, the gay territory has failed in its mission of creating a ‘liberated
zone’ and has become the ‘gay ghetto’, a symbol of Isolation and continued oppression’
(Davis 1994:1). While his assessment of the effect on gay politics of the changing locus of
political power in postmodern society is an astute one, I do not agree with his pessimistic
view of the new role of the ‘gay ghetto’. Although the development of a local base for
electoral power was a significant effect of the claiming of urban territory by gay men, the
earliest, most important, and continuing roles of these queer spaces have been social,
emotional, cultural and symbolic, not overtly political.
Moreover, even as the locus of political power moves from the legislative to the
cultural sphere and the significance of gay neighbourhoods to local political struggles
decreases, the influence of queer spaces continues to rise. As sites of cultural resistance
with enormous symbolic meaning for gay men, such spaces provide cultural and
emotional support for a political movement comprised of an increasingly diverse and
geographically scattered community.
Nearly fifteen years ago, John D’Emilio observed that, ‘for gay men and for lesbians,
San Francisco has become akin to what Rome is for Catholics: a lot of us live there and
WAYNE D.MYSLIK/ 167
many more make the pilgrimage’ (D’Emilio 1981:77). I suggest that today, queer spaces
such as San Francisco are for gay men more akin to what Jerusalem is for Jews: most of us
live somewhere else, fewer of us make the pilgrimage than in the past, our political power
has moved elsewhere, but the cultural and emotional significance of the place cannot be
overestimated. For those who do choose to live in or use them, queer spaces represent, if
not a physically safe ‘liberated zone’, a site of cultural resistance where one can
overcome, though never ignore, the fear of heterosexism and homophobia.
Territory
This is our territory, an area we’ve claimed.
(Stuart, 26)
When asked what it means to be ‘safe’ as a gay man, nearly half of the men who spoke to
me defined safety not in physical terms or in terms of violence and crime, but as ‘living
openly as a gay person’, ‘being comfortable in my sexuality’. Many gay men explain that
they feel safe in queer spaces because of a sense of safety in numbers. Interestingly,
though, these men do not believe that other gay men are more likely than straights to come
to the assistance of a bashing victim. In fact, several suggested that gay men, out of fear for
their own safety, might be less likely to intervene in an attack or bashing. The safety they
feel, therefore, is clearly an emotional and psychological safety that comes from being in
an area in which one has some sense of belonging or social control, even in the absence of
physical control.
Dupont Circle is territory that has been claimed by the gay men of Washington. Although
there are violent exceptions, the residents of Dupont Circle have come to expect others
to adhere to certain behavioural patterns, the most significant of which is a tolerance of
open expressions of homosexuality and the open association of gay men. When Stuart
states, ‘This is our territory’, he is not only attesting to his claim on the Dupont Circle
neighbourhood, but reaffirming that claim. For gay individuals, alienated and with no
sense of power, control or order in any other part of the city, this sense of claimed
territory takes on an enormous emotional significance.
CONCLUSION
Queer spaces are not, in fact, safe havens from the threat of violence that follows gay men
throughout their lives. Ironically, the congregation of people which provides an emotional
and psychological safety itself undermines physical safety by advertising the existence and
location of a target group. ‘Safe’ spaces in turn become hunting grounds.
However, despite the evidence that gay men are especially targeted in these areas,
queer spaces in many respects alter the traditional power relationship between
heterosexuals and homosexuals. In most areas of the city, gay men feel uncomfortable or
vulnerable and, consciously or unconsciously, alter their behaviour to hide their sexual
identity. As sites of resistance to the oppressions of a heterosexist and homophobic
168 THE SOCIAL/SEXUA L IDENTITIES OF PLACES/
society, however, queer spaces create the strong sense of empowerment that allows men
to look past the dangers of being gay in the city and to feel safe and at home.
Overwhelmingly, they consider the psychological and social benefits of open association
worth the physical risk taken in queer spaces. For gay men, coping with the presence of
violence is an act of negotiating power in society.
NOTES
1 Georgetown is a wealthy neighbourhood near Dupont Circle which is home to Georgetown
University and a strip of shops and bars crowded with presumably straight college students.
Owing to its palpably heterosexual atmosphere and the numbers of drunken young men,
many gay men list Georgetown as the neighbourhood they feel least safe.
2 On 26 June 1969 a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City, set off a
riot that is considered by many as the symbolic beginning of the modern gay rights
movement.
11
ON BEING NOT EVEN ANYWHERE NEAR
‘THE PROJECT’
Ways of putting ourselves in the picture
Vera Chouinard and Ali Grant
INTRODUCTION: SO WHAT IS ‘THE PROJECT’ ANYWAY?
The last few years have seen massive upheaval in progressive theory, research and politics
(Faludi 1992; Fraser 1989; Harvey 1989; Palmer 1990; Ross 1988). In geography, as in
the social sciences more generally, there have been subtle and complex redrawings of
‘The Project’ (Barrett and Phillips 1992; Christopherson 1989; Fraser 1989; Walker
1990). For radical geographers (in which we include feminist geographers), these changes
have been signalled by the appearance of collections showcasing new critical geographies
(e.g. Kobayashi and MacKenzie 1989; Peet and Thrift 1989; Wolch and Dear 1989) and
gradual shifts in concepts, research foci and methods. Put simply, critical geographers
have engaged in a partial retreat from class analysis and issues and increasingly recognized
the value of feminist geography (although the terms of ‘engagement’ or negotiation very
much remain to be worked out). Marxist and feminist geographers have also been
searching for theories and methods which recognize diversity in human lives and in the
meanings assigned to those lives. This has led to some serious and not-so-serious
flirtations with postmodern philosophy and theory (Dear 1988; Deutsche 1991; Harvey
1989; Soja 1989).
What, then, is the new ‘Project’ in radical geography? It would be misleading to
suggest that we can outline all its contours, or provide a single definition that would
satisfy all radical geographers. We can, however, zero in on some of its most central
features—and it is important to do so, because in some ways ‘The Project’ is as partial
and exclusionary as those that have gone before.
One key feature is an emphasis on processes of oppression rooted in three sets of
relations: class, gender and race. In conference sessions we hear this ‘trinity’ so often it
has almost become a group chant, and the radical geographic literature increasingly flags
these relations as sources of oppression. At one level, of course, these developments are
wonderful and exciting: radical geographers have fought long and hard to have the
significance of gender and race, as well as class, recognized. At another level, however,
through their silences, they signal important exclusions in ‘The Project’. The disabled,
lesbians, gays, the elderly and children are frequently invisible in definitions of ‘The
Project’—definitions which fail to acknowledge ableism, heterosexism and ageism as
significant sources and structures of oppression. Notice as well that we radical
170 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
geographers seldom discuss the politics of research practices as part and parcel of our
efforts to reconstruct ‘The Project’. If we did so more often, perhaps these silences could
be effectively challenged. Perhaps this is exactly why we don’t.
In what follows, we take a critical look at two of these silences and discuss what
geographers might do about them. We look at ‘The Project’ from two perspectives: those
of lesbian and disabled women. From these vantage points, it becomes clear that it is high
time for all geographers to do what they can to ensure that ‘other’ voices and practices are
taken seriously in struggles to reconstruct ‘The Project’. This does not mean simply
tinkering with theories and methods so that lesbians and disabled women become another
‘topic’ or Viewpoint’; it means drawing on these vantage points in revolutionary ways
which challenge and disrupt our understanding of processes of exploitation and
oppression. It means seriously confronting the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of our
own complicity in the construction and oppression of ‘others’, and struggling to find ways
to understand these processes. It means not being content with representations of
inclusion, but insisting that the voice and presence of ‘others’ in the research process is an
essential part of the struggle for social change.
Our own politics and experiences presented challenges in co-authoring this paper (see
also Bell et al. 1994). Although we have common experiences, and are therefore able to
talk about each other’s oppression in general, neither of us felt it was possible or
appropriate to represent the other’s particular oppression. Thus one of us wrote the
sections on disability and ableism, the other the sections on lesbian experience and
heterosexism. We argued over each other’s sections and did not always agree; this was
not a problem. Language did present a problem: using ‘we’ throughout the paper would
have implied that we both felt equally able to discuss each other’s oppressions, but how
could we switch from ‘we’ to ‘I’ without thoroughly confusing the reader? There is no
easy answer, so T in the discussions of disability belongs to the first author, and ‘I’ in the
discussions of lesbian experience belongs to the second.
LIVING EXCLUSION: TWO GEOGRAPHERS’ TALES
This section discusses what it is like to live in an ableist and heterosexist society. Ableism
is defined here as any social relations, practices and ideas which presume that all people
are able-bodied. Examples include: evaluating disabled workers by the same criteria used
to evaluate able-bodied employees, holding events in physically inaccessible locations and
treating not being able-bodied as defining a disabled person. Heterosexism refers to social
relations, practices and ideas which work to construct heterosexuality as the only true,
‘natural’ sexuality whilst negating all other sexualities as deviant and ‘unnatural’.
Examples include: legal definitions of ‘family’ which do not include same-sex couples,
assumptions that peoples’ partners must be of the opposite sex, hostility toward lesbians
and gays who make themselves visible in territory dominated by heterosexual relations
and norms (e.g. public places and workplaces), and failing to recognize and appreciate
lesbian and gay cultures.
We begin with personal experiences to help the reader ‘see’ society and our discipline
through others’ eyes. The intention is not to evoke sympathy or pity but to encourage the
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 171
reader to understand more fully the environments we both negotiate daily. While we
present experiences of ableism and heterosexism separately, this should by no means
suggest that these are separate from oppressions based on class, gender, race, ethnicity
and age. Rather, there are multiple locations of oppression in patriarchal, capitalist
societies including those based on both ableism and heterosexism.
The disabled woman
It is hard to think of any facet of my life which has been untouched by ableism and by
struggles to occupy able-bodied spaces on my own terms.
For example, as a professor, my workplace, the university, has been a very significant
site of my oppression. This has taken multiple forms, from physical barriers to access to
the use of ableist standards to evaluate my contributions. One form of exclusion is very
visible: after four years, I still lack physical access to my office. Two entrances which
appeared as scooter and wheelchair accessible on our official map for disabled staff and
students turned out to be nothing of the sort: there are no automatic doors, no working
lift and heavy internal fire doors block access to corridors. So, although I have acquired a
scooter, I still cannot get into my official workplace independently. This situation sends
out strong signals that my presence, and the presence of disabled colleagues and students,
is not important; that we are not valued in the academic setting.
Ableist relations and practices are manifested in a number of other ways as well. For
instance, there is no procedure to adjust the workload required of disabled professors,
although a full workload for many disabled people should be defined not in terms of work
expected from able-bodied professors, but in terms of the capacity of the disabled
academic. Other social barriers include a reluctance to be flexible in terms of how classes
are taught (e.g. in the disabled professor’s home or through interactive computer
technology).
To these social manifestations of ‘ableism’ one must add the little everyday practices of
academic life which exacerbate the challenges of being disabled. Recently, in a feminist
geography conference session, I was forced to stand because the room was filled. This was
arguably my own ‘fault’ as I arrived late (having had to walk a long distance from another
session), but after about half an hour the pain in my feet, legs and hips was so intense that
I was forced to ask a young woman if she and her companions could shift one chair over so
that I could sit down (someone had left their seat, so there was an empty chair at the far
end of the row). I apologized for asking, but explained that I was ill, very tired and in a lot
of pain. She turned, looked very coldly at me and simply said ‘No, the seats are being
used.’ She may well have been right, but I suddenly no longer felt part of a feminist
geography session: I was invisible …and I was angry. Fighting a juvenile urge to bop her
on the head with my cane, I began to see feminist geography through new eyes; eyes
which recognized that the pain of being ‘the other’ was far deeper and more complete
than I ever imagined, and that words of inclusion were simply not enough.
Other negative reactions to my being disabled include direct challenges to my right to
occupy able-bodied territory. Recently an older woman burst into a shop where I was
sitting chatting with the owner (a friend of mine). Sticking her face uncomfortably close
172 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
to mine (invading my territory!) she looked at my arm braces and walker and blurted out
‘My god, what the hell happened to you?’ I explained that I was disabled by rheumatoid
arthritis. ‘Oh’, she replied, and walked away. She had no interest in my well-being; she was
simply asserting her ‘right’ as an able-bodied woman to demand explanations for the
presence of the disabled in ‘her’ space.
My sense of myself, as a disabled, academic woman has also been shaped by more
subtle aspects of daily life. Walking on the university campus and in other public places, I
am constantly conscious of frequent looks (often double and even triple-takes). I realize it
is unusual to see a relatively young woman walking slowly with a cane or using a scooter
and the looks reflect curiosity, but they are a constant reminder that I am different, that I
don’t ‘belong’. It is painful for me to acknowledge this. I guess that is why I have learned
to look away: to the ground, to the side…anywhere that lets me avoid facing up to being
the ‘other’.
It is remarkable how thoroughly ableist assumptions and practices permeate every facet
of our lives, even though we often remain relatively sheltered from and insensitive to
these forms of oppression. Yet disability in some form will come to each and every one of
us someday, and when it does, and ableism rears it ugly head, one finds a topsy-turvy
world in which none of the old rules apply and many ‘new’ ones don’t make sense.
People develop new ways of relating to you often without recognizing it. For instance
some of my students will not call me at home, despite instructions to do so, because I am
‘sick’. Other students shy away from working with a disabled professor: some assume
that the best, most ‘successful’ supervisors must be able-bodied; others are unwilling to
accommodate illness by, for example, occasionally substituting phone calls for face-to-face
meetings or meeting at my home rather than the office. Of course this is not true of all
students, but these practices are pervasive enough to hurt every day to make it just a little
harder to struggle to change relations, policies, practices and attitudes.
Some manifestations of ableism would be hilarious if they weren’t so hurtful and
damaging. An administrator heading a university disability programme invited me to sit on
a committee planning events for our annual disability awareness week. I explained that I
would be happy to contribute but, as I was quite ill and immobile at the moment, we
might at times have to settle for a phone conversation rather than my actually attending a
meeting. The response was absolute silence, even though I was told those responsible
would get in touch. It was a shock to realize that even those in charge of disability issues
could act in such ways—a bit like being dropped in the middle of the Mad Hatter’s tea
party without being told what story you were in.
The dyke
Like disabled women, lesbians must struggle over the right to space, in a culture that
constructs’ woman’ as both able-bodied and heterosexual. And as a lesbian who tries to be
always ‘out’ in everyday spaces, I spend most of my time fighting for some space, whether
in a geography department, in a restaurant or on the street. Heterosexism pervades all
environments and operates initially to presume that I am heterosexual. Thus when I
socialize outside of lesbian and/or feminist company I am often asked about a male
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 173
partner; when I try to access social or health services with my lover, no spaces exist on the
paperwork for us; when we walk into restaurants or stores arm in arm, people often feel
compelled to ask if we are sisters or if she is my mother, although we do not look at all
alike. Environments of heterosexism permit women certain identities, but deny them
others: women together can be mothers, daughters, sisters, roommates, friends —but
not lovers. They cannot be lovers because this is profoundly political. It is profoundly
political because it both resists and threatens the oppressive system of male dominance which
requires women to be heterosexual for its very existence. Compulsory heterosexuality
ensures that each member of the oppressed group—women—is individually coupled with
a member of the dominant group—men. This assures male rights of access to women on
an economic, emotional and physical level. Lesbian existence attacks this right. It
challenges heterosexual hegemony.
Thus, when I walk down the street, day or night, outwardly expressing myself as a
dyke, announcing my identity as a woman who other women may have access to, but men
may not, I often experience open hostility and/or violence from both heterosexual men
and heterosexual women. This is intensified if I am with a group of dykes, if we are taking
up space on our own terms. If women refuse/resist the heterosexual identity that is the
only one available to them in heterosexist society, they will be denied any others.
It is not as simple as ‘being out’. Heterosexism works either to deny me/make me
invisible, or to force on me identities which, (a) do not threaten the system of compulsory
heterosexuality, and (b) fit into heterosexist ideology. A sampling of the most popular
stereotypes about lesbians illustrates this point: all I need is a good man; I can’t get a man;
I am like a man; I was sexually traumatized by a man; I want to be a man; I am a man-
hater. There is an obvious common denominator here—men. Yet what defines my
existence as a lesbian is loving other women: men are totally irrelevant to this basic
definition. All the myths and stereotypes are related to men because, in a heterosexist
society, women together are not allowed the self-defined identity. Compulsory
heterosexuality demands that women direct their energies towards men, and be accessible
to men. Women who direct all energies to other women cannot be accessed by men. But
men must be in the picture and one way to do this is through myths and stereotypes.
While lesbian existence is very different from heterosexual existence, it would be a
mistake for heterosexuals to always make it ‘other’. When you think of sexuality, don’t
automatically think lesbian, think self. Heterosexuality is as much a social construction as
lesbian sexuality is. However, as Valentine (1993c: 396) notes, ‘such is the strength of the
assumption of the “naturalness” of heterosexual hegemony, that most people are oblivious
to the way that it operates as a process of power relations in all spaces’. Thus, for
example, talking about the weekend with heterosexual colleagues, I might explain that on
Friday I went to a lesbian dance, Saturday I relaxed with a great new lesbian novel and
Sunday I went to see a lesbian movie. This is often interpreted as ‘flaunting’ or obsessing
on my sexuality. My colleague can tell me that Friday night she went to a [——]
nightclub with her husband, they spent Saturday morning in bed reading the [———]
newspaper, and on Sunday they took the kids to a matinee to see a [———] movie. The
point is that it is I who will fill the empty spaces with ‘heterosexual’ not she; that her
(hetero) sexuality is always upfront and centre—her wedding band announces it, walking
174 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
down the street hand in hand with her husband announces it, her discussions of everyday
life announce it—is not recognized. The spaces above are the spaces of privilege.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? MISSING SISTERS IN
GEOGRAPHY
The silencing and exclusion of disabled women and lesbians is, not surprisingly, manifest
in geographic literature. In this section, we comment on the phenomena of missing sisters
in our discipline.
Invisible sisters: disabled women
From the perspective of a disabled woman, the geographic literature is in many ways a
wasteland. Few studies speak to the lives of the disabled, and even fewer grapple with the
social processes through which mental and physical disabilities become bases for
discrimination, marginalization and oppression. A computerized search of 5,000 geographic
journals found no references at all to disabled women. Issues such as access for the
disabled were addressed in journals of related disciplines, in particular planning and
engineering, but often from a physical rather than social planning perspective. A few
geographers have studied facets of the lives of the disabled, such as service provision and
coping amongst the psychiatrically disabled (e.g. Dear 1981; Elliott 1992; Taylor 1989),
work on the visually impaired (Golledge 1993), and the US disabled persons’ movement
(Dorn 1994) and Dear and Wolch’s (1987) important work on homelessness. Some
geographers report that there is significant ongoing research on such topics as multiple
sclerosis but, due to lack of interest, this work has not been very visible in geographic
journals (personal communications). More encouraging, graduate research on disability
issues is increasing as I discovered while trying to organize a special journal issue on
geography and disability research.
It is important to recognize that some work by non-geographers speaks to geographic
aspects of disability and oppression. For example, Hahn (1986, 1989), a political scientist,
has discussed the challenges of creating more inclusive urban built environments and the
role of ableist ‘body images’ in marginalizing the disabled.
Despite these encouraging signs, in radical geography disabled women have been
rendered almost completely invisible and silent. Browse through the index of a major
collection (like Peet and Thrift’s New Models, 1989) and try to find a reference to the disabled
or to ableism (I could not). Or turn to discussions of ways forward in feminist geography
(e.g. Bowlby et al. 1989) and note major research priorities. Sexuality is there. So too is
‘race, class and gender’. Then why not ableism or ageism? We know from women’s lives
that these things matter. Why aren’t we saying so? More importantly, why aren’t we
doing something about it?
To be fair, the ‘invisibility’ of disabled women and men in radical geography
undoubtedly reflects a real absence in academic and student ranks (in fact, geographers
could use a good study of this). After all, performance and evaluation standards in
academia are extremely ableist; allowing little or no room for differences in abilities to
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 175
read, write, teach or do research, take on speaking engagements and, most importantly,
‘produce’ in general. Those who cannot perform to ableist standards are likely to find
themselves pressured to give up their positions, even though they may be able to make
important contributions, and despite laws requiring accommodation of the disabled in the
workplace. If they resist, they face an often lonely battle to convey the need for non-
ableist standards and practices. To modify an old adage, it is hard to understand what it
means to live as a disabled person in an ableist society until you have walked (or wheeled)
some miles in her shoes.
It is very likely, therefore, that many disabled women and men are quickly ‘pushed
out’ of the system. As women are under-represented in positions of power within the
discipline, it is likely that disabled women are especially vulnerable to such pressures.
They lack, for instance, the chance to be mentored by women, especially disabled female
faculty, and mentoring is essential to coping with the gendered power relations of the ‘old
boys’ network’. Class oppression also comes into play, as disabled women are especially
vulnerable to poverty (National Council of Welfare 1990). For disabled women, limited
economic means translates into concrete difficulties in acquiring mobility aids needed to
negotiate campuses as well as in raising the tuition needed to pursue higher education.
In a way, it is puzzling that radical geographers have had very little to say about these
processes, especially considering the Marxist origins of this part of the discipline. For the
exclusion and marginalization of the disabled is deeply intertwined with the
‘commodification’ of human life; with valuing people for their capacity to produce
commodities, services and profit rather than for diverse talents, abilities and ways of being
and becoming. This is one of the more damaging and insidious facets of patriarchal,
capitalist societies for it encourages us to reduce human worth to ‘what we can get out of
each other’ and in the process helps marginalize those who, for various reasons,
cannot ‘compete’. There is abundant evidence of this economic and social devaluation. In
Ontario, Canada, for instance, 80 per cent of disabled persons live in poverty, a result of
discrimination and exclusion in the job market, and relatively meagre public and private
support programmes (Disabled Persons for Employment Equity 1992).
Of course, the silences in the literature are just one sign of academic practices which
marginalize the disabled. Traditional research methods, which construct the disabled as an
‘object’ population rather than as experts in living as part of the disabled community, are
another form of silencing and exclusion. So too are conferences which scatter sessions
between buildings and floors, forcing mobility-impaired people to cover long distances
and endure fatigue and often pain. In fact, at most conferences there is no sign of any
accommodations for the disabled: no special information booth, no questions about
special needs on registration forms, no aides available to assist people—with a
wheelchair, or knowledge of sign language, or just indicating accessible elevators. Sadly,
much the same can be said of our campuses, where many administrations refuse to spend
the money needed to make access a reality.
176 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
Invisible sisters: lesbians
The geographic literature cannot be fairly called a wasteland when it comes to lesbians;
however, analyses of the spatial expression of sexuality, have appeared only very recently
in the margins of geographical research. Feminist geography is just beginning to recognize
sexuality as an important part of that great abyss of ‘otherness’ (England 1994; McDowell
1993a, 1993b; Peake 1993). The emerging literature on lesbian and gay geographies to
date, speaks much more to the experiences of gay men than to those of lesbians (Valentine
1992, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c is an exception). Nonetheless, it is very exciting to see a
growing body of work on the impact of lesbians and gay men in the socio-spatial
restructuring of the city (Adler and Brenner 1991; Bell 1991; Bell et al. 1994; Knopp
1987, 1990a, 1990b; Lauria and Knopp 1985; Winchester and White 1988). However,
there is an urgent need for a much more critical approach to the research issues addressed
in this literature.
The dangers inherent in discussing lesbians and gay men in the same breath should be
clear given the wealth of feminist work in geography illustrating the critical difference
that gender makes (McDowell 1993a, 1993b; Pratt 1993; Rose 1993). That it is
impossible to ignore the fact that human experience is gendered is surely well established.
It is clear, for example, that to discuss the ‘working class’ is to ignore (amongst other
things) the all-important differences between what it is to be the ‘woman on the street’ as
opposed to the ‘man on the street’. This applies equally in the realm of sexuality. To state
the obvious: lesbians are women, gay men are men and thus common experiences cannot
be presumed. Although lesbians are not completely ignored, many authors—rather than
recognizing that the socio-spatial experiences of lesbians and gay men may in fact
constitute two separate and discrete research problems—are at great pains to explain the
bases for the differences observed. For example, Johnston (1979; cited in Lauria and
Knopp 1985) argues that these differences reflect the fact that gay men may perceive a
greater need for territory. Discussing this and other explanations, Peake (1993:425)
argues that:
Such empirical and conceptual generalizations smack of an inability to rise above
the level of the patriarchal mire, of being unable to unpack the heterogeneity of
class, ‘race’, and other relations that characterize the lesbian community.
I would agree, but go further to suggest that the question of lesbians does not always have
to be addressed in research focused on gay men. The obligation to attempt to explain
differences in the socio-spatial experiences of lesbians and gay men only arises if the
premise is that there should be any similarity. Both lesbians and gay men engage in same-
sex relationships and experience oppressive marginalization, but there is no reason to
assume they must have any more in common than that.
Recognizing that the question of difference/similarity need not always be a question
may avoid such dangerously misleading arguments as those made by Lauria and Knopp
(1985) in discussing the reasons for differences in the impact lesbians and gays have had on
the city’s socio-spatial structure. Part of their explanation is based on their belief that
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 177
lesbian sexuality has always been more accepted than gay male sexuality. They illustrate
by stating, ‘lesbian sexuality has been accepted under certain conditions, as when it is
“performed” for men by women who conform to societal standards of beauty’ (1985:
158). They fail to realize that this is not ‘lesbian sexuality’.1 The most superficial
exploration of pornography will show that the scenario they describe has nothing to do
with ‘lesbian sexuality’ and everything to do with two or more women preparing each
other for ‘the main act’ (i.e. heterosexual intercourse). And ‘the main act’ always ensures
that there is no threat whatsoever to heterosexual hegemony.
Thus, given the critical importance of gender in structuring our experiences of
everyday spaces, commonalities cannot be presumed between lesbians and gay men. The
frequent use of the terms ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ to mean all lesbians and gay men both
affects and denies the realities of lesbian existence. It makes invisible the huge power
differential based on gender between lesbians and gay men (and doesn’t even begin to
touch on the differences within each community). It fails to reflect the myriad ways in
which gay men, as men, oppress lesbians, as women. And, as women’s experiences are
more often than not subsumed under the ‘norm’ of men’s in androcentric geographical
research, so too are lesbians’ experiences often subsumed under gay men’s.
This problem of ignoring and/or trivializing the importance of differences based on
gender—not to mention ability, class, ‘race’, culture and so on-points to another
dangerous path that ‘lesbian and gay geographies’ could easily follow: one which sees a
dichotomy with heterosexuality as dominant and all other sexuality thrown together into
one big oppositional construct. All of us who fall into this latter category are then defined
by the fact that we do not engage exclusively in ‘normal’ heterosexual sex. Those familiar
with the politics of lesbian and of gay communities in many North American cities will be
aware of the recent trend toward ‘queering’ everyone who is not heterosexual. For
example, it seems of late that Lesbian and Gay Pride Day has become Lesbian and Gay and
Bisexual and Transsexual and Transgendered Peoples’ Pride Day. While this alliance may
be politically expedient, it muddies the distinctions between these groups and is likely to
depoliticize lesbian existence in the process. For example, the unique threat which lesbian
existence poses to heteropatriarchy gets lost:2 in this crowd of lesbians, gay men,
bisexuals, transsexuals, transgendered people and straight supporters, only one group
denies men access to women—lesbians. Further, as lesbian autonomy is made invisible so
too is the revolutionary message to other women that there can be life without men.
Many feminist lesbians, especially those who came out through the so-called ‘second
wave’ of the modern women’s movement, are wondering what ever happened to the
consciously political struggle for a collective resistance/challenge to heteropatriarchy, and
to our dream of the Lesbian Nation (Johnston 1973).
Blurred distinctions pose another problem: just as feminists in Anglo-American
geography have painfully realized that there is no single category ‘Woman’ (McDowell
1993a), it must be recognized that there is no single category ‘Lesbian’, never mind
‘Queer’.3 Discussing lesbian organizing in Toronto, Ross points out that:
In large urban centers across Canada and other Western countries, the 1980s have
heralded the subdivision of activist lesbians into specialized groupings: lesbians of
178 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
color, Jewish lesbians, working class lesbians, leather dykes, lesbians against sado-
masochism, older lesbians, lesbian youth, disabled lesbians and so on.
(Ross 1990:88)
As a radical feminist Dyke who experiences the privileges of being white, formally
educated and able-bodied, my resistance to and experiences of heteropatriarchal
oppression, are as different from those of ‘homosexual ladies to really watch out for’
(Bechdel 1994), as they are from S/M lesbians. And they are worlds apart from those of
gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals and transgendered people.
Part of this conflation of very different experiences stems from approaching this topic
as a question of sex—of something supposed to take place between individuals in private
space—rather than as a question of power and oppression. For example, in discussing
negative reactions to the appearance of Knopp’s (1990a) article in the Geographical
Magazine, Bell (1991:327–8) states:
members of the academy do feel uneasy researching this topic. This squeamishness
regarding sexual issues is partly homophobic and partly a ‘justifiable fear of never
being cited, except in a list of interesting, albeit peripheral work’ (Christopherson
1989, 88); while the study of the geographies of homosexuality remains
marginalized and obscure, it will not attract career-and status-minded academics.
(my emphasis)
This quote raises two sets of issues. First, ‘homophobia’ is a very small part of the
explanation of why this subject is often treated with a certain squeamishness.
‘Homophobia’ is to heterosexism what ‘prejudice’ is to racism: neither comes close to
describing the systems of oppression from which those who are ‘homophobic’ and/or
‘prejudiced’ greatly benefit. Heterosexism—which privileges heterosexuality as the only
true, pure and natural sexuality and discredits and makes deviant any other expression of
sexuality for women—is necessary to heteropatriarchy. Heterosexism works effectively
to control women, all women, and should not be conceptualized as simply irrational fear
of ‘different lifestyles’. It ensures that women have little choice other than to enter into
intimate relationships with members of the very group that oppresses them—men.
Heterosexism bestows a whole array of privileges on heterosexuals whilst encouraging
hatred of lesbians through harassment, discrimination and violence.4 In other words,
squeamishness about sex simply does not come close to explaining why this subject has
rarely been subjected to a critical analysis in geography.
Second, the ‘justifiable fear of never being cited’, can be described as part of the power
relations at work in geographical research. Deciding to ‘play it safe’ for the sake of career
and status is thoroughly understandable in a patriarchal institution; however it has very
real implications for those of us who are marginalized within the discipline. As McDowell
(1992b:59) argues, ‘we cannot ignore our own positions as part of the conventional
structures of power within the academy, nor, although it is often painful, can we afford to
ignore the structures of power between women’. Feminists doing work in this area must
remain vigilant so that the question of power and oppression— who loses, who gains, in
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 179
whose interest is our oppression—is not lost in efforts to make lesbians visible in
geography.5
CONFRONTING ABLEISM AND HETEROSEXISM IN
GEOGRAPHY
We want to underscore, again, the point that manifestations of these oppressions in
workplaces, homes and communities often make the difference between disabled women
and lesbians who can be active political advocates of change, and those who are too
exhausted and discouraged to even pick up the phone. It is sobering, for example, to read
that 50 per cent of all rheumatoid arthritis patients suffer from clinically defined
depression. Pain and mobility limitations contribute to this, but are probably less
significant than under-funding of medical research and services, and unsupportive medical
practices based on some physicians’ aversion to treating incurable and chronic diseases
because they are more troublesome to deal with. For lesbians the penalties for coming out
in the workplace and/or wider community (such as job loss and violence) are so severe
that many women live a splintered existence: out in their ‘private’ lives, but trying to
‘pass’ as heterosexual in other facets of life. The damage involved in denying one’s
identity and culture in order to survive should not be underestimated. The personal costs
are devastating; so, too, are the costs to all of us as members of society: the knowledges
and experiences of disabled women and lesbians, and their capacities to understand, care
and contribute become lost to teaching, research, planning and policy-making. Our
stories are hidden, our voices silenced; a lost heritage for us, our children and their
children.
The social construction of disabled women and lesbians as oppressed others is a
pervasive and complex process; it permeates many facets of academic life and so much of
daily life that, for women like ourselves, it is inescapable. In this section we consider ways
of challenging ableism and heterosexism in geography, an endeavour that requires
fundamental rethinking of our social theories, research methods and politics as academics.
Are geographers up to it? Facing up to ableism
As ableism is a pervasive set of social relations, practices and ideas affecting both our
discipline and society, it follows that to attack ableism within the social sciences is to
touch but the tip of the iceberg. These efforts are very important in their own right, but
are unlikely to challenge ableism unless they are part of a comprehensive offensive against
attitudes, practices, services, policies and power relations that imprison and maim
disabled people because they are ‘different’. This robs society of precious sources of
knowledge and hope.
If ableism is so much a part of radical geography and daily life, what can we do to
challenge it? Must disabled women remain excluded and silenced ‘others’?
One important first step is to insist that research by and for—as opposed to ‘on’—the
disabled deserves greater priority in radical geography. We must also agree that it is
important to fight for inclusion of more disabled people in the radical research
180 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
community, not only by trying to increase representation within academia, but with a
whole array of measures ensuring the disabled physical, economic and social access to
workplaces and communities. Without solid support for rethinking how we work and
live, for finding more inclusionary ways of producing and living, all the affirmative action
initiatives in the world won’t allow disabled women to define their own revolutionary
terms and conditions of participating in the production of knowledge and daily life in
general. Nor will it support disabled women’s struggles against sexist ableism in its
various guises—including efforts to reduce disabled women’s comparatively greater
vulnerability to male violence (Masuda and Ridington 1992).6
Thinking through strategies for challenging ableism, it quickly becomes apparent that
even the initial steps require us, in a very profound way, to re-learn how we value
differences in ourselves and in others. Performance standards which value quantitative
output (such as grants and papers) and frequent conference travel, for example, not only
devalue ‘ordinary’ academic activities such as teaching a class, they fail to recognize just
how amazing it may be for someone who is mentally or physically disabled to produce
even a single paper. Somehow, we need to learn how to think and act through
‘other eyes’ if we hope to challenge these oppressions and exclusions. This means,
amongst other things, learning to ‘see’, through our theories, research and lives, the
relations and processes through which disabled women are socially constructed as
marginal and excluded others. It means, as well, learning to respect the pain and anger of
the disabled at being cast as less important and less capable; it means supporting struggles
to challenge the processes of exclusion and marginalization which sustain this ‘other’
status.
A related task is to search for creative ways of giving voice to lived experiences of
ableist relations and practices in our research designs. This means, among other things,
relinquishing privileged academic viewpoints in favour of more inclusive modes of
description and analysis, not simply giving Voice’ and validity to ‘subjugated’ knowledges
(although this is important) but also developing research designs in which participants
have a say in the conduct, interpretation and use of research, and where both researcher
and participants ‘live the research process’ in a very direct way (Chouinard 1994).
It also means struggling to conceptualize disablement processes as part of the political
economy of patriarchal, capitalist societies—treating disablement not just as an unrelated
set of oppressive relations and practices added on to existing research agendas, but as
processes rooted in significant ways in classist, sexist, heterosexist, ageist (as well as
ableist) relations and practices which are part and parcel of the development of capitalist
societies today. The growing body of radical and/or feminist literature can help
geographers to conceptualize disablement processes in this comprehensive way. Work on
the political economy of disability (Oliver 1990) and feminist critiques of the social
construction of the disabled and of disabled women in both the women’s and disability
rights movements (e.g. Findlay and Randall 1988; Morris 1991) has highlighted, amongst
other things, the importance of cultural images in distorting peoples’ understanding of
disabled women’s lives and how these distortions affect disabled women’s sense of their
own realities and struggles. Thompson writes:
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 181
Anger felt by women because of our disabilities is rarely accepted in women’s
communities, or anywhere else for that matter. Disabled or not, most of us grew
up with media images depicting pathetic little ‘cripple’ children on various
telethons or blind beggars with caps in hand (‘handicap’) or ‘brave’ war heroes
limping back home where they were promptly forgotten. Such individuals’ anger was
never seen, and still rarely is. Instead of acknowledging the basic humanity of our
often-powerful emotions, able-bodied persons tend to view us either as helpless
things to be pitied or as Super-Crips, gallantly fighting to overcome insurmountable
odds. Such attitudes display a bizarre two-tiered mind-set: it is horrible beyond
imagination to be disabled, but disabled people with guts can, if they only try hard
enough, make themselves almost ‘normal.’ The absurdity of such all-or-nothing
images is obvious. So, too, is the damage these images do to disabled people by
robbing us of our sense of reality.
(cited in Morris 1991:100)
Unless geographers manage to build on such sophisticated insights by, for example,
considering the social construction of exclusionary territories, we risk perpetuating
representations of the disabled as ‘special cases’ rather than as people living through some
of the most destructive manifestations of societies driven by profit, greed, intolerance and
superficial types of individual success —qualities which translate into excluding those of
us who are ‘different’ from the spaces of the powerful and advantaged.
To further efforts to develop such theories (e.g. Oliver 1990), geographers need input
and guidance from those living with disabilities and struggling to challenge the multiple
discriminations that go along with this type of ‘difference’. We need to learn to open our
conceptual and empirical debates to those living disablement. This means including
disabled activists in the social construction of academic knowledges about ableism and in
debates about its connections to broader lived relations such as class, and letting them
bring their lived experiences of discrimination and struggle into the research process. In
this way, we can build political challenges to ableism, within and outside of the research
process, including alliances between researchers and disabled activists.
These reconstructions, focusing as they do on ‘enpowering’ the oppressed, will not be
easy. Indeed, as McDowell (1992a) points out in her discussion of feminist methods, even
the most progressive research designs raise very difficult ethical, practical and political
questions. The researcher is never really ‘outside’ the dilemmas of radical research but
constantly struggles to handle them a little bit better, a little more fully.
Sensitivity to issues like exploitation of the ‘researched’ is likely to be especially
important in the case of geographic research focusing on disabled women. These women
are (at least) ‘doubly disadvantaged’ by gender and by mental or physical challenges. In
most cases, limited finances and marginalization combine to limit their capacity to
participate in society and in the research community. This means two things. First,
researchers have a responsibility to further struggles to open the research process to
disabled women and make their voices heard in the conduct and use of research. Second,
politically, the research must be aligned with struggles against ableism and the relations,
institutions and practices that support it. The method will vary from project to project,
182 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
however it should be recognized that a research project which does not centrally
contribute to the research and political priorities of the disabled women involved is
exploitative and oppressive.
Challenging ableism in geographic research will be as revolutionary for our
understanding of processes of urban and regional change as it will be for the politics and
practices of research. For disabled women, it will help us better understand how
exclusion, silencing and oppression are reproduced within the predominantly white,
middle-class ranks of the women’s movement, as well as through patriarchal institutions.
It will make it as important to understand the positioning of people within the ‘micro-
relations’ of power in daily life and life spaces, as it is to understand the role of major
social divisions in empowering some groups at the expense of vulnerable ‘others’. More
importantly, challenging ableism will force us to grapple with time- and place-
specific manifestations of ableism, and with how the living of these oppressive and
exclusionary relations translates into resistance and rebellion.
Are geographers up to it? Facing up to heterosexism
Much of the geographic work to date on lesbians and on gays has concentrated on
increasing visibility rather than critical analyses of heterosexual hegemony. That is, most
authors concentrate on lesbian space and gay male space (e.g. meeting places, gentrified
neighbourhoods) rather than on everyday spaces—the heterosexual and hostile
environments in which lesbians and gay men spend most of their time. Of course, given
the dominance of heterosexuality in space, it is important to document and understand
lesbian space and gay male space, but if this is all we do then it is surely a case of adding
‘queers’ and stirring. It is striking how little critical political analysis there is in the
literature, and how few connections are made to the wealth of feminist work in
geography. Valentine’s work is an important and refreshing exception in that it moves
beyond the Impact on the city’ approach to a critical examination of how lesbians create,
transform and negotiate not only lesbian environments but the more day-to-day
environments of heterosexism (see especially Valentine 1993b, 1993c). She argues
(1993a:114) that more research is needed ‘to gain a better understanding of how
heterosexual hegemony which is so often taken for granted, is reproduced in space’.
As public discourse in North America on lesbians changes, it is more critical than ever
to illustrate the ways in which our material realities have not; that is, the ways in which
heterosexual hegemony prevails. As Westenhoefer wryly points out in the infamous
Newsweek article that put lesbians on almost every news-stand across North America,
‘We’re like the Evian water of the ‘90’s. Everybody wants to know a lesbian or to be with
a lesbian or just to dress like one’ (21 June 1993). Knowing a lesbian may indeed be
‘trendy’ in parts of white Western culture but does this manifest itself in political
solidarity? Does it lead to thousands of heterosexuals who ‘know a lesbian’ marching for
lesbian rights? Does it lead to these same heterosexuals insisting on placing lesbian
literature in the school system? Does it lead to mass heterosexual mobilization around the
heterosexual bias of immigration, taxation and adoption laws? A change in discourse alone
will not challenge structures of oppression.
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 183
Further, a change in discourse is often a double-edged sword. Although changing
discourse undoubtedly has political implications, it can also make lesbians’ struggles
against heterosexism more difficult, as the ideology of heteropatriarchy works to suggest
that we have less to struggle against. An analogy can be easily drawn: consider the
feminist struggle against male violence against women; everyone is talking about it, it is
squarely on the public agenda, but women are no less likely to experience male violence
today than they were twenty years ago (Bart and Moran 1993; Dobash and Dobash 1992;
Statistics Canada 1993; Walker 1990). Yet, despite ample hard evidence that this violence
against women is endemic to heteropatriarchal culture, we are still likely to hear (and
prefer to believe), that this violence is a product of poor anger management, women’s low
self-esteem, dysfunctional families and/or learned behaviour. Similarly, everybody may
be talking about (even to) lesbians in the ‘gay nineties’, but heterosexism is still as
powerful as, if not more powerful than, it was twenty years ago. Popular culture may tell
us that being lesbian is fairly acceptable today, but there is no evidence that lesbian
teachers are coming out in their thousands, that lesbians are holding hands in the street,
that federal laws have been changed or that violence against lesbians is decreasing. It is
important to make lesbians visible in geography, but the concentration on lesbian and/or
gay space has so far come at the expense of critical analyses of environments of
heterosexism. It is time for more of the latter, and less of the former.
REINVENTING OURSELVES AND ‘THE PROJECT’: MISSION
IMPOSSIBLE?
The kind of geographic research envisioned in this chapter has the potential to
revolutionize our understanding of social movements and struggles.7 By learning to
understand ableism and heterosexism as embedded in other social relations of power in
patriarchal capitalism, and by exploring the diverse ways in which our experiences of
oppression are socially constructed (reflecting our diverse locations within power
relations and the role of place in social processes), geographers will be better able to
explore how differences and lived identities help shape progressive political action over
time and space. Another benefit, as we have learned in the course of collaboration, is that
researchers can confront and challenge their own complicity in the construction of
relations, identities and practices which marginalize ‘other’ sisters. The challenge is to do
nothing less than reinvent our ways of being involved in research and other social
processes, and to develop a progressive, collective ‘Project’ inclusive enough to ensure
that ‘missing sisters’ are put back into the geographic picture. This does not mean each
and every research project will be directly concerned with ableism or heterosexism, but it
does mean that researchers will deliberately identify the ‘locations’ from which they are
speaking, and the fact that their findings may not speak to the experiences or struggles of
‘missing sisters’. It also, of course, means efforts to include the lives of disabled and
lesbian women as significant facets of women’s lived identities, histories and geographies
(e.g. Bondi 1992; Chouinard 1992,1994; Deutsche 1991; Duncan and Goodwin 1988;
Fraser 1989; Harvey 1989; hooks 1990; McDowell 1992b; Mouffe 1988; Rooney and
Israel 1985; Soja 1989).
184 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
In what follows, we consider the possibilities for such a reconstructed progressive
‘Project’ in radical geography (again, including feminist geography). We argue that
geographers are well placed to face this challenge but that we must recognize significant
barriers to a successful ‘redrawing’ of the ‘Project’.
Mission impossible? Non-ableist geographies
Both the geographic and non-geographic literature show growing interest in the uneven
development of peoples’ capacities to contest social oppressions (e.g. Chouinard 1989;
Duncan and Goodwin 1988; Fincher 1991; Ley and Mills 1993; Miliband 1991; Murgatroyd
et al. 1985). In geography, place, identity and culture have been increasingly important
themes (witness, for example, special sessions at the 1992 Institute of British Geographers
Conference and the 1994 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers).
The time is ripe, then, for geographic interpretations of the complex, diverse and often
fragmented processes of the social construction of lived identities, and of related
processes of ‘disempowerment’ and marginalization.
Geographers, like social researchers in general, have robust critical traditions of
enquiry on which to build reconstructed non-ableist and non-heterosexist research.
Almost three decades of radical research, enriched by feminist work and by relatively new
interests in postmodernism and interpretative theory, have provided a sound foundation
for exploring processes of identity formation, empowerment and oppression, and the
significance of place in those processes (e.g. Pratt and Hanson 1994; Knox 1991; Ley and
Mills 1993; Peet and Thrift 1989; Rose 1993).
If there are grounds for optimism, there are also grounds for cautious concern about
the possibilities for non-ableist and non-heterosexist geographies.
One challenge is the problem of having to confront our own attitudes and practices. Do
you turn away when you see a severely disabled young person in a wheelchair—or do you
look, watch how they cope with the environment and think about how you and others
could make their lives easier by altering that environment? Do you think of them as
disabled first, and a person second—do you help socially construct their identity as
someone to be pitied, a victim —or do you recognize the importance of breaking through
your images and reactions to build a more inclusive ‘Project’ in geography? Even as a
disabled feminist researcher, I sometimes have difficulty putting the commonplace
reactions and stereotypes aside: I am as much a product of the ableism that pervades our
societies as anyone else. The point is that we must face up to our complicity in ableism if
we are to challenge it effectively in our research, teaching and daily lives.
Another challenge involves treating confrontations with ableism (and heterosexism)
not simply as a new topic or ‘oppressed group’ to study, but as a catalyst for rethinking
geographic processes. For instance, in writing this chapter we have both learned that
understanding of space and territory is revolutionized by understanding that ableism,
heterosexism, and ageism are in many ways as significant bases of social oppression as
gender, class or race. Both disabled women and lesbians are engaged in struggles for spaces
of resistance and access to the territories of the powerful, fighting to gain control over the
terms and conditions of their lives. That fight includes struggles over the means of
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 185
producing physical and social environments, such as cultural media, schools, popular
stereotypes, capital and state programmes.
Related challenges include struggles for the presence and visibility of the disabled in
social spaces. Some catalogues, for instance, have started to include disabled models—a
small step, but one that reminds us of the presence of disabled persons in our
communities. Sadly, other signs point to the continued exclusion and marginalization of
disabled people. For example, in Toronto a disability network information programme
once broadcast at noon on Saturdays is now shown at 6 am. The sociocultural message is
clear: the concerns of disabled people are not sufficiently important to warrant broadcast
at a time when people are likely to be awake.
A non-ableist geography will not only have to be sensitive to complex processes of access
and exclusion, but also to how disabled people must struggle to create liveable,
supportive spaces. It will also require research processes which include disabled persons as
vital contributors; this in turn will require meaningful political alliances with disability
activists and organizations. In short, it will require nothing less than a redrawing of ‘The
Project’ to include the experiences and struggles of the disabled as vital facets of
contemporary social movements: not conceptualizing the disabled or lesbians as ‘others’
but as significant voices at the margins of social power; people who are as much a part of
humanity as their able-bodied and/or heterosexual sisters.
Is such a reconstructed ‘Project’ an impossible dream? Only if we lack the geographic
imagination to envision reinventing ourselves as researchers and teachers determined to
fight complicity in the social construction of ‘others’, including relations and practices
that create spaces which render our sisters invisible, silenced and oppressed. Will we find
the courage to give up some of our privilege, for example by refusing to participate in
events that are inaccessible to our disabled sisters?8 Will we find the courage to say
loudly, often and publicly that we will not be part of any ‘Project’ in which disabled
women are cast as the ‘other’? It will mean insisting that by including disabled women, on
their own revolutionary terms, we are all made stronger, more complete, and better able
to understand and fight our oppressions.
Mission impossible? Non-heterosexist geographies
A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexuality is long, long overdue in geography. The
central tenets of feminist geography make it most appropriately placed to tackle
heterosexism, but it will remain intellectually and politically impoverished if it ignores the
fact that patriarchy is heteropatriarchy. How are we, as feminist geographers, to expose
and challenge the patriarchal structures that maintain male supremacy without recognizing
the critical role that compulsory heterosexuality plays in the social control of women?
Both lesbians and straight women have an interest in challenging heterosexism. As
Valentine (1993c:411) points out:
by ignoring antilesbianism or collaborating in perpetuating it, some heterosexual
women comply in their own oppression, because such antilesbianism is also used to
police heterosexual women’s dress, behavior, and activities. Hence, if ‘dyke’ were
186 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
not a term of oppression, heterosexual women would also have more freedom to
define their own identities.
This is not a difficult concept to grasp and I challenge straight feminist geographers to
recognize their own complicity in the construction of dominant and oppositional
sexualities, and thus in the oppression of all women. Recognize heterosexual privilege and
critically analyse the system of rewards that is based on heterosexuality. Understand how
this system works to construct and reinforce that identity; how it helps maintain
compulsory heterosexuality, without which heteropatriarchy could not exist. This involves
incorporating a recognition of heterosexism in both theory and practice.
If our work is truly to be part of the struggle for social change, the struggle for all women’s
liberation, then a challenging discourse in geography is not enough. The connections
between the production of knowledge and the politics and practices of research are
obvious. The next time someone calls you (or a woman you know) a dyke, or hints that
you are, look at why this has happened. How have you stepped out of line, how have you
moved beyond the heteropatriarchal definition of a ‘woman’? More critically, look at your
response: do you quickly mention your male partner, apologize for that behaviour, try to
justify what you are doing, and/or step back into line? Or do you challenge, disrupt and
unsettle? Do you recognize lesbian-baiting for what it is and do you recognize the power
of heterosexism to control women? Do you challenge it, and say, ‘Why, thank you’? We
need discourse, but we also need politics and practice.
It is impossible to think of ways to move towards a non-heterosexist geography without
raising some questions about representation. The spatial analysis of sexuality may well be
of interest to many feminist geographers, but it would be a mistake for them to presume
that this necessitates an investigation of lesbian activity, community and/or space. The
structures of heterosexuality are crying out for a critical analysis by heterosexual feminist
geographers; this would be a fruitful and appropriate area of study, and one which may
avoid appropriating the voices of ‘others’. This question of who should do what type of
research is dealt with in a challenging collection of papers in The Professional Geographer
(England 1994; Gilbert 1994; Katz 1994; Kobayashi 1994; Nast 1994; Staeheli and
Lawson 1994). Staeheli and Lawson are well worth quoting at length:
The most notable difficulty expressed in these papers is the assumption that
feminist women researchers have insider status based on their experiences and
training that makes women ‘sisters’ with the women they research. In the field and
in the community, however, it is becoming clear that this assumption is naive, and
perhaps dangerous. The assumption of insider status ignores the various dimensions
of difference that distinguish women and the issues with which they are concerned.
This realization is generating a sense of crisis as feminist researchers question their
relationships with the people, places, and power relations they study. In its most
extreme form, it can lead to guilt, paralysis, and abandoning research projects.
(1994:97)
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 187
This ‘crisis’ can create an atmosphere where the political runs the danger of getting too
personal. I want to present an honest plea for the making of enough space for feminist
geographers to discuss the very real differences amongst us. We must have the courage to
recognize our own complicity in others’ oppression. For example, writing together as a
Dyke and a disabled woman, we, the authors, both recognize the privileges we gain from
each other’s oppression (see also note 6). We also understand that, although common
threads run through our oppressions, our experiences often differ and neither of us would
ever imagine she could speak for the other. I am not necessarily arguing that heterosexual
women should never discuss lesbians in their research. Neither am I arguing that it is
always okay to do so. It is important to listen to the voices of ‘marginalized groups’ when
they talk of who should and should not do research with them. Surely feminists who are
sympathetic to the concerns of, for example, lesbians, are also sympathetic to their
arguments, and concerns about representation and appropriation?
This issue could make even the most ethically and politically aware feminists hold on to
our academic privilege of choosing a research area. Although it may be appropriate for
lesbians and straight women to work together in some cases, it is not always so. The
challenging question is: do we, as academics, still retain the right to decide what is
appropriate and what is not? An integral component of power and privilege is being able
to make up the rules.
Further, in unearthing the failings of androcentric research on women, feminists have
surely learned that marginalized groups do not speak to their oppressors in the same language
that they use with each other. As we consider ways to avoid perpetuating heterosexist
geographies, it is important to know, for example, that many lesbians, myself included,
have no interest in being involved in any research on lesbians conducted by a straight woman.
This does not mean she is a ‘bad’ woman; just that she will always see my experiences
through ‘straight’ eyes. It is important for lesbians to present their own experiences. In a
similar vein, Kobayshi (1994:74) argues that:
Political ends will be achieved only when representation is organized so that those
previously disempowered are given voice. In other words, it matters that women
of color speak for and with women of color.
CONCLUSIONS: TOWARD EMPOWERING GEOGRAPHIES
In this chapter we have argued for reconstructing ‘Projects’ in radical geography to engage
with the perspectives developed from positions of exclusion and marginalization within
the discipline. For the two of us, writing this chapter has enriched and challenged our
geographic imaginations. We have moved from ‘Projects’ which fail, to questioning why
and how there are ‘missing sisters’ in geography, toward ‘Projects’ which constantly
challenge the taken-for-granted nature of ‘otherness’. We have moved from a politics of
exclusion toward a revolutionary politics of inclusion. We have used examples from the
positions we know best, but our general arguments have relevance for other ‘others’,
including radicals with perspectives that continue to unsettle the establishment. We
challenge readers to take this journey; to openly confront the white, able-bodied,
188 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
heterosexual, male paradigms which continue to dominate the discipline, and rediscover
the diversity of lived geographies of oppression and struggle. There will be mistakes and
setbacks along the way but the path is rich with possibilities for discovery and
transformation.
Among the issues we have taken from this consideration of our own positions is that
challenging the silences and absences in our own ranks is the first vital step toward
developing less elitist knowledges and political practices. Our intention in recounting some
of our own personal/political experiences is not to evoke sympathy nor apologies—when
we, as two white women, act in racist ways, apologies may make us feel better but they
do little to challenge the structures of oppression. Action is what is required.
Another conclusion to be drawn from this chapter is that our understanding of the
uneven development of late patriarchal, capitalist societies will be woefully inadequate as
long as our disabled and lesbian sisters continue to be missing. Not only will we miss
diverse lived relations of oppression and resistance, but we will also impose a false
homogeneity on manifestations of oppression and exploitation in peoples’ lives and
environments. This kind of conception of social experience and change, like Marx’s
‘commodity fetishism’, helps blind us to the very complicated ways in which people’s
lives are entangled within, and altered by, processes such as the economic and social
devaluation of particular labourers on the bases of ability or sexuality. The point is not simply
that we need to be sensitive to particularity. The point is, rather, that such processes are
central to the uneven development of patriarchal, capitalist societies.
Radical geographers are well placed to take up the challenges posed in this chapter. A
sensitivity to the place-specificity of processes of oppression and resistance, and to the
play of differences within those places, permits sophisticated explanations of the politics
of creating and recreating ‘otherness’, of how ‘micro’-processes of power and oppression
fit within the big picture of societies driven by enduring classist, racist, sexist,
heterosexist, ableist and ageist power relations or structures.
This would include exploring how these relations give rise to the economic and political
inequalities which help divide and silence us, often in the company of our own, and to the
differences and commonalities in the marginalization and resistance of oppressed others.
These explanations would also address the social consequences of lived oppressions: for
example, the links between different types and levels of representation within local states
and peoples’ capacities to contest and change oppressive relations in particular places.
Finally, such explanations would help move us closer toward theories and methods which
take structure, agency, experience, discourse and interpretation equally seriously.
We believe that in attempting to reinvent ‘The Project’ it is important to recognize
that issues of determinism, functionalism, structure and agency and so on are not
exclusive to the new post-structuralist and postmodern perspectives and debates. They
are issues that other radical geographers such as Marxists and feminists have engaged with
for a long time in their efforts to come to grips with changing geographies of
marginalization, oppression, resistance and revolution. Much Marxist work is a rich and
ongoing legacy, not a process of debate and research which somehow ‘froze’ in the late
1970s with clashes between so-called humanist and structuralist Marxists (Anderson
1980; Thompson 1978). It will be our own loss, and a serious one, if intolerance and
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 189
misrepresentation causes us to disregard the work of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Marxists in
our efforts to refine frameworks that focus on peoples’ experiences and actions as forces of
societal development and change. The same danger is present in current engagements
with feminist geography, as its themes and issues are more widely considered in the radical
geographical literature. For it is clear that the terms of engagement are not always set by
feminists: although at least a mention of feminist geography now appears to be obligatory
in radical literature, it is often little more than that. As McDowell (1992b:58) argues:
At last, it seems as if there is a growing recognition of feminism’s fundamental
understanding that the deployment of the universal is inherently, if paradoxically,
partial and political. But…it also seems clear that this recognition is based not on
an understanding of feminist arguments, and more certainly not on a commitment
to feminism’s revolutionary project, but rather on an eclectic reading of
postmodernism
Unless we can link the causes of oppression and practices to their human costs in
particular places, we are likely to be left with idiosyncratic and elitist interpretative
accounts of social experience and action. A focus on social relations forces us to
reconsider, time and again, our own positions in processes of creating and using
knowledge; without that kind of ‘reality check’, that reminder that we are part of
pervasive power structures, we are likely to become entangled in our own interpretative
webs. For example, in situations where the ‘deconstructionist’ author is textually
represented as ‘in the background’, giving voice to ‘others’ and challenging authority,
while in practice relinquishing little, if any, power over the production and use of
knowledges (see for example the interesting exchange between Massey 1991, Deutsche
1991 and Harvey 1992).
Radical geography will be impoverished, politically as well as intellectually, if we
cannot find ways of balancing concerns with diverse experiences of oppression and
exclusion, with continued struggles to advance our understanding of the causal processes
helping to perpetuate sexism, heterosexism, ableism, racism and ageism. We hope this
chapter has indicated that a solid foundation for projects in radical geography must draw
at least as fully on existing traditions like Marxism and feminism as on proposals for more
‘interpretative’ theories and methods. We have to get at the causes of power and
oppression, as well as noting their diverse manifestations in people’s lives and locations, if
we are to speak to and act on issues of social change. If we do not, not only do we
impoverish diverse knowledges and help silence voices, but we also risk a political limbo
in which it is quite unclear why academics should be speaking for anyone rather than
stepping aside and letting people speak for themselves. We are either trying to act as
facilitators of change, in part by using our own skills and privileges to identify the causes
and consequences of social oppression, or we are parasites exploiting ‘others’ for dubious
reasons.
We also hope we have indicated why the social construction of ‘otherness’ is an issue
for all of us. To fail to listen to, and address, the voices of lesbians and disabled women,
amongst other ‘others’, is to cut off crucial avenues of debate and research—work and
190 WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE/
connections that could benefit us all by challenging current, exclusionary research
practices and engaging with ‘others’ not on elitist terms but on their own revolutionary
agendas. It should be clear that we are not simply looking for a piece of the pie—we want
to change the recipe.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank Kim England, Joan Flood, Larry Knopp and Linda Peake
for insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
NOTES
1 In fairness, the authors’ approaches to the subject have changed considerably in the last ten
years (personal communication with Larry Knopp).
2 The term ‘heteropatriarchy’ is taken from Valentine (1993c:396):
To be gay [sic], therefore is not only to violate norms about sexual behavior and
family structure—but also to deviate from the norms of ‘natural’ masculine and
feminine behavior. These norms change over space and time, and hence sexuality is
not merely defined by sexual acts but exists as a process of power relations.
Heterosexuality in modern Western society can therefore be defined as a
heteropatriarchy, that is, as a process of sociosexual power relations which reflect
and reproduce male dominance.
3 Valentine (1993b) includes an interesting discussion of essentialism versus constructionism
in understanding the roots of lesbianism.
4 For example, Valentine (1993c:408) cites a San Francisco study of 400 lesbians: ‘84% had
experienced antilesbian verbal harassment, 57% had been threatened with physical violence,
and 12% had been punched, kicked or beaten…’
5 I want to be very clear that in using Bell’s quotation from Christopherson’s ‘On being outside
“the project”’ article, and using it somewhat out of context, I am not criticizing
Christopherson per se.
6 As Masuda and Ridington found in the DAWN study (1992:vii):
Of the 245 women who participated in this survey, 40% had been raped, abused or
assaulted, 64% had been verbally abused; girls with disabilities have less than an
equal chance of escaping abuse than their non-disabled sisters; women with multiple
disabilities experienced multiple-incidents of abuse, and only 10% of women who
were abused sought help from transition houses, of which only half were
accommodated.
7 For example, Vera is working on a project concerned with disabled women’s struggles.
Among its innovative features are an advisory group composed of disabled women activists
(to oversee and discuss the work from start to finish), and a conception of social experience
and change in which efforts to contest ableism are understood in connection with other
relations of oppression. These features will help ensure a research process closely guided by
VERA CHOUINARD AND A LI GRANT/ 191
the expertise of disabled women activists, a nuanced explanation of the socio-spatial barriers
that disabled women are contesting in a range of social movements, and recognition of the
diversity in the political lives of disabled women. It will be a geographic research project by
and for disabled women.
8 An example of giving up a little piece of privilege: I live in a town where is only one lesbian
dance every month or two, so these dances are very important to me. However, when a
dance was arranged in an inaccessible facility, I knew that, despite the fact that I wanted to
go, I could not. By using my able-bodied privilege, I would have participated in sending out
a clear message that disabled women were not welcome at a dance that advertised ‘all
women welcome’. As simply not going in itself would not make any kind of statement, I
joined with other lesbians and stood outside the dance to let other women know why we
weren’t going in. This was a small matter, but it did make a difference: there has not been a
dance in an inaccessible building since.
192
PART III
(RE)SEARCHINGS
194
12
ENGENDERING RACE RESEARCH
Unsettling the self—Other dichotomy
Kay Anderson
INTRODUCTION
At a moment in feminist theorizing when scholars are grappling with ethnocentric
presumptions of a ‘generic woman’ implicit within ‘imperial feminism’ (Amos and
Parmar 1984), it is timely to note the paucity of attempts to unsettle the epistemology of
separation implicit in much race research. The fictionalized collectivities of ‘Black’,
‘White’, ‘European’, ‘Asian’ and so on— the stock in trade of the field called ‘race
relations’—are often the corollaries of a dichotomized us/them framework that
(unwittingly) obscures the subjectivities of identities internal to those categories. Such a
framework also tends to overwrite the interconnections of privileged race positions with
other sources of identity and power. Whereas the critique of Western feminism by Black,
post-colonial and lesbian writers has challenged feminist consensus (Butler 1990; Collins
1991; hooks 1981, 1991; Larbalestier 1991; Singleton 1989), much race research—
including work by anti-colonialists such as Said (1978) and Clifford (1988)—has worked
with modernist presumptions of an ordered (racialized) reality whose subject positionings
are, for the most part, fixed and undifferentiated (c.f. Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992;
Donald and Rattansi 1992).
In this chapter I seek to problematize the polarity of race identities upon which rests
the cohering argument of my earlier work Vancouver’s Chinatown (1991). I aim to
undertake such an auto-critique by feeding into the Chinatown story the discursive fields
and social positionings of gender and sexuality, a task I undertake not for its own sake, but
rather to sharpen the critical analysis of the many valences of social power. By extension,
the chapter critiques other work in race relations that implicitly or explicitly disengages
race identities from other historically situated oppressions such as those surrounding
gender, class and sexuality. Without discrediting work that specifies the contribution that
race-based oppression makes to structures of inequality, the chapter seeks to foreground
the multiplicity and mobility of subject positionings, including those of race and gender.
Such a style of analysis may be particularly revealing, because while racism has long
structured socio-spatial relations in British settler nations such as Canada and Australia, it
has been woven into a range of power-differentiated regimes out of which colonial
relations have been organized into the present. Certainly the stories that emerge from a
196 KAY ANDERSON/
re-examination of select moments in the history of White/Chinese relations in
Vancouver, Canada, reveal a more ‘complex dominator identity’ (Plumwood 1993) than
a unified White oppressor. The projects of colonialism, themselves manifestly variable
from place to place, relied on the imaginative and practical leadership—less of Whites per
se (as if there exists such an abstract, uncontradictory ‘self; see Bhabha 1990a) than—of a
specific ‘master subject’ who was White, adult, male, heterosexual and bourgeois (Rose
1993). To erase these refinements to the dominator perspective is to risk invoking a
falsely tidy dichotomy of relations between a racialized ‘us’ versus a racialized ‘them’,
when in reality the social processes constituting social relations were complex and
differentiated. The oppressions through which ‘colonialism’s cultures’ (Thomas 1994)
were elaborated in Canada’s western province of British Columbia had myriad and
overlapping sources in the structures of capitalism, patriarchy and cultural domination by
race and sexuality. And while pronouncements about the intersections of diverse idioms of
oppression are now commonplace in theorizing in the social sciences—with many efforts
at formulating multidimensional models of class, race and gender oppression (see e.g.
Bottomley and de Lepervanche 1984; Bottomley et al. 1991; Jennett and Randal 1987)—
empirical demonstration of the ways in which oppressions interacted and became mutually
confirming is not extensive (although see e.g. Bear 1994; Pettman 1992; Ware 1992).
Within the space constraints of a chapter, this is the challenge of the first section of what
follows.
Racialized and gendered discourse did not always, however, operate in a fully
efficacious complicity in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British Columbia. To
re-tell the story of Vancouver’s Chinatown by emphasizing the power of an (albeit more
differentiated, that is, European male) centre is to risk reifying further the master-
perspective of the dominator identity. Indeed at certain moments in the history of
Vancouver’s Chinatown, alliances between White women and Chinese men trouble the
falsely consensual understanding of domination that arises from one-dimensional race
analyses. Thus, if we reorient the story of Vancouver’s Chinatown around the subjectivity of
White women, at least in select moments, we shall see the spaces where are upset images
of the monolithic societal racism upon which neat race narratives depend. By
foregrounding such spaces, as I do in the second part of this chapter, we begin to
‘denaturalize’ (Kobayashi and Peake, 1994) the racialized and gendered marking of
subjects that has been so central to strategies of domination (see also Jackson 1994).
A parallel oversimplification in the governing logic of ‘European hegemony’ is the
construct of a homogeneous racialized category pitted beneath one coherent oppressor.
Yet the gender- and class-differentiated experiences and statuses within the category
‘Chinese’ also defy the essentialized configurations of binary (self/Other) models. By
briefly drawing on published sources documenting the uneven experiences of Chinese
men and women in early Vancouver, the second part of the chapter also unsettles notions
of a stably positioned, internally unified and uniformly oppressed victim. Taken together,
the examples support post-structuralist critiques of the ‘centred subject’ (see e.g.
Donaldson 1992; Nicholson 1990) by highlighting the contradictory, multi-dimensional
and strategic quality of identities. The examples also go some way to demonstrating how
the relationships between dominant and minoritized groups are crossed not only by
ENGENDERING RACE RESEARCH/ 197
diverse discursive fields (Lowe 1991), but also by multiple positionings that are not reducible
to the binary division of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
The potential infinity of the fractual patterns of social relations might appear to paralyse
the quest for explanation conceived around a single, controlling point of determination. If
we dissect categories too far, we risk losing sight of the structuring threads of power that
cohere in empirically specifiable ways. That case has been persuasively argued by ‘post-
postmodernists’ such as Walby (1992). Certainly the argument in what follows should not
be taken as a refutation of the force, persistence and profound material effect of that
pernicious ideological and material regime that is racism. On the contrary, to specify the
intersections of axes of oppression, as this chapter undertakes to do, is not necessarily to
disperse or disable the critique of power. It is rather to offer glimpses of two things. First
is revealed the often mutually constitutive boundary-making practices out of which
colonialism’s cultures were constructed in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century
setting of western Canada. That racism often drew on gendered meanings and
positionings in these processes is not to deny racism’s strength; rather it is to appreciate
the wider discursive network in which racism was inserted. Second is exposed the
possibility of rupture of racialized regimes (and the readings they support) when
alternative speaking perspectives to that of the elite master-subject are positioned at the
centre of analysis. If racialized alliances are at times crosscut by gendered and classed
struggles, such as we shall see occurred in Vancouver in the 1930s, and we resist
assimilating such struggles into an epistemic regime of race domination, then we glimpse
fresh (Chinatown) stories and alternative political alliances and possibilities.
This chapter now turns to a brief résumé of the work which I then propose to critically
revisit in the light of these introductory comments.
VANCOUVER’S CHINATOWN (1991): A BRIEF RÉSUMÉ
My intention in writing Vancouver’s Chinatown was to reconceptualize an enclave which had
long been theorized in the social sciences as a colony of the East in the West, an ‘ethnic’
neighbourhood whose residents and streetscapes existed in natural connection to their
Oriental difference and Chineseness. In contrast to that model, I developed an anti-
essentialist conceptualization of Chinatown as a construct of Western imagining and
practice.
Using the example of Vancouver, Canada, where people of Chinese origin settled in a
few blocks of that city’s East End from the late 1870s, I traced through time the discursive
practices that shaped the definition and management of that district. This, from the time of
negative stereotyping between the late 1880s and 1930 when Chinatown was classified by
White Vancouver society as a vice district; through the period of the 1930s and 1940s
when Chinatown’s classification grew more complex and contradictory; that is, when the
vice classification came to coexist with the district’s first formal tourist definition as
Vancouver’s ‘Little Corner of the Far East’. During the 1950s and early 1960s—the post-
war era of modernist urban planning —Chinatown was targeted by Canadian federal and
civic administrations as a ‘slum’ and came close to being completely destroyed by urban
renewal and freeway plans. Come the 1970s, Chinatown became classified as an ethnic
198 KAY ANDERSON/
and heritage district—valued by White Canadians precisely for its Chineseness and
refurbished in a radically new kind of targeting as an Oriental district with funds from all
three levels of Canadian government. In that project, they were joined by Chinatown
retailers who, in the rush for the spoils of multiculturalism, manipulated to their own
advantage the racialized representations of identity and place that delivered them to White
Vancouver society.
Lying beneath the phases of neighbourhood definition, I argued, was the continuity of a
racialization process that is the book’s structuring narrative. Over the hundred-year
period, Chinatown was constructed—both ideologically and materially—out of
manifestly variable guises of race classification on the part of those armed with the
conceptual and instrumental power to define and regulate the area. The role of the three
levels of Canadian state in sponsoring and enforcing that power is highlighted throughout.
Chinatown was not just the object of biased depiction and ‘prejudice’, then, as liberal
theses had argued (Ward 1978), but—following Foucault (1979)—of a particular cultural
politics of discursive production that enabled one (European) set of truths to acquire the
status of truth and normalcy. That this operation entailed a will to dominate (‘hegemony’)
had already been persuasively argued for a different scale and context by Said (1978).
Thus, Chinatown, like that mythical region of Western imagining called the Orient, was
recurrently White Vancouver’s Other, I argued, a place through which a dominant group
forged its own cultural understanding of its identity, boundaries, status and privilege.
Chinatown was a site through which were articulated diverse narratives of race, health,
vice, civility, blight, heritage and ethnic pluralism. Unlike other critiques of orientalism,
however, notably Said and the more recent work by Lowe (1991), my interest lay not
only in the discursive struggles surrounding identity and Othering strategies, but also the
social production of the district, its changing material form and fortunes.
NATION—BUILDING IN COLONIAL CONTEXT: DISPLACING
THE NARRATIVE DEVICE OF UNITARY RACE POSITIONINGS
In late nineteenth-century British Columbia, notions of in-group and out-group drew on a
complex network of raced and gendered discourses. Later in this section of the chapter, we
shall see the interaction of these meanings at the scale of ‘place’, with specific reference to
the discursive construction of Chinatown in early Vancouver. But the processes were
equally evident at the scales of ‘nation’ and ‘province’. The making of ‘Canada’ in its
symbolic dimension entailed representational practices that were deeply saturated with
race and gender concepts, and by highlighting their collusion, we further refine the
identities and subjectivities out of which a dominant imagined geography of nation grew
(see also Bhabba 1990a).
That Canadian officials of the late nineteenth century were seeking to create a White
Canada was abundantly clear in the languages and debates recorded in the government texts
that were the primary data sources for Vancouver’s Chinatown (Anderson 1991). Federal
legislation in the form of a head tax —passed in 1885 to contain Chinese immigration—
thus sought to limit family settlement, while permitting a controlled amount of Chinese
labour and capital. Bound up with the impulse to contain Chinese numerically was also a
ENGENDERING RACE RESEARCH/ 199
desire to prevent what was called ‘miscegenation’ or ‘mixture of races’. To that end, the
ultimate target of legislation appears to have been less the ‘Chinese’ as a collective
racialized category, than the more narrow category of Chinese women. Moralities of race
and gender fed an interactive discursive network. In the words of the Royal
Commissioner for Chinese Immigration, John Chapleau, when arguing the case to the
House of Commons for a head tax in 1885: ‘If they came with their women they would
come to settle and what with immigration and their extraordinary fecundity, would soon
overrun the country’ (Canada 1885b:98). Canada’s Prime Minister of the time, John
MacDonald, held the same opinion: ‘If wives are allowed, not a single immigrant would
come without a wife, and the immorality existing to a very great extent along the Pacific
Coast would be greatly aggravated’ (Canada 1887:643). Not just idle polemic, such views
shaped policies that imposed constraints on Chinese family life in Canada and China well
into the twentieth century (see Li 1988: Ch. 4). (By 1938, the Vancouver press reported
that the ‘ultimate solution’ to the Chinese problem had been found in the severe sex
imbalance in the local Chinese population which was constraining its ability to replenish
itself, see Province 28 February 1938.)
Embedded in the projections of officials such as Chapleau and MacDonald was a particular
construction of Chinese women, as wives and ipso facto reproductive beings who
threatened the demographic strength and integrity of White Canada. Chinese women
were never seen as single immigrants with the potential for waged (or unwaged) labour,
yet we know that such women undertook a range of jobs within the enclave economy of
Vancouver’s Chinatown in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Adilman
1984). And if Chinese women were seen by Canadian officials as anything other than
‘fecund’, they were cast as prostitutes—a still more ominous identity according to John
Chapleau, in 1885, because ‘they bring with them a most virulent form of syphilis and in a
special way corrupt little boys’ (Canada 1885b:xii). Such pronouncements filtered into
media texts across the country to feed the image of a disease-bearing race with whom
sexual liaisons would be ill-advised.
A sharpened gender awareness of the discursive processes at work in Canadian nation-
building brings into view not just Chinese women immigrants, however, caught between
White cultural superiority and male power. Running through the official constructions of
Chinese immigration— and especially during the lead up to the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1923 (see Anderson 1991:132–41)—was a racialized and gendered aesthetic that
interconnected the spaces of nation and body. ‘Canada’ appears scripted in official texts as
a pure space, one that if impregnated by the flow of alien material would become
contaminated and offer up inferior ‘stock’. In Figure 12.1, for example, taken from the
Vancouver press during the anti-Chinese riot of 1907, we see how the iconic body of
White woman was grafted onto the space of nation (and province). The rhetorical device
within this system of representation was to symbolically construct the nation as passive
and pure by affording it the attributes of an Anglo female body. Like other symbolic
figurations of nation such as Miss Britannia and Lady Liberty (see Pateman 1988; Yuval-
Davis 1991), Miss BC is made to emblematically stand as an essence under peril of
violation. Thus invested with agency is the wilful guardian of nation, Prime Minister
200 KAY ANDERSON/
Wilfrid Laurier, whose (masculinized) charge and call to action becomes no less than the
heroic rescue of the imperilled British Columbia.
The ‘captivity narrative’ (Schaffer 1991) at work here—of defenceless, feminized space
whose boundaries require protection from ‘the commingling of blood’ (Canada 1922:
1518, 1522, 1524, 1529)—structured the discursive terrain of province and nation-
building. It created and appropriated the bounded notions of ‘British Columbia’ and (writ
large) of ‘Canada’, drawing on specific codes of race, femininity and masculinity within
Canadian culture. These were the constitutive cultural and political resources whose
interaction we need to glimpse in order to appreciate how the Ideological work’ (Poovey
1989) of nation-building actually got done. That those codes were powerful and
persistent is doubtless also the case, as witness the ‘race hygiene’ debates of the 1930s (see
Anderson 1991: Ch. 4) when there was very explicit concern in Canadian policy circles
about the ‘mongrelization’ of White purity by Chinese ‘penetration’ (see also Stepan
1991). It follows that we need to resist any reductive impulses to distil a governing logic
of binary (race or gender) relations to more fully understand the irreducibly broad social
projects entailed in the construction of colonialism’s cultures.
SEX, VICE AND CHINATOWN: RACE, GENDER AND PLACE
Vancouver’s texted place called ‘Chinatown’ was crafted out of a repertoire of images
whose racialized and gendered content enhanced their cultural appeal and political effect.
In this section I would like to elaborate some of the gender-silences in my earlier race
analysis with reference to the field of knowledge surrounding Chinatown in the period
between approximately 1880 to 1930. During that time period, it is evident that the
concept of ‘Chinatown’ harnessed racialized images to its service that were already deeply
gendered (see Ware 1992) and which drew on more than a more narrowly conceived
Orientalist field of knowledge. By revisiting a series of illustrations from the Vancouver
press earlier this century, I hope to expand the interpretive grid I cast on such historical
materials and illuminate the discursive network within which operated race, gender, and
sexuality languages and practices.
I previously argued that, of all the things that might have been said by early White
Vancouver residents about Chinatown, only those aspects that fitted the racial
categorization became filtered into the neighbourhood construct. In the early twentieth-
century cartoons from Vancouver’s Saturday Sunset (Figures 12.2, 12.3, 12.4), we see the
nature of the material out of which Chinatown was ideologically constructed. Local
knowledge drew upon the presumed proclivities for opium, gambling, sexual exploitation
and over-crowding of that abstracted figure ‘John Chinaman’ to produce interlocking
registrations of vice, mystery, danger and disease. For those seeking to render the place
and its people eternally alien, a label into which could be assimilated all the things that
Europeans sought to deny or repress in themselves, served a persistently useful function.
Certainly the label became more than a package of (derogatory) meanings, words and
texts. As I demonstrated in my earlier work, the Chinatown concept triggered and
justified harassment campaigns for many decades as part of the state’s management of
ethnic pluralism.
ENGENDERING RACE RESEARCH/ 201
Figure 12.1 ‘Miss British Columbia: “Will Sir Wilfred Laurier never touch that button?”’ (Saturday
Sunset, 4 September 1907)
One can go further, however, than arguing that European conceptions of ‘a Chinese
race’ was the primary modality governing law enforcement practices in Chinatown. There
seems also to have been constructed around Chinatown a deeply gendered ‘moral panic’
(Cohen 1972) that served to legitimize not just White Canadian intervention but a
historically specific form of masculinity and moral guardianship. In the 1908 illustration
202 KAY ANDERSON/
‘Vancouver Must Keep this Team (Figure 12.2), civic guardians Chief of Police
Chamberlain and Magistrate Alexander—icons of the law enforcement arms of the state—
are clearing their heroic path through Vice-town. It is a site where ‘difference’ is being
scripted as ‘danger’ to culturally dominant norms; a place that the ‘axe man’, Deputy
Chief of Police McLennan, sought tirelessly to ‘tame’ (Province 16 July 1913). And that
the norms these men felt moved to police were themselves crafted out of gendered (and
heterosexist) material is plainly evident in the 1907 cartoon ‘The Unanswerable
Argument’ (Figure 12.3). The ideal of Canadian, suburban, civilized, family life is here
set up in opposition to, and at risk from, the pathologized modes of living on Carrall
Street.
Although the competition presented to the White working class by cheap Chinese
labour was a persistent theme within early Vancouver’s colonial discourse, it was the
scenario of sexual liaisons between Chinese men and White women which was seen as the
most threatening violation of all. Indeed nothing served to congeal stereotypical
knowledge about Chinatown more securely than the emblematic activity of John
Chinaman’s predation. So while in certain instances, Chinese could be cast as ‘a feminine
race’, to use the words of Royal Commissioner Dr Justice Gray in 1885—‘docile’ and well
suited to the menial labour of railway construction (Canada 1885b:69) —they could, to
serve other purposes, be masculinized and construed as energetic pursuers of White
women (see also Back 1994). The contradictions within the languages that constructed
Chinese as alien were complex and do themselves point to the irreducible diversity of
classed, raced, gendered and sexualized resources upon which colonial discourses drew.
There were other double standards. Whereas sexual relations between Chinese women
and White men were rarely discussed (except to fuel alarm about the transmission of
syphilis), the possibility of sexual relations between Chinese men and White women was
deeply troubling (if also, perhaps, titillating) and supplied much discursive material for
Chinatown’s image-making. The ‘moral blight’ that was Chinatown certainly set a
pressing agenda for Christian missions in early Vancouver. In the 1908 cartoon ‘The
Foreign Mission Field in Vancouver’ (Figure 12.4), Chinatown’s opium dens are
constructed as the natural habitat of the lascivious John. Inside them, White women—
passive at the hands of the inscrutable Oriental—are induced to commit ‘amoralities’, in
the words of many a civic official. As occurred in other ‘inter-racial’ settings, the scenario
is made to stand as the most profound of violations, and it worked in a few ways: first by
contacting the generalized fear, beginning at the point of immigration, that ‘Canada’ faced
a threat from close contact with outsiders. Proximity of ‘races’ within the private sphere
could thus also be construed as ‘perilous’ by image-makers such as Attorney-General
Mason and the press, both of which played wickedly on the notoriety of ‘Vice-town’ in
1924 when a Chinese domestic (‘China boy’) allegedly murdered his employer, Janet
Smith, of the high-income district of Shaughnessy (see Province 13, 28 Nov., 5 Dec. 1924;
also Lee 1990:65–9). This was one of a few occasions when alleged murders of White,
wealthy women by Chinese servants was used to transform difference into ‘danger’ and to
justify the enforcement of boundaries between Chinese men and White women (see also
the controversy surrounding the death of Mrs Millard of the West End in 1914 in
Anderson 1991:116).
ENGENDERING RACE RESEARCH/ 203
Figure 12.2 ‘Vancouver must keep this team’
(Saturday Sunset, 1 February 1908)
Second, the fantasies and anxieties surrounding sexual relations between Chinese men
and White women fed into other cultural discourses. Within such discursive ‘fellowships’
(Foucault 1972) circulated languages of: presumptive heterosexuality (according to which
White women were the exclusive preserve of White men); racialized manhood (such that
the ‘bestial negro’ and ‘wily Oriental’ could be rendered lustful primitives); White
femininity as an innocent and vulnerable essence; and of women as Othered objects,
servicers of male bodily needs and desires. Like their insatiable pursuers, White women
were also closer to nature than the rational, controlled, White male. Small wonder, then,
that sex between Chinese men and White women became inscribed as the ultimate moral
204 KAY ANDERSON/
Figure 12.3 ‘The unanswerable argument’
(Saturday Sunset, 10 August 1907)
and political transgression. Not only did it compromise racial boundaries, it threatened
White, male property. Safeguarding the virtue of White women thus became dignified as
a prerogative, and was very often the pretext that law enforcers used in targeting
Chinatown. In so doing, White men exercised not just their sense of race and gender
supremacy, but also their power of definition over the criteria of normalcy in sexual
conduct.
The sexual politics at work in civic missions to Chinatown trouble the binary frame of
race analyses that assume an essential opposition of interests between ‘Whites’ and
‘Chinese’. For one thing, the representations and practices surrounding Chinatown
originated in social relations that included gender and sexual orientation, suggesting there
was nothing unitary in the position of racial privilege (or, as I shall later argue, of racial
subordination). White women’s inferior positioning relative to White men, together with
the privileging of heterosexist masculinity in Canadian culture, informed the very
moralities that grew up around the ‘race’ question. Indeed they compromise any narrative
characterizations of social relations that might collapse gender, sexuality and class
arrangements into a larger governing conception of ‘race’ domination. Nor was it a case
of a simple layering of race with gender meanings (as might be implied by linear and
ENGENDERING RACE RESEARCH/ 205
Figure 12.4 ‘The “foreign mission field” in Vancouver’
(Saturday Sunset, 10 October 1908)
mechanistic ‘additive models’ of oppression; see Sacks 1989; Spelman 1988). The point
underlined by the substantive discussion is that racist knowledges had gender and moral
codings relating to family, sexuality, marriage and residence embedded within them, just
as discourses surrounding gender, sex, citizenship and family life relied on race meanings
for their cultural integrity. It follows that race identities cannot be decontextualized and
separated off analytically or politically from the constitution of other identities and axes of
power. Each division is practised in the rhetorical and interactive context of others. The
representational practices surrounding Chinatown thus bring into view the insinuation
through each other of the multiple hierarchies that underwrote early Vancouver society.
CHINATOWN REORIENTED: ALTERNATIVE SUBJECT
POSITIONINGS AND STORIES
The contribution of racialized and gendered discourses to ethnic relations in early
Vancouver might seem to have been so decisive as to support readings of colonialism as a
pervasively efficacious venture. If the making of a British British Columbia was a relatively
influential project, however, it was not a unitary one evolving from a singular source of
ethnic superiority. We have seen that its sources were multiple and differentiated. It is
also the case that, for all of colonialism’s power at certain times and in particular places,
the management of ethnic difference was no neat process of imposition. Rather it entailed
206 KAY ANDERSON/
struggle, and was often fragmented and frustrated by debate, contradiction and resistance
by those it subordinated.
Analysis of colonialism’s operation can also be constructed from a range of vantage
points. Indeed the perspective of the elite White master-subject is possibly only
legitimized by accounts, such as appear in the first part of this chapter, of the simultaneity
of race, gender and heterosexist oppressions in colonialism’s extension to British
Columbia. Thus while it is important to continue to illuminate the differentiated sources
and forms of power under colonialism, it is also helpful to puncture the binding grip of a
(master-) story of the inter-ethnic encounter—a grim tale, that is, of inexhaustibly
coherent control on the part of a privileged Anglo group. In what follows, I seek in a most
preliminary way, to diversify the Chinatown problematic by opening up the story-field to
alternative subject and speaking positionings.
Although there can be little doubt that White Vancouver women were often complicit
in the practices that marginalized Chinese in that city’s early history, there were moments
when White women broke ranks with White men and formed alliances that undercut the
stable fixings of racialized boundaries. A more nomadic style of story-telling to the linear
mode of Vancouver’s Chinatown (1991)—one that weaves narrative threads through
scattered moments—illuminates such apparent ruptures in the Orientalist logic of
Occident versus Orient. To that end, vignettes that I earlier framed in race terms (see
Anderson 1990; 1991:116–20, 158–64), can be recast to disrupt logics of race
complementarity and to highlight the possibility of political alliances that cut across
racialized identities.
In 1920, the Vancouver city council decided to impose a hefty $100 licensing fee on
vegetable peddling, a trade almost wholly dominated by Chinese in early Vancouver. The
move on the part of council was undertaken out of support for the powerful Retail
Merchant’s Association which had grown concerned about the inroads being made into its
business by the itinerant vendors. The pedlars—disinclined to accept the fee—decided to
enlist the support of their clients as well as the Chinese ambassador. Interestingly, on this
occasion, some 5,000 Vancouver women were more interested in avoiding long shopping
trips to the city market than endorsing the vendetta of the Retail Merchant’s Association.
The women signed the petition in support of their Chinese produce suppliers and against
the White male retailers who, in race readings of social relations, are cast as their
compulsory partners.
The incident wasn’t the only occasion when there were alliances across racialized
boundaries that are written out by a logic of binary opposition. There were other
moments of vulnerability in dominant discourses surrounding Chinatown. Fifteen years
later, in 1935, Chief Constable W.Foster found cause to implement British Columbia’s
Act for the Protection of Women and Girls, specifically in Vancouver’s Chinatown. That
Act had been implemented back in 1919 out of fear for women’s ‘moral safety’ in Chinese
restaurants throughout British Columbia. In Vancouver, Foster argued that contact
between Chinese men and White women was being set up inside restaurant booths and
that after working hours, women would go to Chinese quarters where ‘they were induced
to prostitute themselves and immorality would take place’ (cited in Anderson 1991; Ch.
5). This was no trivial matter for the retired colonel, and between 1935 and 1937, Foster
ENGENDERING RACE RESEARCH/ 207
and his ‘moral reform squad’ comprising Mayor M.Miller, License Inspector H.Urquart
and City Prosecutor O. Orr set about banning White waitresses from Chinatown cafes by
cancelling the licenses of businesses employing them.
The vendetta against Chinatown cafes met with angry resistance from Chinese owners
of the restaurants, including the powerful and wealthy president of the Chinese
Benevolent Association, Charlie Ting. Perhaps the most revealing challenge, however,
came from the women themselves, who in 1937 marched to City Hall to protest their
dismissal by, in the words of one woman, ‘the self-appointed directors of the morals of
women in Chinatown’. The women were quite prepared to articulate the specificity of
their experience as workers and defend their right to choose their employers and place of
work. Certainly the women defied the image of the passive object of desire that we have
seen was so useful in dignifying earlier male missions in Chinatown. One waitress, Kay
Martin, told the press she would ‘much prefer working for a Chinese employer than for
other nationalities’. Another stated that ‘if a girl is inclined to go wrong she can do it just
as readily uptown as she can down here’. Another noted ‘our bosses are honourable men
who know that we must live’.
If it was the adversity of living conditions during the Depression that brought about the
womens’ defence of their employers, the action nonetheless upsets readings of relentless
race polarization. Such interpretations risk flattening the experiences of White women as
subjects, deducing them from the (putatively) immobile and deterministic position of race
power. Yet as we have seen, ‘Whites’ were not always and necessarily fated to dominate.
The apparent coherence of racism gives way before such evidence, which, while
necessarily brief here, highlights the mutable configurations, crosscutting constituencies
and contingent authorities out of which social relations are made.
Similarly unsettling of dualistic race readings are the distinctions of class, gender,
ethnicity, generation, language and so on that pluralized Chinatown as deeply as they did
White Vancouver. If the likes of Charlie Ting became, for a time, an ally of White women
in Vancouver, those of his class may have been less ‘honourable’ in the eyes of the Chinese
rank and file workers of the enclave economy in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Many scholars
have identified a socioeconomic pyramid in the district, at the apex of which stood a tiny
minority of men of capital who were some of the wealthiest individuals in early
Vancouver (Wickberg et al. 1982; Yee 1988). The liability implied by the racial category
‘Chinese’ may well have been the asset of certain merchants who in Chinatown had a
vulnerable and captive labour force at their disposal. This bloc of workers, unprotected by
White unions, often laboured under punitive contracts for their Chinese bosses. There
were also many unpaid workers, including women, who worked long hours sewing
buttonholes and doing much of the handwork for Chinese tailors (see Adilman 1984). The
experience of those workers was shaped by their subordinate status in an array of
dualities, not least of gender. The women prefigured today’s sweat-shop workers whose
notoriously exploited labour in other North American Chinatowns, such as New York
City, tells of ongoing class and gender antagonisms which have only recently prompted
agitation for reform on the part of Chinese women workers (Kwong, forthcoming).
Such gender-differentiated relations within the racialized category are erased by
characterizations of the universally subjugated ‘Chinese’. Not only do they suggest
208 KAY ANDERSON/
different racisms for different groups of ‘Chinese’ (see Satzewich 1989), they also lead us
to consider the possibility that other oppressions—quite apart from the relation that places
Whites in a deterministically antagonistic relationship to Chinese—might have been as
decisive in shaping their everyday experience. Not all the realities and aspirations of the
lives of Chinatown’s residents would have been exhausted by the fact of racial
subordination, as the growing number of fictionalized accounts by Chinese Canadian
writers of life in Vancouver are beginning to reveal (Chong 1994; Lee 1990).
CONCLUSION
This chapter has sought to confront the tensions raised for analysis by the intersection of
axes of socio-spatial inequality. I have sought to undo the privileging of racialized
positionings—European versus Chinese—by foregrounding the gendered meanings and
practices that at times reinforced, and at other times, disrupted those categorizations and
relations. In the poststructuralist spirit of a more ‘distrustful analysis’ (Bottomley 1991:
108) that eschews the search for unitary subjects and singular explanatory frameworks, I
have attempted to decentre the authorial paradigm of ‘European hegemony’ charted in my
own Vancouver’s Chinatown (1991). Without discrediting the case for racism’s force,
malleability and resilience in Canadian culture, or indulging a naive postmodern embrace
of endlessly infinite identities, I have here tried to demonstrate that the cultural field is
created and fractured by a range of social relations and subjectivities whose mappings
invite what Pratt (1993) has called a ‘restless story-telling’. By emphasizing the different
centres of cultural authority surrounding race, gender and sexuality, and the invariant
political alliances surrounding those idioms of identity and power, the chapter has sought
to disrupt modernist notions of undifferentiated subjects, root causes and fixed
trajectories. It follows that the Chinatown story-field might effectively be further opened
up to re-tellings from the vantage points of the district’s residents, themselves multiply
and fluidly positioned in relation to each other and the wider society.
13
DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK
Masculinity, metaphor and space
Matthew Sparke
[A] point that needs to be emphasized here is that certain spatial metaphors
are equally geographical and strategic, which is only natural given that
geography grew up in the shadow of the military…. Field evokes the
battlefield.
(The editors of the journal Hérodote, in Foucault 1980:69)
[O]ur relationship to the ‘field’ itself must be problematized; that is, we
must recognize that the field is constructed through power relations that
define academics and the people and places we study.
(Staeheli and Lawson 1994:97)
‘[T]he principal training of the geographer’, once declared Carl Sauer (1956: 296),
‘should come, wherever possible, by doing field work.’ Numerous other famous men in
the discipline have said the same. Moreover, as Gillian Rose has recently argued, they
have said so simultaneously lauding it as a tough and heroic activity, as ‘a particular kind
of masculine endeavor’ (1993:70). All the while work in the field has been sanctified as a
character-building rite of passage into a world described as real, the field itself has been
feminized, cast as a seductive but wild place that must be observed, penetrated and
mastered by the geographer who, having battled with it, revelled in it, and, in the end,
triumphantly risen above it, returns to the academy his education complete, his stature
assured and his geographical self proven, definitively, his. Such a sentence, though,
however lengthy, summarizes the masculinity of fieldwork rather too roughly. To be
sure, its exclusively masculine pronouns, heroes and assumptions are commonly
announced with authority by the father figures of geography. However, there are also
multiple, concrete examples of how its seminal logic has become disseminated, which is
to say, performed and thereby transformed by other, less manly, geographers.1 As Jennifer
Hyndman (1995) has argued, ‘many feminist and other geographers do fieldwork
precisely to critique, deconstruct and reconstruct a more responsible, if partial, account
of what is happening in the world’. There are, then, possibilities for renegotiating
fieldwork for the better, and my aim in this chapter is to trace the complex web of
practices and metaphors which, while consolidating the field as a site of masculinist work,
210 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
have begun nevertheless to be rearticulated as a politicized location for endeavours with
more emancipatory promise.
An apologist for traditional fieldwork might well dismiss my initial outline of a critique
by arguing that the metaphorization of the field as feminine proves nothing. In the first
section of the chapter I seek to address such criticisms by connecting my discussion with
some of the more general debates currently circulating about spatial metaphors. In
particular, I draw on writing by Cindi Katz (1993) and Neil Smith, who argue that spatial
metaphors become politically problematic when they introduce a fixed and fixing notion
of absolute space.2 Masculinist geographical imaginations of the field as a feminized,
separate and containable space, work with, or so I will argue, just such a de-historicized
conception of absolute space. It is also a conception which, to recall the argument of the
French geographers interviewing Foucault, owes a great deal to the strategic geo-politics
of the military. It evokes the battlefield; and, just as military conceptualizations of space
are connected directly with the violence of war, so too do masculinist formulations of the
field of fieldwork have quite literal implications.
Yet it would be ridiculous to assert that every plan for a field trip somehow amounts to
a virulent call to arms. Care is required in distinguishing between the overarching
dynamic of disciplinary violence and the heterogeneous ways through which different
fieldworkers renegotiate its influence. For this reason, the later sections of this chapter
move beyond the question of militarist cum masculinist metaphors in order to take up the
substantive task of problematization outlined by Staeheli and Lawson (1994). Their
suggestions, along with the other feminist discussions of fieldwork published in a special
methods section—‘Women in the Field’—of The Professional Geographer (46 (1):1994)
move the debate on to how to actually think and do research that avoids inflicting violence
on those who are researched. In doing so, they not only problematize the masculinism of
fieldwork, but simultaneously displace the meaning of the field itself.
Ultimately, the displacement of masculinism raises a question about the geographers
who generally find it easiest to take masculinity for granted: men, and, in particular,
straight men. For those like myself who would like to contribute to, rather than take
over, attack or otherwise oppose feminist work, it means at the very least more self-
reflexivity. More generally, I feel that the lessons of feminist critique demand of men a
willingness to read and discuss a whole range of critical work in a spirit of responsibility.
Learning from feminist work in this way means that self-reflexivity need not, indeed, must
not be limited to bold identitarian announcements of the ‘as a straight white man’ variety.
Such ‘as-a-ism’ seems only to provide a mantra of relief from the more detailed and
difficult task—the ‘perverse’ task, as Sandra Harding (1991) describes it—of examining
the complex contradictions constituting one’s positionality. Thus, in the final part of the
chapter I bring the questions introduced by feminist critique to the specific contradictions
involved in the conflicting ways masculinity and shared working experiences shaped my
own fieldwork interviews of temporary workers in Vancouver, BC.3 This, then, is not an
attempt to pretend that I can speak from a woman’s position—even if it could be so
singularly defined. Instead, my argument represents the situated knowledge of a man
interrogating the masculinity of fieldwork by turning to feminist work.
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 211
FROM THE FARAWAY AND FEY TO THE FIELD AS A SPACE OF
BETWEENNESS
Concluding her introduction to her book Technologies of Gender, Teresa de Lauretis
describes an arc of feminist critique that traces what she calls ‘a movement from the space
represented by/in a representation, by/in a discourse, by/in a sex gender system, to the
space not represented yet implied (unseen) in them’ (1987:26). De Lauretis’s more
specific focus is on the visual arts, but, in this first section of the chapter, I will argue that
the particular space of the field can also be traced through the same arc of representation
and implication. To begin with, I outline the dominant masculinist demarcation of a
feminized field. As a spatial concept-metaphor that has been shaped by/in worldly
practices, I argue that the field has become normalized as a disciplinary concept, and, as
such, has had world-constitutive effects. However, the way in which these effects have
depended on the particular practice of fieldworkers tracking between field and academy
has done more than serve as the adventurous stuff of manly myth-making. I shall suggest
that it has also been its undoing. As new and increasingly critical scholars have come to
retrace the back and forth route, they have brought into crisis the very distinctions—
between researcher and researched, the near and far, aesthetics and politics, scholarship
and practice, mind and body, masculine and feminine and so on—upon which it
historically rested. In doing so, they have rearticulated—in the double sense of both
‘rejoining’ and ‘repeating out loud’—a space of between-ness that was, I will argue,
precisely the space that was previously assumed but disavowed, ‘a space not represented
yet implied (unseen)’ within the older narratives of manly exploration.
The fielding of the field
In various Western discourses ‘field’ is associated with agriculture,
property, combat, and a ‘feminine’ place for ploughing, penetration,
exploration, and improvement. The notion that one’s empirical, practical
activity unfolds in such a space has been shared by naturalists, geologists,
archeologists, ethnographers, missionaries and military officers.
(Clifford 1990:65)
Clifford’s summary provides a useful starting point for a genealogy of the field.
Geographers too could clearly be added to his list of researchers sharing the space, and the
questions he asks of anthropology are for the same reason just as relevant to geography:
‘What commonalities and differences link the professional knowledges produced through
these “spatial practices”? What is excluded by the term “field”?’ (1990:65).
I will return to this metaphorical yet material notion of spatial practice shortly, but one
of the commonalities here is undoubtedly that of masculinity. The agent of action, whether
it be of War, of God or of Science is assumed to be Man. Woman can symbolically serve
as his helpmate, but it is he who proves and improves himself through a mastery of the
field. By way of a corollary, a possibility that is systematically excluded by these gendered
networks of power and knowledge is that of women acting as agents of knowledge.
212 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
Instead, they are repeatedly seen—and the visual verb is not coincidental4 —as just part of
the field. Fieldwork is in this way symptomatic of the more general disciplinary tendency
in geography described by Rose (1993:9), a tendency wherein femininity becomes the
Other, the space above which and against which geographers of reason define their
science, their art and, in these differing ways, their selves.
Considering the actual history of geography it is important to remember that
associations like those outlined by Clifford constitute more than just verbal or writerly
coincidences. Anna Skeels’s detailed historical examination of Sauer ‘in the field’ has
indicated that his own conceptualization of field education was as a certain rîte de passage into
manhood, a ‘formation of the fieldman from the “boys”’ (Skeels 1993:89). Reworking
such views, Richard Symanski’s (1974) notorious fieldwork into brothels in Nevada might
well have been an extreme and idiosyncratic example, but, as Barbara Rubin (1975)
pointed out in her critique at the time, it illustrated quite clearly the ways in which a
masculinist scholarly attitude had decisive consequences for the sexualizing of actual
research and the objectification of actual people. Likewise, when David Stoddart (1986:
esp. 143–57)—to retain one of Rose’s main examples—champions fieldwork as the hardy
stuff at the heart of the discipline, when he commends Sauer for his insistence on the
geographical gaze (1986:147), and when he connects all of this to his own attempts at
‘making sense of nature’ (1986:ix), he illustrates a continuum between thoughts, words
and deeds. It should be remembered, though, that these forms of flamboyantly unabashed
claim take place within a much wider network of social practices such as those alluded to
in Foucault’s interview with the geographers. Take as a particular moment of
condensation Stoddart’s plea to the discipline to have pride in the history of fieldwork as
‘a record of achievement at the farthest ends of the earth’. ‘Let us’, he opines,
salute with Conrad ‘men great in their endeavour and in hard-won successes of
militant geography; men who went forth each according to his lights and with
varied motives…but each bearing in his heart a spark of the sacred fire’.
(Stoddart 1986:157)
Here the associations noted by Clifford are articulated with grandiose aplomb.
Masculinity, militarism, imperialism and science all come explicitly together in a fantasy of
fieldwork in faraway lands. While, as Derek Gregory argues, their ‘modalities of power
lie beyond the compass of [Stoddart’s own] account’, ‘their main thrust’ remains
stridently, albeit nostalgically, clear (1994:32, 20). More than just the exploits of lone
men, then, it is within the burning context of what Conrad fetishized as ‘sacred fire’—
namely, within the violent masculinist discourses linking science, empire and exploration
—that traditional fieldwork has had its foundation and force. Stoddart’s heroic rhetoric
simply makes the connections more apparent.
The fact that the masculinity of fieldwork has been fashioned in the context of general,
indeed, imperial systems of knowledge production should warn against any personalist
attempt to ‘blame’ the masculinist construction of the field on especially flagrant
individuals. Given that the problem is more general than individual intentions, so too
must be the critique. As Rose (1993: esp. Ch. 4) indicates, the macho model of men
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 213
entering the field is also over-determined by the feminization of nature in science, and the
privileging of the knowledge of the masculine gaze. Insofar as geographers have inherited
a place in these traditions, they need to reconsider the masculinist and imperialist
arrogance of the discipline at large. It seems inadequate for a commentator like Denis
Cosgrove to simply poke fun at what he calls the ‘hairy-chested feats of scholarly
endurance’ (1993:516) advocated by those seeking disciplinary redemption in fieldwork.
In this case, the writers he is responding to had argued for a form of field stamina
involving ‘not merely physical exertion but also the intellectual discipline that comes from
engaging in ethnographic research…in non-English-speaking settings’ (Price and Lewis
1993:9). Against this type of claim, a more adequate critique would have had to address
the overdetermined masculinist and Anglo-centric production of neo-colonial ‘intellectual
discipline’ itself. Perhaps eulogies to fieldwork at ‘the farthest ends of the earth’ do
sometimes express a ‘muscular disdain for the fey and metropolitan’ (Cosgrove 1993:
516). But coming from Cosgrove, a man who elsewhere affirms an ‘epicurean relish for what
Stoddart calls “lands of delight”’ (Cosgrove and Daniels 1989:179), the criticisms appear
rather superficial. The point surely is that whether it is done with muddy boots or
intellectual discipline or both, whether as a ‘recording science’ or ‘performing art’ (1989:
171) or both, fieldwork remains imbricated within masculinist modalities of power. These
may, as Rose (1993: esp. Chs 2, 3) suggests, be understood as different genres of
masculinity, some scientistic and others aesthetic,5 but the construction of the field as
either faraway or fey remains nonetheless the construction of an Other: the field as
something to be looked at from above, to be struggled with and enjoyed on the ground,
and always, in the end, mastered.
The systematicity of it all means that breaking away from a masculinist approach to
fieldwork is often easier said than done. Cosgrove might be argued to come closer when
he and Daniels (1989:179) note how relevant ‘the metaphor of the mirror’ is for
describing the performance of fieldwork. However, the notion of the field functioning as
masculine geography’s self-consolidating, speculative Other is still left unexamined by the
two men. Instead, the metaphor of the mirror becomes for them ‘congenial’ not critical,
and thus ultimately appears, in David Matless’s words, ‘curiously conservative’ (1989:
182). In anthropology too, the difficulty which men seem to have of problematizing the
masculinity of fieldwork is also clear. Paul Rabinow, for example, in a book that
otherwise problematizes so much, fails to deal at all critically with the masculinity of his
fieldwork in Morocco (Rabinow 1977). Instead, in a section of the book that relates a
growing intimacy with the place, and a growing rapport with a male informant and his
‘roguish circle’ (1977: 61), he writes what might well be called a narrative of
penetration, culminating in his having sex with a so-called ‘Berber girl’ (1977:69). If it
were possible —which I do not think it is—to disconnect what happened in this instance
from what continues to happen, no doubt sometimes violently, to young women around
the world in the context of white, male fieldwork, the section could at least be read like
the rest of the book as a usefully frank discussion of the feelings of the anthropologist. But
even as such, the feelings are not problematized as masculine feelings, and there is no
effort made by Rabinow to examine the event as a practical embodiment of the more
general power relations privileging a white American man entering, studying and, in his
214 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
own words, having ‘sensual interaction’ (1977:65) with the objectified Moroccan
landscape.
A factor that emerges as a defining characteristic of masculinist framings of the field is
the capacity assumed unquestionably by the fieldworker to be able to leave. Very few of
the people who are researched are ever able to even pretend to do the same. Their
reflections on fieldwork are rarely written down, let alone circulated through the
academy. Meanwhile, as the people and places visited by the likes of Rabinow, Stoddart
and Symanski are fast transformed into mute objects before an assimilative academic gaze,
the fieldworkers themselves become ensconced in the academy with all the authority due
to scholars who have braved the field and returned. In this sense, the double movement of
going There only to come back Here constitutes the elemental spatial practice, the primal
fort/da,6 at the very core of masculinist fieldwork authority.7 In the next section, I
examine how this spatial practice is itself secured through a masculinist metaphorization
of the space of the field.
The field of masculinist in-fluence
The trope of space must be consciously analyzed in order to evaluate its in-
fluence.
(Kirby 1993:188)
In order to understand how the spatial metaphor of the field is caught up in the
construction of a fieldworker’s authority it is necessary to consider what Katz and Smith
(1993:68) refer to as ‘the interconnectedness of material and metaphorical space.’ This
interconnectedness is important to remember not only because it opens the question of
how spatial metaphors such as the field come to shape social life, but also because it serves
as a caution against any interested attempt to fix where metaphoricity ends and
conceptualizations of materiality begin.8 As Dominick LaCapra’s (1980) deconstruction of
Ricoeur’s work shows, there is an implicit violence done in any such theoretical project to
legislate the meaning and scope of metaphor once and for all.9 As an alternative it is
possible to take Derrida’s own approach and consider how the interrelating flux of
metaphors and concepts is abbreviated through philosophically or, as in the present case,
politically interested moments of closure (Derrida 1982). Elsewhere I have described how
this process of enclosure can effectively dehistoricize, homogenize and contain the reference
of spatial names and metaphors so as to produce what I called anemic geographies (Sparke
1994b). Here, the case of the masculinist field presents another anemic geography.
However, in contrast, for example, to the racist metaphorization of Africa as ‘Dark
Continent’ critiqued by Lucy Jarosz (1992), it is one which takes place at a more personal
and yet generalized scale. It privileges the individual fieldworker by securing the field
wherever and whatever it is as separate and contained. It is this specific moment of closure
that needs to be examined in terms of the irretrievably entwined relations of ‘material and
metaphorical’ space.
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 215
Katz and Smith (1993:75) argue that ‘[s]patial metaphors are problematic in so far as
they presume that space is not’. They go on to outline how this form of presumption
becomes possible when space is conceived along the geometric lines of what they call
absolute space (see note 2). It is a conception that effectively makes space seem
unproblematic by reifying it, removing it from the dynamics of its historical production,
and naturalizing it as a timeless and measurable given. I think it is precisely this same
absolutist way of imagining space upon which the fixing of the field is predicated. Pinned
to the depthless horizon of absolute space the field can easily be presented as an
unproblematic domain lying outside the academy, a space, then, that dissembles its own
complex and all too academic production. As such, the presentation of the field draws on
a tradition in which space is seen after Euclid and Descartes as ‘geometrically divisible into
discrete bits’ (Katz and Smith 1993:75). To borrow a definition from Martin Jay, ‘as [a]
spatial metaphor…[the] field [thus] tacitly assumes a synchronic entity to be surveyed or
mapped as a structural or relational gestalt’ (Jay 1990:312).
For Katz and Smith the connection between the field and the problematic of
absolutization is clear. The one serves as a metaphor for the other. Absolute space, they
say, ‘refers to a conception of space as a field, container, a coordinate system of discrete
and mutually exclusive locations’ (1993:75). However, this raises the question of why the
field should provide such an amenable example of absolute space. How has its fixity and
finitude endured through all the turbulence of fieldwork over the years? Two closely
connected reasons are, I think, quite clear. The first concerns the sexuality of vision, and
the second, the hegemonic ways in which modern Western thought has made the world
seem picturable in the first place.
The field has been able to share and lock into the compartmentalization implicit in the
logos of absolutized space by serving simultaneously as the feminized object of the
masculine gaze, and the pictured place of communion with the actual and factual (see
Rose 1993: esp. Ch. 4). This sort of place of communion has itself been established, or as
Timothy Mitchell (1988) has put it, ‘enframed’ through an episteme of Cartesian
dualisms. Like the mental versus material ‘everyday metaphors of power’ Mitchell seeks to
displace, the no less powerful academy versus field dualism is thus supported by the
hegemony in Western thinking of distinctions between meaning and reality, structure and
practice, mind and body (Mitchell 1990). Coming together with the masculinism of the
academy and the feminization of the field, these dualisms enable the ongoing
compartmentalization of the field as a disciplinary version of what Elizabeth Grosz (1990)
has called a ‘body-map’.10 Such a corporeal cartography would seem in this case to be
coordinated so as to demarcate, contain and thereby incorporate all that the masculine
disavows. As a result of such corseting, the field’s meaning becomes encased, even, one
might say, incarcerated. Seemingly barred from metaphorical movement, it is
consolidated more as a concept, a durable, everyday and taken-for-granted embodiment of
absolute space. And it is through this quotidian hegemony that it has functioned again and
again to guarantee a place to which researchers can go secure in the knowledge that they
will always be able to leave.
The comings and goings from a feminized field of masculinist work can now be better
understood as a spatial practice coordinated through a spatial metaphor turned absolute,
216 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
routinized concept. As such they have quite literal implications: ‘dead literal’ to use Donna
Haraway’s more poignant words (1989:58). The examples of Symanski’s studies,
Stoddart’s rhetoric and Rabinow’s reflections provide only a limited indication of this, but
Haraway’s own incredibly detailed critique of primatology shows just how violent, even
lethal, masculinist constructions of the field can be. An essay, for example, which follows
Carl Akeley into the field documents exactly the destructive intersection of manly
adventure with science and art in self-styled heroic work that aimed with both gun and
camera to master the field of African nature (Haraway 1989:26–58).11 However,
Haraway does not leave the story there, and while much of the rest of the book examines
the racism, anthropocentrism and familial-sadism structuring primate studies, her final
section opens the possibility of feminist renegotiation with a subtitle that speaks of
primatology as a ‘Genre of feminist theory’ (1989:278–383; see also Haraway 1991b). It
is this same possibility for renegotiation that I seek to highlight next as I turn to the work
of feminist geographers. As Heidi Nast suggests in her introduction to the ‘Women in the
Field’ papers, this work can evoke a very different field, one that ‘is not naturalized in
terms of “a place” or “a people”; [but] rather…located and defined in terms of specific
political objectives’ (Nast 1994:57). (Re)placing the field of fieldwork within such a
politics of location does indeed seem to promise what Haraway (1989:288) calls ‘the
possibility of new stories not strangled by the same logics of appropriation and
domination’. As feminist research that is still empirically grounded, it also highlights how
‘the intervention must work from within, constrained and enabled by the fields of power
and knowledge that make discourse eminently material’ (1989:288).
Rearticulating the blasphemy of between-ness In fieldwork
Under contemporary conditions of globalization and post-positivist thought
in the social sciences, we are always already in the field— multiply
positioned actors, aware of the partiality of all our stories and the artifice of
the boundaries drawn in order to tell them.
(Katz 1994:66)
To paraphrase de Lauretis (1987), my argument thus far has suggested the following: that
the traditional space of the field has been presented by/in specific disciplinary systems of
representation—call them scientific data retrieval and interpretative observation; that
these have been upheld by/in an organization of power and knowledge comprising a back
and forth spatial practice of masterful study—call it ‘going there’, ‘being there’ and
‘leaving’; and that this form of spatial practice has been fashioned by/in a system of sex-
gender—call it heroic masculinism. Following de Lauretis, the critical move that needs
now to be made is one that asks what spaces are assumed but yet disavowed through this
formulation of the field. If the absolutization of space enables the field to be assumed as
securely distant and contained, what ‘active and stirring’ spatial relations are concealed
beneath such a projective palimpsest? What is the spatiality ‘not represented yet implied
(unseen)’ by the masculinist fielding of the field (Derrida 1982:213)?12
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 217
Critics such as Katz have already engaged in exactly this form of questioning. Insisting, in
her words, on how ‘we are situated and bear responsibility for interrogating our
positionings’ (1992:504), they have moved away from the Olympian high ground of
objectification and Cartesian distinction. Instead, by drawing attention to subjects that
previously went neglected, they have highlighted the geographies of power that, in the
words of Staeheli and Lawson, ‘define academics and the people and places we study’
(1994: 97). This is a radical problematization of the field. Rearticulating what the
absolutization of space previously kept apart—and thereby intangible, inaudible and
unexamined—feminist critique has displaced the dualism of field and academy, replacing
it with the more grounded yet dynamic notion of fieldworking in what Kim England calls
‘the world between ourselves and the researched’ (1994:86). This is not, she notes, the
same as conducting fieldwork ‘on the unmediated world of the researched’ (1994:86).
Nor is it another reincarceration of the field as radically Other. Instead, it is a repetition
of fieldwork with a difference, a form of blasphemous empiricism that admits to subject
positions and, hence, research positions constituted materially and interpersonally in what
Katz rearticulates as ‘spaces of betweeness’ (1994:72).
By describing the attention to interpersonal positioning in feminist fieldwork as
blasphemous I mean to invoke the same ironic mix of fidelity and dissent made manifest
by Haraway. Such blasphemy, she says, ‘has always seemed to require taking things
seriously’, but it also ‘protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on
the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy’ (1991c:149). Feminist empiricism
seems blasphemous in much the same way.13 Frequently dissenting from high theory—
both masculinist and feminist—it has had what Linda McDowell (1993) describes as a
long and subversive history within geography. Faithful to the responsibility of
representation through fieldwork, and insistent on the need for rigorous research that
makes a difference for communities, it has also nevertheless blasphemed against the rules
and rites of what to study, how, when and where. Pam Moss (1993), for example,
describes how it has stressed qualitative over quantitative approaches, and, as Isabel Dyck
(1993) underlines, this same stress on the knowledge produced through intersubjective
communication has brought with it a dissenting reflexivity towards the gendering of
research itself. It is this blasphemous empiricism that also provides a vital backcloth
against which to discuss a point of seeming contradiction addressed in a footnote by Rose.
In the footnote in question Rose writes: ‘I am not suggesting that women cannot
undertake fieldwork only that its dominant style is a tough masculinity’ (1993:181). One
way, perhaps, of thinking about the blasphemy of feminist fieldwork, is that it constitutes
a critical renegotiation of this same tough masculinist style. Rearticulating what the style
and accompanying spatial practice kept apart, the blasphemers raise complex questions
about the relations of power linking the traditionally secluded spaces of academic life and
fieldwork research. They respect what Clare Madge describes as the ‘need to consider the
role of the researcher in the research process’ and, in doing so, bring about a ‘boundary
dispute’ (1993:296), a radical interrogation of the limits of the field. It is therefore a
renegotiation that, far from abandoning the field, works instead by remembering
geographers’ ongoing positioning in between multiple overlapping fields. Katz’s
argument, ‘I am always, everywhere, in “the field”’ condenses this testimony to what before
218 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
was only ever ‘implied (unseen)’ (1994:72), and, for the same reason, presents probably
the greatest possible blasphemy against the stylized, fort/da, spatial rituals of heroic
fieldwork.
That they constitute blasphemy might also account for why reflexive statements about
fieldwork and the academy have so rarely been uttered by male geographers. Certainly,
when they have, the guardians of the sacred fire have descended. Allan Pred, for example,
made what could well be read as a departure from the dominant penetrative model when
he noted that:
the distinction made between ‘fieldwork’ and other more everyday observations
and experiences is but one manifestation of a general unwillingness to accept the
fact that our ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ lives are not in dichotomous
opposition to one another, but dialectically interrelated.
(Pred 1984:91–2)14
This was clearly blasphemy for Stoddart: writing by which, he reports, he was not much
enlightened; an argument deserving only of derision, not profound, not physical, and,
presumably, not tough enough (1986:147).15 Against this backcloth, then, the
blasphemous achievement of the feminist methods papers in The Professional Geographer
becomes clearer.
It may at the outset have seemed strange for me to turn to the example of the ‘Women
in the Field’ essays as an example of feminist renegotiation with masculinist fieldwork.
The critical attention of the authors is not turned directly towards the question of
masculinity and, empirically, men and their immediate affairs are—in a rare move for
professional geography—marginalized. Instead, England (1994) attends to the dangers of
doing research as a straight woman about lesbian life in Toronto; Melissa Gilbert (1994)
analyses her position of privilege in relation to the low-waged women she interviewed in
Worcester, Massachusetts; Katz (1994) critically connects her work with children in rural
Sudan and East Harlem, so as to ground her argument about the continuities of the field in
the context of globalization; and Audrey Kobayashi (1994) discusses the ‘coloring of the
field’, bringing attention to the dangers of ethnographic authority rooted in ethnicist or
otherwise essentialist absolutism.
As Nast suggests in her introduction, the writers thus go beyond the literalist and, as
such, exclusive textualism that has limited recent attempts at ethnographic reflexivity by a
number of men in anthropology.16 In contrast to some of these privileged performances
of polyphony, the papers more immediately concern the politics of women doing
fieldwork, and the problems facing feminist solidarity in the context of a racist,
heteropatriarchal and capitalist society. However, it is in this very practical attention to
the dangers of epistemic violence and appropriation that the writers make what I think is
their most blasphemous break with masculinist fieldwork. Faithful to the project of
research, they nevertheless put its gaze, its appropriative arrogance and its limits under
critical vigil. Rather than claiming Olympian vision, they situate themselves as women
within the relations of dominance through which they are privileged as fieldworkers. And,
in doing so, they turn a contradictory position of being fieldworkers and feminists in
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 219
geography—a position, to use McDowell’s (1992) phrase, both ‘inside and outside “the
project”’17—into a politicized location for critique. Overall, then, as Staeheli and Lawson
put it, ‘these authors question the boundaries of “the field”’ (1994:97), and as they do so
the whole reified map demarcating and separating field from academy comes to life, the
spaces divided by its boundary-drawing becoming rearticulated in the blasphemous
between-ness of interpersonal debate.
I do not want to romanticize or homogenize the interventions represented by the
‘Women in the Field’ papers. They introduce a range of different approaches, and while,
for example, Kobayashi, insists on how there is ‘more to gain from building commonality
than from essentializing difference’ (1994: 76), Gilbert, by contrast, provides a host of
sobering reminders of just how difficult seeking such commonality can be. Nevertheless,
there is a shared blasphemous impulse in the papers, and it is this—most especially, their
attention to the partiality of situated knowledge, and their rearticulation of field and
academy—that I would like to bring to a re-examination of my own fieldwork in
Vancouver.
OF FIELDWORK, TEMPING AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF
POSITIONALITY
We do not seek partiality for its own sake, but for the sake of the connections
and the unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible.
(Haraway 199 1a:196)
Like a number of feminist scholars whose research projects have stemmed from an attempt
to come to terms with dynamics affecting their own lives (see Kobayashi 1994; Moss
1994), my research into temping had its roots in my own experience working as a temp while
I was an undergraduate in England.18 Given an unshackled notion of the field, this very
experience effectively served as my first round of fieldwork in the industry. ‘Experience’,
though, is an easily abused category, and I do not mean to infer here that my work as a
temp went on to guarantee an instant rapport with the temps I interviewed in my
fieldwork in Vancouver. Turning experience into an origin for ethnographic authority in
such ways leads directly to the dangers of identitarian absolutism critiqued by Kobayashi
(1994).19 Experience is inadequate as an origin of explanation, and, instead, as Joan Scott
has suggested, it is more usefully understood as ‘that which we want to explain’ (1992:
38). It was in just this sense, then, that I began the research on the temping industry in
order to come to terms with my own earlier experiences. Ironically, however, in doing
the fieldwork, I found myself involved in new experiences that sometimes repeated some
of the same contradictions that had shaped my time as a temp. Not least of these was my
position as a man—first as a worker and then as a fieldworker—in an industry that
predominantly employs women. It is to these contradictions that I would next like to turn
after a few comments about the limits of academic male reflexivity.
220 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
The problem of male self-reflexivity
This is already as McDowell (1992:56) notes, ‘a profoundly self-reflexive moment in human
geography’, and perhaps it is more productive now to distinguish between different types
of self-reflexivity. Although my aim in what follows is to follow the example of self-
situating commentary presented by the ‘Women in the Field’ writers, my position as a
man makes a difference. When men turn self-reflexive problems arise. As a form of
gender-alert self-examination such work may halt men’s abdication from what Elspeth
Probyn (1993:47) calls ‘the responsibility of speaking their own bodies’, and, for this
reason, it may also thwart the tendentious but common practice of associating ‘gender
issues’ solely with women. But, as Probyn also indicates, the straight, white and
propertied male voice has for a long time been the only voice allowed to wax
autobiographical—even if it did so transcendentally. Contemporary attempts at self-
reflexivity from such privileged positions, however well-intentioned, still carry with them
something of this history of hegemony, and one of the results tends to be a moralizing
mixture of introverted angst and anger. ‘[This] self-critical mode of reflection’, says Julia
Emberly,
often manifests the worst attributes of the Christian moral imagination. A religious
rhetoric of fear, guilt, redemption and absolution emerges. A narcissistic return to
self-centering lurks on the horizon. The male investigating subject, having been
confronted with feminist politics, sees himself as a sacrificial son, a symbol of
atonement for the original sin of patriarchy, the rule of the father.
(1993:85)
I find this critique particularly pertinent to the positions of men like myself whose
experiences have been basically heterosexual. As I proceed in what follows to try and turn
my position as a ‘participant-observer’ into that of an ‘observed participant’, I want to
avoid the confessional logic Emberly highlights as much as possible. In particular, it seems
vital to remember that redemption and absolution do not lie around the corner, and that,
instead, auto-critique needs to be persistent, constantly problematizing the moments in
which interpretations others might make are marginalized through a return to maudlin,
men’s-movement type self-centring.20
Between fieldwork on temping and temping as fieldwork
Some of the experiences I had as a temp had less to do with gender and were more related
to economic processes. Although, of course, class and gender remain inextricably related,
some of the situations I faced—such as the struggles over pay-rates, and my inability to
get assignments because ‘things were slow’ after the 1987 Stock Market crash—served
better as indicators of class processes, and, as such, when suitably contextualized,
crystallized a broader pattern of economic vulnerability (see Sparke 1994c). By contrast,
my more obvious experiences of gendering in the industry called for explanations that could
come to terms with what, paradoxically, they did not embody. Being a man makes a
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 221
significant difference in temping. For one thing, I was commonly sent out on
unconventional, masculine-coded assignments, like the jobs I did driving a bulldozer and a
fork-lift truck. But more than this, even when I was doing secretarial, filing and telephone-
answering work, I had experiences which, if they illustrated anything, it was more as
exceptions that proved the rule: in this case, the rule of the patriarchal relations that
feminize temping as trivial but necessary office house-keeping.21 Unlike many temps, I
was not so quickly marginalized because as a man and a student I had what was treated as
extra curiosity value. Likewise, when I answered the telephone with a male voice callers
often took me for the manager. Add to these assumptive dynamics the fact that as a young
single student I did not experience the same heavy economic burdens that weigh down on
the will to resist of many women who temp, and it all made for a different and privileged
experience of life in the industry.
When it came to my fieldwork in Vancouver the same differences became more
problematic. While I wanted to come to terms with the gendered dynamics of temping
that had conditioned my own experience, and while my research was sensitized by a series
of questions stemming from feminist scholarship, I was still basically positioned as a man
‘going into the field’ to interview women. However much I sought to eschew the
traditional enframing of the field, I was still in a situation where it was difficult to
articulate a space of between-ness in which my interviews might be experienced as
something more useful than the customary mix of invasion and appropriation. I had
wanted, for example, to follow the format of long personal interviews that had
characterized Rosemary Pringle’s (1988) tremendous study of and with secretaries in
Australia. However, as I introduced similar questions about feelings and the gendering of
work in my own interviews, how were the temps I was interviewing to know that my
project was not motivated instead by a prurient, peep-show type patriarchy?
Even before the interviews began the way in which my research was implicated in the
male researcher/female subject structure had effects. When I rang up someone who
agreed to do an interview we had to work out a place and a time that would be
convenient. Sometimes this led to talk about good and bad cafes and malls, or about the
length of lunch hours and the working day. Subsequently, we usually described what we
would be wearing or carrying. Especially with younger women who did not know me,
this set of exchanges sometimes made me feel that it was all a little like a blind date, and I
definitely did not want the women themselves to be obliged to negotiate that implication.
However, my efforts to allay potential fears of this kind were themselves not
unproblematic, and my occasional attempts to say something like, ‘I know this sounds a
bit like a date, but really, please don’t think that’s what I’m trying to set up’, ironically
mimicked, however awkwardly, the patronizing remarks temps often hear as secretaries
from bosses. Both circumstances involve a denial of women’s abilities to make their own
interpretations and decisions.
In another instance, the questions of gendered research became still more explicit
during the course of an interview with a young woman whom I will call Karen Edwards.
The interview was in the coffee-bar at the Vancouver Art Gallery on a Saturday lunch-
time and did not begin before a rather confusing 10 minutes of walking past one another.
222 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
Karen’s sister had also come along, and so, having sat down opposite both of them, I
began to ask some preliminary questions.
Matthew: So how long have you actually temped now?
Karen: Since the beginning of January—so about three months.
Karen’s sister: Can I just ask a question?
Matthew: Yeah, sure.
Karen’s sister: Why…—uh well there’s nothing wrong with this, but couldn’t you guys
have done this on the telephone?
Matthew: Well, yes and no. I mean, like yes we could have done, but later on I want
to talk more about feelings, like about how one feels about work, the way
you’re treated and positioned by people and stuff like that.
Karen: So you need to get facial gestures and things.
Matthew: Well yeah—and like on the phone, I’ve tried it and it’s really weird—
people give you a quick answer like ‘No that never happened’, or, ‘Yes it’s
OK.’
(Laughing)
Karen’s sister: Just wondering.
Matthew: So yeah, it’s not my way of trying to get dates, right—that’s not what I’m
doing. (More laughing)
Karen’s sister: I didn’t want to say it like that. It just made me, well [laughing] think.
Karen: Well it’s a good way to meet people in a new country I guess.
Matthew: Yeah right… So—anyway—what kinds of jobs have you actually been
doing on assignments?
It seemed to me that Karen’s sister initially felt that the interview, with its awkward
beginning and simple start-off questions, looked like a rather duplicitous attempt on my
part to arrange something like—‘there’s nothing wrong with this’—a date. She told me
that she had come along because they were both going shopping across the road at Eatons,
but I think the reasons why an older woman might accompany her younger sister to an
‘interview’ with an anonymous man also relate directly to very real fears about safety.
Karen, herself, with a number of other phrases like ‘so you need to get facial gestures’,
seemed to have wanted to preserve the idea that the interview was properly ‘academic’.
Yet, she was not at all perturbed by the possibility of its ulterior function as a way of meeting
people. Indeed, putting her two ways of articulating my position together appeared—I
think—to recreate quite well a picture of me as an academic male tourist: a late twentieth-
century version of the Englishman abroad on his grand tour of educational improvement.
Another problematic dynamic exemplified by the interview with Karen, and, indeed,
by the preceding discussion of it, concerns the politics of interpretation. It was, after all,
my own reading from my own position that led me to bring up the dating scenario in the
first place. Likewise, I have here only presented my own view—another objectifying verb
for knowledge—of what I thought Karen and her sister were thinking. One further way
of illustrating how my own position was shaping my interpretations became obvious in
earlier versions of this chapter itself. In it I had discussed the laughing that was part of the
exchange, and had commented on how I thought my two interlocutors might have been
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 223
thinking that the whole event was a bit of joke. However, as one of my feminist
colleagues pointed out, this was a notably masculine reading of the laughing. Instead, she
suggested that, from her perspective, it could equally be read as the laughing of women
dealing with feelings of anxiety. Clearly the differences in these interpretations highlight
the specificity of my own reading. As such they also point up the more
general possibilities of exclusion and violence that my own representations of my research
—like those of any other scholar—impose on the researched.
The dynamics of gender, or at least the more awkward, problematic and potentially
oppressive aspects of gender relations, did not always become so thematic in my
fieldwork. When I was talking to older women, for example, my ‘Englishman abroad’
position was subject to quite different readings and feelings. Apart from talking about the
poor availability of Marmite in Vancouver or decent coffee in England, we often
compared notes on the differences between the organization of temping in Canada and the
UK. Not only was this valuable for my research—introducing such issues as overtime
rules and the way agencies dodge providing holiday pay by cancelling assignments over
national holidays—it also brought attention to common class experiences, shared by us both
as men and women workers in workplaces globally homogenized through international
capitalism. In other words, it exemplified for me what Haraway (1991a) describes as ‘the
unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible’.
Perhaps the most unexpected of openings and the most developed articulation of
between-ness in my fieldwork overall, however, was the way in which temps themselves
described how they felt that they engaged in a form of fieldwork as temps. Constantly
tracking back and forth from the rest of their lives to a job, and then to another job, and
then another, temps move through the ‘dialectic of experience and interpretation’ that
Clifford (1988:34) describes as a defining feature of participant observation. However,
unlike academic fieldworkers who assume a capacity to leave the field, temps’ movements
are ordered quite directly by capitalist economics. There is certainly little academic
idealism driving this process along, no neo-colonial will-to-knowledge and no great sense
of agency, but rather the much more practical need of working to earn money to live. As
they move from office to office they cannot help but see and feel the differences and
similarities. Moreover, temping is in this sense a form of participant observation with the
emphasis heavily placed upon participation. There is none of the voyeuristic privilege that
comes from the academic’s material well-being resting on the ‘interpretation’ side of the
dialectic. Temps have instead to participate with a will, they have to ‘go native’ in the new
office as fast as possible. The following quotation from an older woman I interviewed was
a typical ethnography of arrival, and a sensitive piece of fieldwork to boot.
Normally I ask: How do you wish to have the phone answered? Who have I got?
Who are the names and where are the numbers? And normally it’s: Oh no, sorry we
don’t have a list, or so and so do you have a list, and so and so never does. And
usually the desk, if you get a desk, isn’t stocked, there’s no paper, you have to ask.
I’ve never been told, well here is the copy room, here is the fax room, here is the
mail room. All it would need is a little map or something. And this is what
happens. And you have to find it all out yourself. And if you ask any questions,
224 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
you’re no damn good. You’ve got four hours to make your mark before you’re
pulled off or left on the job. You ask too many questions it shows you’re
incompetent.
Going through such arrival routines on a regular basis, temps experience the power
relations of the hegemonic and routine, and in doing so they become knowledgeable
about hegemony. The possibility of such knowledge production may even be read into the
sorts of facile encouragement dished out in agency magazines. For instance, Kelly’s
Workstyle™ pamphlet, offering ‘tips from Kelly Services® for managing your work and
life style’, used as a quote of the month an insight of Eleanor Roosevelt’s: ‘You gain
strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look
fear in the face.’ It should be emphasized, though, that such fear can be very real for
temps, and, unlike the academic fieldworker who might, like Geertz (1973:7), be
urbanely exercised by the problem of distinguishing wink from faked wink, temps are
obliged to interpret such cultural distinctions in a context where they are far more closely
felt and sometimes quite sexually threatening. One interviewee assessed a typical
patriarchal pattern as follows.
First day in the office all the men come by with some precarious question. There’s
often this really silly need for them to comment on the way you look—‘You look
very professional’, ‘You look very nice’—and you have to get through all this stuff
and still look professional. But I think the problem is not so much the compliment
but the system of expectations you have to work out quickly.
There were many similar observations I recorded during my fieldwork, but the point I
hope is already clear: temps too are agents of knowledge and interpretation. Far from
being stationary others, their movements as supplementary workers afford them a
position as producers of supplementary and, as such, potentially disruptive information.
They see how the conventional is organized, varyingly and yet repeatedly, and in doing so
they also see that it is not universal, something that is produced and which need not
therefore be necessarily taken for granted. These are some of the classic characteristics of
doing comparative fieldwork. But the differences distinguishing temping from
professional academic fieldwork also need to be noted. Not only do temps experience the
strangeness of the field in more oppressive ways, they also have few of the resources
granted academics. As was noted by the temp commenting on arrival routines, they are
rarely given a map before they set out, and the chance of meeting an informant tends to be
foreclosed by the routinized discipline of most modern offices.22 Moreover, temps who
don’t go on to become academic fieldworkers are rarely able to have their ethnographic
observations listened to, let alone read in scholarly texts. Indeed, for them accruing the
knowledge without anyone particularly wanting to hear it can become a practical problem.
‘It’s one of the reasons I’m glad I’m not a temp anymore’, said one of my interviewees.
You always have to forget. Like when you get to an office and have to learn everything
in 10 minutes. I filled up my head with so much garbage that way, that I had to
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 225
train myself to forget everything. And then, of course, when I got good at forgetting,
I got those dumb recalls asking for me to go back because ‘she knows our routine’.
And then, of course, by that stage I’d normally got it right out of my mind.
It was in the hope of listening and giving voice to people who are in this way obliged to
learn only to forget and then learn again that I set out to record their observations and
feelings. This led to some very detailed accounts of the industry which I found invaluable
in my own research into its gendering and political-economy. Moreover, like England
(1994:85) in her earlier work, I was told by many of those that I interviewed ‘that they
found the exercise quite cathartic’, allowing them to verbalize things that no one else had
ever really wanted to hear. At same time, however, and also like England, I was mindful
of how this did not prevent my interviews from also becoming moments of
misappropriation, appropriation turned politically damaging, even oppressive.
Particularly in exchanges like the one with Karen and her sister, I became aware of how my
argument about giving back through listening could become little more than a
rationalization for a patronizing form of business as usual. For this reason, I fully concur with
feminist critics such as Gilbert (1994) who argue that attempts to meaningfully articulate
and extend a space of between-ness are severely limited.
A CONCLUSION
[F]ield and home are dependent, not mutually exclusive, terms, and… the
lines between fieldwork and homework are not always distinct. … Home
once interrogated is a place we have never before been.
(Visweswaran 1994:113)
Against the logic of the confession, I do not want to end on a note of self-critical despair.
While some of the masculinist framings of the field are not easily displaced, their
renegotiation remains a possibility even for men. At a practical level, for example, I
would another time organize my interviews quite differently by enlisting the assistance
(paid assistance preferably) of women colleagues. Even if it was just in the setting up of
interviews, such help might allay the potential fears of would-be interviewees. Similarly, I
would also in the future want to organize a more collaborative, focus group form of
research that could also serve as the basis for getting temps together. More generally,
though, it seems sanguine, even arrogant, to hope for immediate political and
organizational advances through such refashioned fieldwork alone. Such aspirations would
appear, in fact, to begin to forget how the notion of between-ness opens the possibility of
multiple spaces for social change, some of which might be discontinuous from the
research if not from the arguments to which its findings can contribute. They thus risk
absolutizing the so-called space of between-ness as some form of reified ‘Third Space’,
turning it too into a fixed and fetishized foundation that simply consolidates academic
authority through another anemic geography. For the same reason it seems critical to heed
Visweswaran’s (1994:102) warning that: ‘[r]ecent proclamations that “the field is
226 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
everywhere,” even when coupled with critiques of fieldwork, do little to unsettle the
epistemological weight fieldwork signifies [within academic disciplines].’ It is vital,
therefore, to underline how scholars like Katz began their rearticulation of between-ness,
not just by linking it with reflexivity about the situations of academics, but also with the
call for ‘strategic displacements that merge our scholarship with a clear politics that works
against the forces of oppression’ (1994:67). As Damaris Rose notes, ‘[i]t is important not
to lose sight of this activist goal as the study of “gender issues” becomes more accepted
into the mainstream of academic disciplines such as geography’ (Rose 1993:58). So far,
though, my own direct activism around temping has been limited to a few gestures of
solidarity with temps and a public employees union.
Here, nonetheless, is a point where a dynamic understanding of the space of between-
ness also points beyond the crippling either/or of guilt or revolution. Remembering our
always already embeddedness in between multiple overlapping fields can also function to
continually remind us of how academic freedom brings with it what Spivak (1992:7) calls
‘the freedom to acknowledge insertion into responsibility’. Located between fieldwork
and the academy we are persistently obliged to acknowledge such responsibility in
freedom. It is for this reason a responsibility that will not go away. It does not promise
absolution, it has no fully redemptive end in sight, and it demands only more reflexivity.
But in Spivak’s feminist, decolonialist and Marxist sense, it also urges us to continue to
search for the emancipatory possibilities implicit in a geography where as Sauer himself once
said ‘[a]cademic freedom must always be won anew’ (1956:299).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Nancy Duncan, Jennifer Hyndman, Cindi Katz, Vicky Lawson, Debbie
Leslie, Donald Moore, Pam Moss, Heidi Nast, Anila Srivastava and Gillian Rose for their
comments on a variety of earlier versions of this chapter.
NOTES
1 I am here attempting to highlight what I feel is a quite practical implication of Derrida’s
argument about the disseminatory power of repetition turned displacement in Dissemination
(1981). Fieldwork passed down as method by the great father figures of geography can be
seen in this more arcane register as open to reworking by their undutiful daughters and sons.
However, and contrary to a universalizing ‘Law of the Father’ such as Sauer’s, a
deconstructive reading would suggest that this can never be secured by edict. It becomes
possible, only as a ‘semination that is not insemination but dissemination, seed spilled in
vain, an emission that cannot return to its origin in the father’, Spivak, (1976:lxv). For a
frank discussion of the performativity of gender itself see Butler (1994) and for some
reflexive geographical performances see Bell et al. (1994).
2 Heidi Nast and Virginia Blum (under review) argue that Katz and Smith confuse Henri
Lefebvre’s terminology here. While their argument about the dangers of spatial
metaphorization turns to the French philosopher’s historicization of the modern emergence
of a reified and dehistoricized conception of space, they replace his name for it—‘abstract
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 227
space’—with another name—‘absolute space’—that Lefebvre himself connects to pre-
modern and, historically ‘absolutist’ conceptions of spatiality. See Lefebvre (1991) especially
Chapter 4, ‘From absolute space to abstract space’, and the helpful description of the
distinction by Stewart (1995). Lefebvre’s distinction noted however, I still think that the
English name ‘absolute space’ better evokes the notions of desacralized but containerized and
emptyable space that Katz and Smith use it to describe. ‘Abstract space’, by contrast, is so full
of implications that it invites only further confusion.
3 The possibilities presented by Harding’s (1991) argument about contradictory positionings
are obviously extensive. Here, in the context of this volume, I concentrate on the question of
gendered positioning in particular. This clearly down-plays other questions—for example,
about racialized and colonial positions in fieldwork—but not, I hope, in a way that presents
them as irrelevant. Instead, I consider them as future work.
4 I return to the masculinity of objectification in a later part of the chapter. However, for a
more sustained critique see Haraway’s ovular essay, ‘Situated knowledges: the science
question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, (1991a).
5 I am referring here to the distinction Rose draws between the ‘hegemonic’, scientized
masculinity she illustrates with Hagerstrand’s ‘time geography’, and the ‘aesthetic
masculinity’ she finds in humanistic and cultural geography.
6 The reference to fort/da is to the self-defining and arguably masculinist space game played
with a reel by Freud’s young grandson Ernst. It is discussed in Freud (1959). I have
addressed the masculinity of the game and the questions it raises at length in Sparke 1994a.
7 Clifford Geertz notes as much—however serenely—when he distinguishes his vision of
scholarship from tourism. ‘In itself, he notes, ‘Being There is a post-card experience (“I’ve
been to Katmandu—have you?”). It is Being Here, a scholar among scholars, that gets your
anthropology read […] published, reviewed, cited, taught’ (1988:130). However, the
anthropologist Orin Starn has more critically highlighted how ‘as a reinscription of the
imagery of separation and stability, the metaphors of “home” and “field” may be
counterproductive in the development of languages and frameworks that reckon with what
David Harvey calls the “time-space compression” of the contemporary world’ (1994:35).
8 As Rose (1993) suggests, this is something that Katz and Smith begin to do themselves when
they lay claim to a specific concept of real space as the ground for spatial metaphors, see ‘As
if the mirrors had bled: masculine dwelling, masculinist theory and feminist masquerade’
(this volume). In such claims there remains, of course, the danger of neglecting equally
‘real’ and material spaces as they are imagined and experienced from other perspectives.
Nevertheless, I also read in Katz and Smith’s problematization of reified spatial metaphors a
gesture of critique that invites an openness to precisely such other perspectives.
9 LaCapra, ‘Who rules metaphor?’. This was a review of the logocentric impulse in Paul
Ricouer’s, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language
(1979).
10 She notes that
masculine or phallocentric discourses and knowledges rely on images, metaphors
and figures of women and femininity to support and justify their speculations. [There
is a] disavowed corporeal and psychic dependence of the masculine, with its
necessary foundations in women’s bodies, on female corporeality it cannot claim as
its own territory (the maternal body).
228 DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK/
(1990:74)
11 Those who seek to paint over the violence of fieldwork by concentrating on its aesthetic
dimensions would do well to read Haraway’s account of how the camera became privileged
over the gun within the context of a scopophilic law of the father. ‘The true father of the
game loves nature with the camera; it takes twice the man, and the children are in his
perfect image. The eye is infinitely more potent than the gun. Both put a woman to shame—
reproductively’ (1989:43).
12 Derrida speaks more generally of how ‘metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous
scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring…an
invisible design covered over in the palimpsest’ (1982:213).
13 Although, as Pam Moss has pointed out to me in private communication, saying that
blasphemy comprises dissent without apostasy, may not adequately reflect the serious and, in
some ways, faithful forms of study conducted by feminists that remain committed to
challenging the status quo.
14 Pred also critically documents here what I would call Carl Sauer’s romanticized white
supremacism. Such criticism would no doubt also seem to threaten the imperialism of the
sacred fire.
15 This put down seems to me to be bolder than that of George Marcus who, as an
anthropologist, recently mocked attempts at ethnographic reflexivity by geographers,
dubbing them ‘“[m] ore (critically) reflexive than thou”’, (1992). While there was critical
blasphemy that perhaps discomforted Marcus in the subsequent essays of Crang, Katz, Keith
and Rogers, his commentator’s worry that reflexivity can become ‘the mode of a rather
puritanical, competitive assessment among scholars’ (1992:489), did nevertheless suggest a
danger which I feel is serious, and which I discuss in relation to my own masculinity below.
16 She notes in conclusion that
[a] written text is merely a point amidst a continuous fabric of other texts that
includes all communicative forms through which researcher, researched and
institutional frameworks are relationally defined. Such contextualizations are essential
if we are to carry out the kind of collaborative, global and otherwise transgressive
kinds of research that presently peppers feminist geographers’ horizons.
(Nast 1994:62).
For a critique of how textualism has been limited so as to exclude feminist work in
anthropology see Deborah Gordon’s critique of the role of ‘Writing’ (1988:7–24)
and, the further contextualization of its racism written by bell hooks (1990: 123–
33).
17 See also Teresa de Lauretis’s post-Althusserian description of how critics conducting
feminist critique lie ‘both IN and OUT side ideology’ (1987:10).
18 The name ‘temp’ is the popular abbreviation for temporary workers whose largest contractor
in North America, the misnamed Manpower Services Inc., now employs more people
annually than General Motors. For a discussion of the industry’s political economy see
Sparke (1994c). For another series of quasi-ethnographic critiques of temping see the
testimonials now being printed in the popular zine Temp Slave from Keffo, POB 5184,
Bethlehem, PA 18015.
MATTHEW SPARKE/ 229
19 See also James Clifford’s discussion of ‘fables of rapport’ used to ‘narrate the attainment of
participant-observer status’ and thereby establish ‘a presumption of connectedness, which
permits the writer to function in his subsequent analyses as exegete and spokesman’ (1988:
40).
20 A major problem with a moralistic approach, of course, is that along with self-centring, the
marginalized get marginalized still more. It leads to a dead end. Nast puts it like this: ‘Guilt
that centers merely on the existence of this inequality and not on how the inequality can be
transformed is therefore unproductively paralyzing’ (1994:58).
21 discuss the patriarchal relations structuring temping at length in Sparke (forthcoming).
22 I should note, though, that some of these deficiencies have now begun to be addressed as a
matter of capitalist expediency. ‘Provide some information on the “culture” and “norms” of
your organization so that temps can fit in comfortably’ advises The Office, 111, 1990:59–60.
In a similar vein Supervisory Management for August 1989 recommends the following: ‘When
the temporary employee arrives, give a brief tour around the office. Make sure to show the
person where to put his or her coat, the locations of the rest room, the water fountains,
cafeteria and so forth. Also include in the tour the supply room, the copy machine, and any
other equipment the temp will need to use’, (pp. 26–7).
230
14
REFLECTIONS ON POSTMODERN FEMINIS
SOCIAL RESEARCH
J.K.Gibson-Graham
Until quite recently feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory have offered
epistemological positions that have been the basis for a phenomenal growth in feminist
social science (Harding 1986). Empirical studies conducted from a range of theoretical
perspectives (radical, socialist and liberal feminist) have all in some way affirmed the
existence of women’s experience as a source of privileged understandings, if not the basis
of an alternative social science. Now, however, the deconstruction of ‘women’ is having
profoundly destabilizing effects upon feminist theorizing and research (Barrett 1991).1
Wendy Brown writes of the ‘palpable feminist panic’ that has arisen as the situated and
subjective knowledge of ‘women’, gleaned, for example, from ethnography, oral history
material or consciousness-raising groups, has come under attack for its presumption of
representing the ‘hidden truth’ of women or women’s experience.2 While the turn to
postmodernism has engendered a plethora of exciting philosophical, political and cultural
endeavours that tackle the essentialism around women embedded in both feminist and
non-feminist texts,3 feminist social analysts find themselves confronting an ironic impasse
as the unifying objects of our research dissolve before our eyes.
This chapter tells the tale of a social research process which has been shaped by the flux
of current feminist debates. It takes up some of the problems of ‘doing gender’ outlined
by other feminist geographers such as McDowell (1992), Dyck (1993), Rose (1993) and
Pratt (1993). Like them, I take seriously the challenges posed by postmodern theory to
feminist social scientific research. If we are to accept that there is no unity, centre or
actuality to discover for women, what is feminist research about? How can we speak of
our experiences as women? Can we still use women’s experiences as resources for social
analysis? Is it still possible to do research for women? How can we negotiate the multiple
and decentred identities of women? In this chapter I try to reflect self-consciously upon
these questions as I discuss the research methods employed in my own project.4
MINING AND REPRESENTATION
During 1987 and 1990 when I was researching the development of new mining localities
in Central Queensland, I documented stories about the activities of women along with
those told by company managers, union representatives and community workers. I soon
noticed that two ‘identities’ or ‘constructions’ were available in relation to the women I
was concerned with. One was the representation purveyed by mainstream Australian
232 POSTMODERN FEMINIST SOCIAL RESEARCH/
social analysts and service providers influenced by the liberal community studies tradition.
In this discourse ‘mining town women’ are a client group who have needs for better
social, psychological and health services. They are portrayed as independent and self-
reliant but defensive, vulnerable, cautious of emotional commitment, lonely, isolated,
stressed and traditional.
The other representation was that purveyed by socialist and socialist feminist analysts in
Australia, the UK and North America. In this international discourse ‘miners’ wives’ are
situated as auxiliary members of the industrial proletariat, the feminine face of the solidary
working-class mining community that holds such a hallowed place in left sociology. While
researchers studying the newer mining communities of Australia and North America have
emphasized the differences between women in these more affluent and isolated new
towns and those in traditional mining communities of the British, Welsh and Appalachian
coalfields, miners’ wives are still constituted within a discourse that foregrounds the
functional overlap of capitalist exploitation and patriarchal oppression. Proletarian first
and women second, miners’ wives are subsumed to the fictional identity ‘working class’
and relegated to the status of Other within this totalizing conception.5
The focus in the socialist feminist literature upon industrial disputes, in which women
are expected to express their real identities through solidarity with working-class men,
situates this literature solidly within essentialist Marxism-feminism where consciousness is
true or false and subjectivity structurally constructed and constrained. Most of the studies
within this tradition highlight those occasions when miners’ wives invert their Other
status, come to recognize their true class alignment, and heroically join, lead or hold their
men to authentic working-class consciousness and action.
As I collected stories of women’s political involvements in mining towns, I began to
realize that research could not ‘add women in’ to the picture without situating them with
respect to one or the other representation.6 Yet these characterizations seemed to construct
narrow, unidimensional identities and subject positions with negative and disciplinary
overtones. Both the client/victim/pathologized individual representation of liberal
discourse and the proletarian/militant/supporter cum leader representation of socialist
discourse denied the potential for a multiplicity of political subjectivities to emerge. And
both seemed to actively organize women out of any independent involvement in either
industrial or gender politics.
The stories I collected had a complex and somewhat ambiguous relationship to existing
discourses and subject positions available to women in coal-mining towns. Some of them
undermined the representation of ‘mining town women’ as individualistic and depressed,
unwilling to connect with other women or contribute to community activities. But the
traditionalism of the gender relations in these stories reinforced mainstream
representations of women as personally and politically dependent upon men. The stories
also overlapped with the socialist feminist discourse on ‘miners’ wives’ as members of the
working class, but at the same time allowed glimpses of other processes by which
different (non-working-class) subjectivities were continually being crafted, and sometimes
enunciated in action (Kondo 1990). Recognizing the identities ‘mining town women’ and
‘miners’ wives’ had allowed me to see both as regulatory fictions masquerading as self-
J.K.GIBSON-GRAHAM/ 233
evident categories of analysis, each of which positioned women in mining towns in
subjugated positions.7
This initial process of deconstructing the categories ‘mining town woman’ and ‘miner’s
wife’ had enabled me to identify their politically powerful disciplinary and exclusionary
effects. At the same time I had begun to see glimpses of alternative subject positions and
political identities for women in mining towns with which I could interact. It occurred to
me that producing alternative discourses of gender and mining town life was one way of
liberating alternative subjectivities for mining town women.
The question that soon emerged was, why create an alternative discourse, an
alternative voicing, and where was its audience? Who was interested in new subject
positions for women in mining towns? And why construct alternative subjectivities for
mining town women if ‘women’ in general had disappeared? The usual answer to such
questions harks back to the political project of feminism and the central role that research
plays in the ‘liberation’ of women. But the political project of postmodern feminism is
now a matter of considerable debate.
RESEARCH AS POLITICS/POLITICS OF RESEARCH
In dissolving the presumed unity of women’s identity postmodern feminism has liberated
knowledges and given rise to fruitful theoretical controversies as to who women ‘are’ and
how to ‘know’ them. At the same time, however, Brown’s ‘palpable feminist panic’
(mentioned at the outset of this chapter) seems to have migrated from the realm of theory
into the political realm, where the identity ‘woman’ has usually been constituted as the
necessary ground of feminist political action. Feminists have historically claimed that as
‘women’ we are dominated and oppressed, and feminist politics has staked its legitimacy
upon the assumption of this shared or common, but importantly, subordinated identity. To
surrender epistemological claims about women’s shared identity has signified, for many,
giving up the structural and moral position from which to organize politically to overcome
oppression (Brown 1991:75). Without unity of women’s identity, many critics see
postmodern feminism as opening the doors to fragmentation, factionalism and political
disempowerment.8
It seems that, for many, a paradox has emerged—as knowledge has been liberated,
politics has been shackled. While feminists may agree that in theory, difference
empowers, when it comes to politics many still hold to the adage that ‘united we stand,
divided we fall’. Ferguson (1993) argues that feminists must accept this contradiction and
learn to live with the inevitable tension between articulating ‘women’s experience’ and
deconstructing the texts that represent and enforce this presumed commonality. Rather
than insisting on a real, originary essence that defines all women, Ferguson advocates
constant movement between the (strategically essentialized) representation of women’s
experience and the (strategically non-essentialized) deconstructivist practice of
undermining fixed categories of identity and gender. In support of this view, Pratt (1993)
calls for an ‘equal commitment’ and ‘continuing dialogue’ between these two moments of
research practice. Barrett similarly positions the two moments in opposition: ‘So it is an
234 POSTMODERN FEMINIST SOCIAL RESEARCH/
issue of whether one wants, speaking as a feminist, to deconstruct or to inhabit the
category of “women”’ (1991:166).
I see a danger in posing these moments as opposing practices in irreducible/ ironic
tension, the one associated with grounded commitment, the other with relativism and
disaffiliation. Surely all deconstruction, or the tracing of ‘how we produce truths’ (Spivak
1989:214), is done from a specific theoretical and political entry point from which further
interpretation also proceeds. Seeing one posture as less political because it highlights
difference, and the other as more political because it highlights collective identity, seems
to suggest that the politics of identity is the only viable political form (for feminists at
least). It also implies residual loyalty to the modernist separation of theory and practice —
that conception of a knowledge/theory existing separate from and prior to change/
politics (we understand the world in order to change it). Practice or politics, in this
formulation, can only be enacted by a collectivity of subjects all identically positioned vis-
à-vis the structure of power that has been rendered visible by theory. What this
conception betrays is an interesting failure to see knowledge and its production as an
always already political process.
It seems that what is needed is a rethinking of the relationship between politics and
research. Following Foucault, I would see postmodern feminist politics starting from the
assumption that power is everywhere inscribed, in and by women, as well as by men, in
theory as well as in practice, in difference as well as in unity. Thus the process of
theoretical production is as much a political intervention in changing power relations as is
self-consciously (identity-based) political organization. There is no prior reality or unified
identity to be accessed or created by research from which we can launch a programme of
change. There are, however, existing discourses that position subjects in relations of
empowerment and disempowerment. The ways in which theory and research interact
with these discourses have concrete political effects.
As a social researcher, I was interested in the circulation of alternative discourses on
women in mining towns within communities of interest not readily touched by academic
writing. One mode of circulation open to me was the research process itself. Encouraged
by feminists such as Brown and Weedon to engage in conversation and public discourse,9
I wanted to move beyond a purely literary discursive intervention and into ‘the field’.10 I
embarked upon a research process that attempted to involve women as ‘knowing
subjects’ in the ‘always already’ political nature of the research process.
Immediately I was confronted by the practical dilemmas of how to include women in
mining towns in the process of discursive deconstruction and the circulation of new
discourses. One alternative was to attempt direct intervention in power relations between
men and women by embarking on a project of action and participatory research. But this
method of research relies upon an identification between researcher and researched and
the discovery of a shared subject position from which political intervention can be
discussed and enacted (Reinharz 1992). Without an assumed basis of unity between
women could these research methods still be employed? In pursuing my idea of social
research as a public engagement in the construction of alternative discourses, I was forced
to rethink methods of action research in terms of postmodern feminist social research
practice. The last section of this chapter tells the story of the research project that
J.K.GIBSON-GRAHAM/ 235
developed when an industry restructuring initiative instituted a shiftwork schedule called
‘the 7-day roster’. This very demanding schedule of shifts was justified by the miners’
union in terms of its negligible physiological effects on the individual miner and its
positive impact on the miner’s total annual income; but it proved to be extremely
disruptive to family and community life.
IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE AND POSTMODERN FEMINIST
ACTION RESEARCH
As my own research and that of others had established, in mining towns women are
marginalized by many processes (Gibson 1992a; Sturmey 1989). I decided to employ a
number of miners’ wives as co-researchers in the project in an attempt to confront some
aspects of women’s marginalization.11 The women employed had to be experiencing life
with a shiftworker on a 7-day roster. They also were selected on the basis of their stage in
the life cycle and family formation. The twelve participants (three each from four
different mining towns) were actively involved in the research design and questionnaire
formulation and were trained as interviewers at an initial two-day workshop to conduct
six recorded in-depth discussions with their friends and acquaintances.12 In this way it was
hoped that an established rapport would exist between interviewer and respondent and
would be the basis for a more relaxed and revealing interview experience. The women
received payment for their interviewing work and all expenses were covered to allow
them to attend two workshops at a location that was central to all the towns. At the
second workshop held later in the year, preliminary results were analysed, qualitative
results discussed and possible interventions outlined.
I saw this project as a modified or postmodern form of action research. While I actively
involved women in the process of researching their own situations with respect to
shiftworking partners, the project had no underlying agenda of consciousness raising and
direct group action. The initial training workshop and the later feedback workshop
incorporated discussions of consciousness and action but there was no expectation on my
part or that of the participants that a feminist political programme would or should
emerge. Instead, in the workshops and over the kitchen tables where one-on-one
interviews were conducted, the research project created and cultivated spaces in which a
feminist politics (the transformation of gendered power relations) was performed in
conversation and group discussion.
In the process of creating this political space, ‘place’ assumed some importance. Unlike
in cities where people ‘live together in relations of mediation among strangers with whom
they are not in community’ (Young 1990:303), in small mining ‘communities’ people
foster links with each other through ‘being the same’ and excluding and ostracizing
anyone who is different. Removing women from their ‘communities’ was the first step in
creating a discursive space in which to construct new political subjectivities.
Within the research team, various other barriers stood in the way of political
conversations. Many of the differences which divide and structure our everyday social
experience were present in the group that assembled at the first training workshop—
urban-rural born, married-unmarried, educated-uneducated, older-younger, childless-
236 POSTMODERN FEMINIST SOCIAL RESEARCH/
mother, adopted-not adopted, wealthy-poor, traditional-feminist, spiritual-materialist,
new age-mainstream, fat-thin, forthcoming-shy, amongst others. In this group the
decentredness of women’s ‘collective identity’ and the overdetermined nature of
subjectivity were patently obvious.
Throughout the workshops members of the research team inadvertently explored their
differences with each other and with the other women they had interviewed, and with
Joanne (the freelance community worker I employed as a co-researcher and local
facilitator) and myself. In this space away from family, friends and ‘community’ women
felt liberated to air differences without forcing conformity. I heard many comments
prefaced by ‘My life’s not like that…my husband’s not like that…of course things were
different in those days than now…well, you’re younger than me…some women must
live in a very different situation than I do.’
At the outset of the research, for many of the participants the lack of identification with
each other was uppermost in their minds. But by the end of the second workshop both the
idea and the act of ‘partial identification’ had become more developed.13 Interestingly,
what emerged was not what I would see as identification around the shared experience of
women (the recognition that as women we shared a common ‘problem’). In fact personal
differences in gender experience widened on many fronts. What took place was
identification with respect to common problems of a very specific kind (ones that many
women would not share)—living with a shiftworker (or in the case of Joanne and myself,
living with a self-employed partner who worked long and irregular hours, often including
weekends); particular place-specific forms of male discipline; union, company and
university reluctance to consider family life in industrial relations.
In a sense my research process was constructing a partial but shared, externally related
identity, and beginning to create a public knowledge about mine shiftwork and family life,
about terror in the face of male power over women’s ability to speak out, about women’s
mistrust of each other. The fiction of the ‘mining shiftworker’s wife’ I was encouraging or
imposing became a momentary reality—a basis for communication about many of the
contours of power affecting political activism in mining towns. This comment was made
with acceptance and resignation:
We’re powerless in the face of decisions about the roster—the men won’t listen to
just us.
Other comments were made with surprise and consternation:
Many women confessed to hating the 7-day roster but they refused to be
interviewed. Their husbands were forbidding them to be involved.
Even women who are normally very strong and stroppy said they couldn’t do it.
The men are so suspicious, so them and us. They thought this survey would be
used against them.
In the process of research the participants became open to otherness and aware of their
own political capacities:
J.K.GIBSON-GRAHAM/ 237
This has made me realize that not all people can cope with the roster system, and
just because things in my part of the world run smoothly, does not mean there is
nothing wrong with the town I live in.
The research helped me rationalize my thoughts about the 7-day roster and was
very helpful in coming to terms with many personal issues. It boosted my self-
worth and gave me a sense of achievement and involvement in community and value
other than as a housewife/mother.
In the political space created by this research project a new discourse of mine shiftwork
and a new subjectivity of the ‘mining shiftworker’s wife’ started to emerge. As women
engaged in the myriad conversations that formed part of the research, they actively
displaced the existing discourses of ‘mining town women’ and ‘miner’s wife’ that
confined their subjectivities. Out of this process a new subject position has developed—
one that is focused on the gender division of labour and the impact of industrial conditions
and disputes on relations within the home.
As companies discuss the possibility of introducing 12-hour shifts in the mining industry
and long-distance commuting from the coast to new mines, the results of this research are
circulating as an alternative way of thinking through the issues. A booklet that illustrates
the research findings using cartoons and verbatim comments from women has been
published by the miners’ union and distributed throughout the region, significantly aiding
the circulation of the discourse of shiftwork and family life.14
A new (the first) occasional childcare centre has been built in Moura after attempts by
one of the research participants (who was motivated by the research experience to ‘get off
her bum’) to set up a baby-sitting club failed. This woman took the research report along
to the meeting to discuss the need for such a service and was able to influence the decision
to establish the centre.
One of the women interviewed asked for the tape of her interview back, sat her
husband down and made him listen to it. She then was able to broach her anger with him
for spending all his days off from minework at the new farm they had just purchased.
Their interviewer was pleased to report that ‘now they’re like a pair of newly-weds’.
At some level the research is challenging the established discourse of industry policy—
its boundaries, the actors it legitimizes and its social effects. As women in all their
diversity voice newly developed concerns around an issue of industry restructuring they
enter, wittingly or unwittingly, an arena from which they have long been marginalized
and excluded.
CONCLUSION
While I share no fundamental identity with any other person (as I am a unique ensemble
of contradictory and shifting subjectivities) I am situated by one of the most powerful and
pervasive discourses in social life (that of the binary hierarchy of gender) in a shared
subject position with others who are identified, or identify themselves, as women. This
subject position influences my entrée into social interactions and the ways I can speak,
238 POSTMODERN FEMINIST SOCIAL RESEARCH/
listen and be heard. In this sense I am enabled, as a woman, to research with other women
the conditions of our discursive construction and its effects.
As a feminist researcher, I am coming to understand my political project as one of
discursive destabilization. One of my goals is to undermine the hegemony of the binary
gender discourse and to promote alternative subject positions for gendered subjects. I see
my research as (participating in) creating identity/subjectivity, and in that process as
constituting alternative sites of power and places of political intervention. Whether in
conversation with mining town women or with other feminist academic researchers I
understand my discursive interventions as constitutive rather than reflective, political as
well as academic.
In my research I found the metaphors of ‘conversation’ and ‘performance’ much more
useful in imagining a research strategy than the mining metaphors I had initially adopted.
The mining metaphors constitute research as a process of discovery, of revelation: as
researchers we reveal truths that are hidden from the untutored observer, contributing
hitherto untapped resources to the permanent store of knowledge. By contrast,
conversation and performance are metaphors of creation and interaction. Both processes
are ephemeral, yet each may have long-lasting effects upon thought and action.
Conversations can produce alternative discourses that entail new subject positions,
supplementing or supplanting those that currently exist. These new subject positions
crystallize power in new sites, enabling novel performances —individual or group
interventions in a variety of social locations. In this way the creation of alternative
discourses subverts the power of existing discourses and contributes to their
destabilization.
This research process has provided insights for me into the practice of a new,
postmodern feminist politics of difference. Action research need not focus upon the
uncovering or construction of a unified consciousness upon which later interventions will
be based. Action research can be a means by which we ‘develop political conversation (s)
among a complex and diverse “we”’ (Brown 1991:81). Within these conversations we
create the discursive spaces in which new subjectivities can emerge. As the centred
subject with its historic political mission departs the social stage, there is now room to talk
of the inescapability of difference and the only/ever partial nature of identification. Yet such
talk does not precede or preclude politics. For the babble emanating from this discursive
space is a political process without end, and without a (unified collective) subject. In an
overdetermined world conversations are interventions/actions/changes in and of
themselves, no matter whether they do or do not also give rise to further planned
interventions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A longer version of this paper was published under the title “‘Stuffed if I know!”
Reflections on post-modern feminist social research’, in Gender, Place and Culture 1(2)
(1994):205–24. During the writing of the paper Julie Graham was supported by a
fellowship from the Faculty of Arts, Monash University. The fieldwork upon which the
J.K.GIBSON-GRAHAM/ 239
paper is based was funded by a grant to Katherine Gibson from the Australian Research
Council.
NOTES
1 Butler (1990) argues, for example, that the category ‘woman’ is but a fiction of coherence
that serves to buttress the heterosexual contract.
2 She writes,
‘the world from women’s point of view’ and ‘the feminist standpoint’ attempt
resolution of the postfoundational epistemology problem by deriving from within
women’s experience the grounding for women’s accounts. But this resolution
requires suspending recognition that women’s ‘experience’ is both thoroughly
constructed and interpreted without end. Within feminist standpoint theory as well
as much other modernist feminist theory, then, consciousness raising operates as
feminism’s epistemologically positivist moment.
(Brown 1991:72).
The discussion of ‘women’s experience’ is, from this perspective, the creation of a
discourse which imposes a fixed identity, rather than the uncovering of an
unmediated truth.
3 Barrett talks of the ‘turn to culture’ within feminism as the interest in post-structuralist
theory has prompted a shift away from ‘the social sciences’ preoccupation with things’
towards words and language. She claims that ‘(a) cademically, the social sciences have lost
their purchase within feminism and the rising star lies with the arts, humanities and
philosophy’ (1992:204–5).
4 The research findings will not be reported here. They have been written up in a number of
research reports and articles (see Gibson 1991a, 1991b, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, and Gibson-
Graham 1994a, 1994b).
5 Metcalfe (1987) argues that the exclusion of women from the coal-mining workforce in
nineteenth-century Britain marked the active introduction (largely by the male union
movement) of structured gender divisions within coal-mining communities. These divisions
were transplanted to the Australian industry. In the terms of this discussion, this historical
precedent provided the conditions under which miners’ wives could only ever be constituted
as Other to the working-class miner.
6 Four of the stories I collected are written up in Gibson-Graham (1994a).
7 I suspected that the traditional representation of ‘mining town women’ had a use within the
discursive space occupied by social workers and service providers. The image of mining
town women as individualistic non-joiners was a handy categorization which justified the
interventionist activities of service providers and staff wives (often the same people in the
smaller towns) who acted as gatekeepers for all social activity and any gender-based politics
in the towns.
At the same time I was aware that the left representation of ‘miner’s wife’ had a use
within the discursive space occupied by union leaders, labour historians and socialist
feminists. The image of a solid supporter of ‘the men’ and upholder of hard-won conditions
240 POSTMODERN FEMINIST SOCIAL RESEARCH/
valued and romanticized the contribution of women, and established the nobility of the
miners’ class struggle. For the wives of some miners this representation was a welcome
reward for toeing the line in an important but self-effacing way. Women were accorded the
accolades befitting true working-class warriors when they willingly subordinated their lives
to the cause of jobs (for men), wages (for men), political rights (for men) or lower taxes (for
men). But it seemed clear to me that these accolades would not be forthcoming if women
overstepped some invisible mark and, for instance, interfered in wage negotiations or
shiftwork changes when major disputes were not in the offing, or led a movement for paid
work (for women), or wages for housework.
8 It was in the face of this possibility that Spivak’s strategic essentialism was proposed (in an
interview with Grosz 1984). Barrett cautions: ‘Feminists recognize that the “naming” of
women and men occurs within an opposition that one would want to challenge and
transform. Yet political silencing can follow from rejecting these categories altogether’
(1991:166).
9 Brown (1991) has argued that in countering postmodern social fragmentation feminists need
to orient their political conversations ‘towards diversity and the common, toward world
rather than self and she encourages us to engage in a ‘conversion of one’s knowledge of the
world from a situated (subject) position into a public idiom’ (1991:80–1). In a similar vein
Weedon emphasizes the public realm arguing that ‘in order for a discourse to have a social
effect, [it] must at least be in circulation’ (1987:110–11).
10 The discourse of ‘the field’ is one that is undergoing an interesting deconstruction within
anthropology (see, for example, D’Amico-Samuels 1991). Not surprisingly, within
geography, it is feminist geographers who have taken up this particular challenge (Nast et al.
1994).
11 In framing the research project I was conscious of the disciplinary power that men, unions,
the companies and the social service gatekeepers exercised over miners’ wives in these
communities. Negotiating permission from husbands, the unions, the service providers and
the mining companies for these women to be involved was itself an interesting political
exercise.
12 The questionnaire was designed to elicit information around the following topics: Who is
providing all the unpaid labour which supports the physical and emotional needs of the
shiftworker? How much of the increased productivity gained by continuous production is
being fuelled by an intensification of household labour? How does the increased tiredness and
lack of weekends affect relations between workers and partners, workers and children and
partners and children—and workers and workers? How might a better understanding of
women’s experience of their partner’s shiftwork patterns help men and women alike? What
general feelings did women have about their town?
13 For me the first workshop marked a transition in my relationship to the women I was
employing, which was initially dominated by the hierarchy and differential power of the
academic/housewife-childrearer and employer/employee relations. By the end of the
workshop, one of the women who was most into differentiating herself and her particular
experience from that of the others (especially because she was quite happy with her life and
felt that others’ complaints didn’t ring true for her) expressed the view that even though I
was a doctor I was really just one of them. This moment of identification referred primarily
to one of my many subject positions, that of being a mother of small children, someone who
could share in tales of childbirth, sleepless nights and the irrational frustrations of
mothering. On the basis of this dimension of similarity I was somehow legitimated in her
eyes, my power defused and her acceptance of me granted. I was homogenized and accepted
J.K.GIBSON-GRAHAM/ 241
into the fictional but collective unity ‘mother’. In a different way Joanne (who was not a
mother) was identified as a ‘local’ (that is, non-metropolitan), someone who experienced
isolation, car breakdowns on outback roads and harsh climatic conditions, and partially
accepted on that basis.
14 The Queensland branch of the United Mineworkers Federation has printed 5,000 copies of
Different Merry-Go-Rounds: Families, Communities and the 7-Day Roster for distribution to its
members and to the communities of Central Queensland.
242
CONCLUSION
Nancy Duncan
As I stated in the ‘Introduction’, the authors of this volume contribute in various ways to
the feminist project of embodying, engendering and embedding knowledge claims and
social research in the material context of space and place. This situating and specifying of
theory and research is seen as necessary by feminists who have come to question concepts
which pass as universal and disinterested, but turn out to refer to something much more
particular and interested, usually privileged males. Allegedly gender-neutral concepts are
too often based on an unstated masculine norm. A first step towards the solution to this
problem is thought to consist in contextualizing and revealing the historical, cultural and
gendered specificity of such universalist pretensions.
However, there are potential dangers in focusing on difference rather than identity, and
specificity rather than generality. One of the more obvious problems concerns the
defining of equality, which of course has long been a feminist goal. If one is to take
difference and contingency seriously, equality must be defined in ways that do not assume
homogeneity. As Anne Phillips has said: ‘we cannot do without a notion of what human
beings have in common; we can and must do without a unitary standard against which
they are all judged’ (1993:66).
A material (and social) environment can be constructed which achieves greater equality
of mobility and access by accounting for relative difference. What I mean by this is a
levelling of the playing field, so to speak, by attempting to ensure that the social and
physical environment itself does not unnecessarily handicap those who do not match a
particular norm. An example would be a degree of equality in the workplace achieved
through the granting of paid maternity and paternity leave which, while recognizing
differences in family responsibilities, does so in the interest of equal treatment of all
workers.
Judith Butler wishes to salvage some notion of universality by suggesting the concept
itself be relieved of ‘its foundational weight in order to render it a site of permanent
political contest’ (1992:8). Here we can see that inclusion need not mean assimilation or
co-option, but also that the recognition of difference need not lead to inequality.
However, as we have seen, universalizing thought always courts the danger of falling into
the trap of overgeneralized categories. What is important then, is to be ever vigilant in
looking out for unintentional exclusions—for masculinism and cultural imperialism in our
categories.
244 NANCY DUNCAN/
Butler goes on to say that a category such as woman should be a site of permanent
contestation: ‘Paradoxically, it may be that only through releasing the category of women
from a fixed referent that something like “agency” becomes possible’ (1992:16). Contrary
to much of the thinking around identity politics, a stable and unified identity is not a
necessary basis for a progressive politics. Political agency can be effectively based on non-
exclusionary, heterogeneous categories. Accordingly one of the goals of this volume is to
show that the categories of gender and sexuality do not map neatly onto one another and
are sites of contestation and resistance against exclusions and dichotomizing tendencies.
Exposing false universalist claims, however, need not lead us to turn our backs on
Enlightenment ideals of social justice and universal human rights. These ideals must be
contested whenever, and to the extent that, they can be exposed as implicitly
ethnocentric, androcentric or exclusionary in any other way.
Geographers and others interested in place and historical specificity are well equipped
to look at the importance of place to the construction of gender and sexuality difference
and differences within these differences. However, their orientation toward place
specificity has sometimes wrongly led them to conflate this with localism, based on a
romantic, nostalgic or aesthetic sense of place. Here I refer to localism as a component of
individualism which posits the rights of a theoretically free, equal, disembodied, gender-
neutral, homogeneous group of individuals who come together at the local level to
determine the interests of their specific community. Such localism and locally based
politics can become myopic, turning attention away from regional or global political
economic processes which structure inequalities. Thus, inappropriately localized or
privatized solutions to problems may be sought. These often turn out to be either
exclusionary or ineffective.
In her chapter Rose states that the idea of grounding or contextualizing feminist theory
in so-called ‘real’ material space is a masculinist performance of power. Her alternative
notions of spatiality indeed challenge not only conventional academic norms, but also
might be considered a critique of many of the other chapters in this book. I agree that
there is such a danger, especially if, as I have said, such grounding leads to localism and
exclusion. Taking Rose’s warning (in perhaps a more limited way than she intends) I
suggest that material and discursive spatiality can be repoliticized and opened up to a more
heterogeneous public. Rather than claiming space for a group, as in territorially based
politics, moveable sites of resistance against exclusionary practices can break open such
performances of power.
I am thinking here of something like Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘state’ or ‘striated’ space
(hold the fort) versus ‘nomad’ or ‘smooth’ space (hold the street) (see Massumi 1992:6).
In making a distinction between territories and smooth spaces I also draw inspiration from
the title of Tim Davis’s (1995) paper entitled ‘Gay territories and queer spaces’. Here I
interpret gay to mean a relatively stable identity based in part upon sexuality which can be
mapped onto stable and relatively fixed locations, and queer to refer to a destabilizing
oppositional politics of sexuality which is associated with a fluid spatiality and multiplying
and moveable sites of resistance.1
The general question which this book addresses is exactly how to bring about the feminist
goal of a structural transformation which goes beyond simply making amendments to
CONCLUSION/ 245
previously existing theory. The essays in this volume make some valuable suggestions
which are primarily geographical in orientation. This reveals not only the particular
interests and expertise of the authors, but reflects a much more widely recognized need
within feminism today to specify by situating the often too general, allegedly neutral claims
of social and cultural theory. Thus the authors of the essays in this book have offered some
of their ideas about how to engender and contextualize knowledge claims through a
repoliticized geographical imagination.
NOTE
1 An earlier version of Davis’s paper was delivered at Syracuse University in the symposium
entitled ‘Place, Space and Gender’ from which most of the papers in this volume were
drawn. A printed version of the paper under a different title appears in Mapping Desire edited
by David Bell and Gill Valentine (Davis, 1995:284–302).
246
REFERENCES
INTRODUCTION
Alcoff, Linda and Potter, Elizabeth (eds) (1993) Feminist Epistemologies, New York: Routledge.
Anderson, Kay (1991) Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980, Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Bordo, Susan (1987) The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture, New York: SUNY
Press.
Brown, Wendy (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
——(1992) ‘Contingent foundations: feminism and the question of “postmodernism”’, in Judith
Butler and Joan Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge.
Crary, Jonathan (1993) Techniques of the Observer, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
England, Kim (1994) ‘Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality and feminist research’, The
Professional Geographer 46(1):80–9.
Gross, Elizabeth (1987) ‘Conclusion: what is feminist theory?’ in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth
Gross (eds) Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, pp. 190–204, Boston: Northeastern
University Press.
Haraway, Donna (1991) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of
partial perspective’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, New York: Routledge.
Harding, Sandra (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
——(1991) Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
——(1993) ‘Rethinking standpoint theory: “What is strong objectivity?”’ in Linda Alcoff and
Elizabeth Potter (eds) Feminist Epistemologies, pp. 49–82, New York: Routledge.
Hartsock, Nancy (1983) ‘The feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist
historical materialism’, in Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka (eds) Discovering Reality:
Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Dordrecht: Reidel.
Harvey, David (1993) ‘Class relations, social justice and the politics of difference’, in Judith Squires
(ed.) Principled Positions: Postmodernism and the Rediscovery of Value, London: Lawrence &
Wishart.
Lloyd, Genevieve (1984) The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Merchant, Carolyn (1983) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San
Francisco: Harper.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C.Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds)
Marxism and the Interpretation of CuIture, pp. 271–313, Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.
Valentine, Gill (1993) ‘(Hetero) sexing space: lesbian perceptions and experiences of everyday
spaces’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11:395–413.
248 REFERENCES/
Young, Iris Marion (1987) ‘Impartiality and the civic public: some implications of feminist critiques
of moral and political theory’, in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (eds) Feminism as Critique,
pp. 56–76, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
CHAPTER 1
FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
Alcoff, Linda Martin (1996) ‘Is the feminist critique of reason rational?’ Philosophical Topics:
forthcoming.
Barrett, Nancy S. (1981) ‘How the study of women has restructured the discipline of economics’, in
Elizabeth Langland and Walter Grove (eds) A Feminist Perspective in the Academy, pp. 101–9,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bell, Linda (1983) Visions of Women, Clifton, NJ: Humana Press.
Braidotti, Rosi (1991) Patterns of Dissonance, New York: Routledge.
Flax, Jane (1990) Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary
West, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Gross, Elizabeth (1987) ‘What is feminist theory?’ in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross (eds)
Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, pp. 190–204, Boston: Northeastern University
Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth (1993) ‘Bodies and knowledges: feminism and the crisis of reason’, in L.Alcoff and
E.Potter (eds) Feminist Epistemologies, pp. 187–216, New York: Routledge.
Harding, Sandra (1991) Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Irigaray, Luce (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference, transl. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C.Gill, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Keohane, Nannerl 0. (1981) ‘Speaking from silence: women and the science of politics’, in
Elizabeth Langland and Walter Grove (eds) A Feminist Perspective in the Academy, pp. 86–100,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kittay, Eva Feder (1987) Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure, Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
——(1988) ‘Woman as metaphor’, Hypatia 3 (2):63–86.
Le Doeuff, Michelle (1989) The Philosophical Imaginary, London: Athlone Press.
Lloyd, Genevieve (1984) The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Longino, Helen (1990) Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lovibond, Sabina (1994) ‘Feminism and the “crisis of rationality”’, New Left Review 207 (Sept./Oct.):
72–86.
Ong, Aihwa (1988) ‘Colonialism and modernity: feminist re-presentations of women in non-
Western societies’, Inscriptions 3 (4):79–93.
Plato (1961) Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Rubin, Gayle (1975) ‘The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex’, in Rayna
Reiter (ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women, pp. 157–210, New York: Monthly Review
Press.
REFERENCES/ 249
CHAPTER 2
SPATIALIZING FEMINISM
Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London:
Verso.
Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Brydon, L. and Chant, S. (1989) Women in the Third World: Gender Issues in Rural and Urban Areas,
London: Edward Elgar.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge.
Carter, E., Donald, J. and Squires, J. (eds) (1993) Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location,
London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Castells, M. (1989) The Informational City, Oxford: Blackwell.
Foucault, M. (1986) ‘Of other spaces’, diacritics Spring
Geertz, C. (1988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity.
Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso.
Hall, S. (1991) ‘The local and the global: globalization and ethnicity’, in A.King (ed.) Culture,
Globalization and the World System, pp. 19–39, London: Macmillan.
——(1994) ‘The question of cultural identity’, in The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory, pp. 119–25,
Cambridge: Polity.
Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1995) Gender, Place and Work, London: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association
Books.
Hartsock, N. (1990) ‘Foucault on power: a theory for women’, in L.J.Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/
Postmodernism, London: Routledge.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Katz, C. and Monk, J. (eds) (1994) Full Circles: Geographies of Women Over the Life Course, London:
Routledge.
Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London: Verso.
Leidner, R. (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk, Los Angeles and San Francisco: University of Berkeley Press.
Little, J., Peake, L. and Richardson, P. (eds) (1988) Women in Cities, London: Macmillan.
Mascia-Lees, F., Sharpe, P. and Cohen, C.B. (1989) ‘The postmodernist turn in anthropology:
cautions from a feminist perspective’, Signs 15:7–33.
Massey, D. (1992) ‘Politics and space/time’, New Left Review 196:65–84.
——(1993) ‘Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place’, in J.Bird, B.Curtis, G. Robertson
and L.Tickner (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Culture, Global Change, London: Routledge.
Massey, D. and Allen, J. (eds) (1984) Geography Matters! Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDowell, L. (1993) ‘Space, place and gender relations: Part II. Identity, difference, feminist
geometries and geographies’, Progress in Human Geography 17:305–18.
Minh-ha, T.T. (1987) Woman, Native, Other, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Mohanty, C.T. (1991) ‘Cartographies of struggle: Third World women and the politics of feminism’,
in C.T.Mohanty, A.Russo and L.Torres (eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Momsen, J. and Kinnaird, V. (eds) (1994) Different Places, Different Voices: Gender and Development in
Africa, Asia and Latin America, London: Routledge.
250 REFERENCES/
Momsen, J. and Townsend, J. (eds) (1987) Geography and Gender in the Third World, London:
Hutchinson.
Moore, H.L. (1994) A Passion for Difference, Cambridge: Polity.
Pringle, R. (1989) Secretaries Talk, London: Verso.
Probyn, E. (1994) Sexing the Self, London: Routledge.
Smith, N. (1993) ‘Homeless/global: scaling places’, in J.Bird, B.Curtis, G.Robertson and
L.Tickner (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Culture, Global Change, London: Routledge.
Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Social Theory, London: Verso.
Squires, J. (ed.) (1993) Principled Positions: Postmodernism and the Rediscovery of Value, London:
Lawrence & Wishart.
Tivers, J. (1985) Women Attached: The Daily Lives of Women with Children, London: Croom Helm.
Young, I.M. (1990) ‘The ideal of community and the politics of difference’, in L.J. Nicholson (ed.)
Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge.
CHAPTER 3
RE: MAPPING SUBJECTIVITY
Benjamin, Jessica (1988) The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, New
York: Pantheon.
Champlain, Samuel de (1907) Voyages of Samuel de Champlain 1604–1618, edited by W.L.Grant,
Original Narratives of Early American History, New York: Scribner.
Fox Keller, Evelyn (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Freud, Sigmund (1923/1961) The Ego and the Id, in Standard Edition 19, pp. 3–66, transl. and edited
by James Strachey, London: Hogarth.
——(1930/1961) Civilization and Its Discontents, transl. and edited by James Strachey, New York:
Norton.
Harding, Sandra (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Harley, J.B. (1988) ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in Early Modern
Europe’, Imago Mundi 40:57–76.
——(1989) ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographica 26 (2):1–20.
——(n.d.) ‘Victims of a map: New England cartography and the Native Americans’, unpublished
manuscript.
Helgerson, Richard (1986) ‘The land speaks: cartography, chorography, and subversion in
Renaissance England’, Representations 16:51–85.
Jameson, Fredric (1984) ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review
146:53–92.
——(1988) ‘Cognitive mapping’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, pp. 347–57, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
——(1991) Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
JanMohamed, Abdul (1986) ‘The economy of Manichean allegory’, in Henry Louis Gates Jr (ed.)
‘Race’, Writing and Difference, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lacan, J. (1977) ‘Of the subject of certainty’, in Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.) Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis, transl. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton.
Mazey, Mary Ellen and Lee, David R. (1983) Her Space, Her Place: A Geography of Women, Resource
Publications in Geography, Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers.
REFERENCES/ 251
Mitchard, Jacqueline (1989) ‘Men still fail to pick up on all the pieces’, Milwaukee Journal 30
July:G1.
Rubinstein, C. (1980) ‘Survey report: how Americans view vacations’, Psychology Today 14:62–76.
Spivak, Gayatri (1991) ‘Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism’, in Robyn R.Warhol
and Diane Price Herndl (eds) Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 798–
814, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Tuan, Y.F. (1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Turner, Frederick (1980) Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, New York:
Viking.
Vaca, Cabeza de (1961) Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, transl. and edited by Cyclone
Covey, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
CHAPTER 4
AS IF THE MIRRORS HAD BLED
Agnew, J. (1993) ‘Representing space: space, scale and culture in social science’, in J.S. Duncan
and D.Ley (eds) Place/Culture/Representation, pp. 251–71, London: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. (1990) ‘The other question: difference, discrimination and the discourse of
colonialism’, in R.Ferguson et al (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, pp.
71–87, New York and Cambridge, MA: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press.
Bondi, L. (1992) ‘Gender symbols and urban landscapes’, Progress in Human Geography 16(2):157–
70.
——(1993) ‘Locating identity politics’, in M.Keith and S.Pile (eds) Place and the Politics of Identity,
pp. 84–103, London: Routledge.
Braidotti, R. (1991) Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, Cambridge:
Polity.
Brennan, T. (1991) ‘An impasse in psychoanalysis and feminism’, in S.Gunew (ed.) A Reader in
Feminist Knowledge, pp. 114–38, London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge.
——(1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge.
Christopherson, S. (1989) ‘On being outside “the project”’, Antipode 21(1):83–9.
Daniels, S. and Cosgrove, D. (1993) ‘Spectacle and text: landscape metaphors in cultural
geography’ in J.S.Duncan and D.Ley (eds) Place/Culture/Representation, pp. 57–77, London:
Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1979) Writing and Difference, transl. A.Bass, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Elliott, A. (1992) Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition, Oxford: Blackwell.
Fuss, D. (1989) ‘“Essentially speaking”: Luce Irigaray’s language of essence’, Hypatia 3(3):62–80.
Gallop, J. (1988) Thinking Through the Body, New York: Columbia University Press.
Gregory, D. (1994) Geographical Imaginations, Oxford: Blackwell.
Grosz, E. (1989) Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Hanson, S. (1992) ‘Presidential Address—Geography and feminism: worlds in collision?’ Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 82(4):569–86.
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association
Books.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell.
252 REFERENCES/
——(1993) ‘From space to place and back again: reflections on the condition of postmodernity’, in
J.Bird, B.Curtis, G.Robertson and L.Tickner (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global
Change, pp. 3–29, London: Routledge.
Holmlund, C. (1989) ‘I love Luce: the lesbian, mimesis and masquerade’, New Formations 9:105–
23.
Irigaray, L. (1985a) This Sex Which Is Not One, transl. C.Porter, Ithaca, NY; Cornell University
Press.
——(1985b) Speculum of the Other Woman, transl. G.C.Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
——(1991) The Irigaray Reader, edited by M.Whitford, Oxford: Blackwell.
——(1992) Elemental Passions, transl. J.Collie and J.Still, London: Athlone Press.
——(1993a) An Ethics of Sexual Difference, transl. C.Burke and G.C.Gill, London: Athlone Press.
——(1993b) Sexes and Genealogies, transl. G.C.Gill, New York: Columbia University Press.
——(1993c) Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, transl. A.Martin, London: Routledge.
Keith, M. and Pile, S. (1993) ‘Introduction: the politics of place’, in M.Keith and S.Pile (eds) Place
and the Politics of Identity, pp. 1–21, London: Routledge.
Lagopoulos, A.P. (1993) ‘Postmodernism, geography, and the social semiotics of space’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11(3):255–78.
Massey, D. (1993) ‘Politics and space/time’, in M.Keith and S.Pile (eds) Place and the Politics of
Identity, pp. 141–61, London: Routledge.
Merrifield, A. (1993) ‘Place and space: a Lefebvrian reconciliation’, Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 18(4):516–31.
Morris, M. (1988) The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, London: Verso.
——(1992) ‘The man in the mirror’, Theory, Culture & Society 10(2–3):253–79.
Pratt, G. (1992) ‘Spatial metaphors and speaking positions’, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 10(3):241–3.
Ragland-Sullivan, E. (1992) ‘The imaginary’, in E.Wright (ed.) Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical
Dictionary, pp. 173–6, Oxford: Blackwell.
Reichert, D. (1992) ‘On boundaries’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10(1):87–98.
——(1994) ‘Woman as utopia’, Gender, Place and Culture 1(1):91–102.
Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity.
Smith, N. (1984) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.
——(1993) ‘Homeless/global: scaling places’, in J.Bird, B.Curtis, G.Robertson and L. Tickner
(eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Culture, Global Change, pp. 87–119, London: Routledge.
Smith, N. and Katz, C. (1993) ‘Grounding metaphor: towards a spatialized politics’, in M.Keith
and S.Pile (eds) Place and the Politics of Identity, pp. 67–83, London: Routledge.
Soja, E. (1987) ‘The postmodernization of geography: a review’, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 77 (2): 289–94.
Soja, E. and Hooper, B. (1993) ‘The spaces that difference makes: some notes on the geographical
margins of the new cultural politics’, in M.Keith and S.Pile (eds) Place and the Politics of
Identity, pp. 183–205, London: Routledge.
Whitford, M. (1986) ‘Luce Irigaray and the female imaginary: speaking as a woman’, Radical
Philosophy 43:3–8
——(1991) Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London: Routledge.
REFERENCES/ 253
CHAPTER 5
RE-CORPOREALIZING VISION
Bordo, Susan (1987) The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture, New York: SUNY
Press.
Braverman, Harry (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Collins, Patricia Hill (1991a) Black Feminist Thought, New York: Routledge.
Cosgrove, Denis (1985) ‘Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea’, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers 10:45–62.
Crary, Jonathan (1988) ‘Modernizing vision’, in Hal Foster (ed.) Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay
Press.
——(1993) The Techniques of the Observer, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Haraway, Donna (1991a) ‘Animal sociology and a natural economy of the body politic’, in Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge.
——(1991b) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial
perspective’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge.
Harley, Brian (1989) ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographica 26(2):1–20.
hooks, bell (1990) Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics, Boston: South End Press.
Hoover, Herbert and Hoover, Lou (1950) Georgius Agricola: De Re Metallica, New York: Dover
Publications Inc.
Jacobs, Harriet (1988) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.
Merchant, Carolyn (1983) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San
Francisco: Harper.
Mintz, Sidney W. (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York:
Penguin Books.
Mitchell, Timothy (1988) Colonising Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Natter, W. and Jones, J.P. (1993) ‘Pets or meat: class, ideology, and space in Roger and Me’,
Antipode 25:140–58.
Rose, Gillian (1993a) ‘The geographical imagination’, in Feminism and Geography, pp. 62–86,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——(1993b) ‘A politics of paradoxical space’, in Feminism and Geography, pp. 137–61, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Schiebinger, Londa (1989) The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Wigley, Mark (1992) ‘Untitled: the housing of gender’, in Sexuality and Space, pp. 327–89, New
York: Princeton Architectural Press.
CHAPTER 6
GENDERING NATIONHOOD
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
2nd edn (original, 1983). New York: Verso.
254 REFERENCES/
Anti , Milica (1991) ‘Democracy between tyranny and liberty: women in post-“socialist” Slovenia’,
Feminist Review 39:149–54.
Bennington, Geoffrey (1990) ‘Postal politics and the institution of the nation’, in Homi K.Bhabha
(ed.) Nation and Narration, pp. 121–37, New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
Campbell, David (1992) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Chatterjee, Partha (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dalby, Simon (1994) ‘Gender and geopolitics: reading security discourse in the new world order’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12(5): 525–42.
Dölling, Irene (1991) ‘Between hope and hopelessness: women in the GDR after the “Turning
Point”’, Feminist Review 39:3–15.
Drakuli , Slavenka (1993) ‘Women and the new democracy in the former Yugoslavia’, in Nanette
Funk and Magda Mueller (eds) Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe
and the Former Soviet Union, pp. 123–30, New York: Routledge.
Einhorn, Barbara (1991) ‘Where have all the women gone? Women and the women’s movement in
East Central Europe’, Feminist Review 39:16–36.
——(1993) Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe,
New York: Verso.
Enloe, Cynthia (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
——(1993) The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Fábián, Katalin (1993) ‘The political aspects of women’s changing status in Central and Eastern
Europe’, in Proceedings of the 1993 Maxwell Colloquium, pp. 73–80, Maxwell School of Citizenship
and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.
Foucault, Michel (1980) ‘The history of sexuality’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault, pp. 183–93, edited by Colin Gordon, London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Funk, Nanette (1993) ‘Feminism East and West’, in Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller (eds) Gender
Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, pp. 318–
30, New York: Routledge.
Funk, Nanette and Mueller, Magda (eds) (1993) Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from
Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, New York: Routledge.
Gorbachev, Mikhail (1987) Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, London: Fontana.
Goven, Joanna (1993) ‘Gender politics in Hungary: autonomy and antifeminism’, in Nanette Funk
and Magda Mueller (eds) Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and
the Former Soviet Union, pp. 224–40, New York: Routledge.
Hauser, Ewa, Heynes, Barbara and Mansbridge, Jane (1993) ‘Feminism in the interstices of politics
and culture: Poland in transition’, in Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller (eds) Gender and Post-
Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, pp. 257–73, New York:
Routledge.
Jankowska, Hanna (1991) ‘Abortion, Church and politics in Poland’, Feminist Review 39:174–81.
Johnson, Nuala (1995) ‘The renaissance of nationalism’, in R.J.Johnston, P.J.Taylor and W.J.Watts
(eds) Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Kiss, Yudit (1991) ‘The second “No”: women in Hungary’, Feminist Review 39:49–57.
REFERENCES/ 255
Marston, Sally (1990) ‘Who are “the people”? Gender, citizenship, and the making of the American
nation’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8:449–58.
McClintock, Anne (1993) ‘Family feuds: gender, nationalism and the family’, Feminist Review 44:61–
80.
Mili , Andjelka (1993) ‘Women and nationalism in the former Yugoslavia’, in Nanette Funk and
Magda Mueller (eds) Gender and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former
Soviet Union, pp. 109–22, New York: Routledge.
Molyneux, Maxine (1991) Interview with Anastasya Posadskaya (25 September 1990). Feminist
Review 39:133–40.
Mouffe, Chantal (1992) ‘Feminism, citizenship and radical democratic politics’, in Judith Butler and
Joan Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, pp. 369–84, New York: Routledge.
Nash, Catherine (1994) ‘Remapping the body/land: new cartographies of identity, gender, and
landscape in Ireland’, in Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (eds) Writing Women and Space: Colonial
and Postcolonial Geographies, pp. 227–50, New York: Guilford Press.
Radhakrishnan, R. (1992) ‘Nationalism, gender, and the narrative of identity’, in Andrew Parker,
Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yaeger (eds) Nationalisms and Sexualities, pp. 77–95,
New York: Routledge.
Renan, Ernest (1990) ‘What is a nation?’ in Homi K.Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration, pp. 8–22, New
York: Routledge.
Sparke, Matthew (1994) ‘Writing on patriarchal missiles: the chauvinism of the “Gulf War” and the
limits of critique’, Environment and Planning A 26:1061–89.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty and Guha, Ranajit (eds) (1988) Selected Subaltern Studies, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Tickner, J.Ann (1992) Gender and International Relations, New York: Columbia University Press.
Todova, Maria (1993) ‘The Bulgarian case: women’s issues or feminist issues?’ in Nanette Funk and
Magda Mueller (eds) Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the
Former Soviet Union, pp. 30–8, New York: Routledge.
Watson, Peggy (1993) ‘Eastern Europe’s silent revolution: gender’, Sociology 27(3): 471–87.
Young, Iris M. (1990) ‘The ideal of community and the politics of difference’, in Linda J.Nicholson
(ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism, pp. 300–23, New York: Routledge.
Yuval-Davis, Nira (1991) ‘The citizenship debate: women, ethnic processes and the state’, Feminist
Review 39:58–68.
CHAPTER 7
MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY
Bourdieu, P (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cockburn, C. (1985) Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technical Know-how, London: Pluto
Press.
de Beauvoir, S. (1949/1972) The Second Sex, transl. H.M.Parshley, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Dinnerstein, D. (1987) The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World, London: The Women’s
Press.
Easlea, B. (1981) Science and Sexual Oppression: Patriarchy’s Confrontation with Woman and Nature,
London: Weidenfield & Nicolson.
Halford, S. and Savage, M. (1995) ‘Restructuring organisations, changing people: gender and
restructuring in banking and local government’, Work, Employment and Society 9(1):97–122.
256 REFERENCES/
Hall, P. (1985) The geography of the fifth Kondratieff, in P.Hall and A.Markusen (eds) Silicon
Landscapes, pp. 1–19, London, Allen & Unwin.
Hartsock, N. (1985) Money, Sex and Power, Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Henry, N and Massey, D. (1995), ‘Competitive time-space in high technology’, Geoforum 26 (1):49–
64.
Ho, M.-W. (1993) The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms, London: World Scientific.
Keller, E.F. (1982) ‘Feminism and science’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7(3):589–
602.
——(1985) Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Kidder, T. (1982) The Soul of a New Machine, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.
Lloyd, G. (1984) The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, London: Methuen.
Massey, D. and Henry, N. (forthcoming) ‘Time-spaces in and around high-tech’.
Massey, D., Quintas, P. and Wield, D. (1992) High-tech Fantasies: Science Parks in Society, Science and
Space, London: Routledge.
Moore, H. (1986) Space, Text and Gender, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Noble, D. (1992) A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science, New York:
Alfred A.Knopf.
O’Brien, M. (1981) The Politics of Reproduction, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Sartre, J.-P. (1943) Being and Nothingness, transl. H.E.Barnes, London: Methuen, 1958.
Segal Quince & Partners (1985) The Cambridge Phenomenon, Cambridge: Segal Quince & Partners.
Turkle, S. (1984) The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, London: Granada.
Wajcman, J. (1991) Feminism Confronts Technology, Cambridge: Polity Press.
CHAPTER 8
RENEGOTIATING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND
PRIVATE SPACES
Anzaldua, G. (1987) The Borderlands/La Frontera New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Bell, D. (1995) ‘Perverse dynamics, sexual citizenship, and the transformation of intimacy’, in
D.Bell and G.Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire, London: Routledge.
Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (1995) ‘Introduction’ in D.Bell and G.Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire,
London: Routledge.
Bell, D., Binnie, J., Cream, J. and Valentine, G. (1994) ‘All hyped up and no place to go’, Gender,
Place and Culture 1(1):31–47.
Bell, S. (1994) Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, Bloomington, IL.: Indiana University
Press.
Benhabib, S. (1992) Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics,
New York: Routledge.
Brownmiller, S. (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, London: Simon & Schuster.
Buel, S. (1988) ‘Mandatory arrest for domestic violence’, Harvard Women’s Law Reporter 11.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge.
——(1994) ‘Gender as performance’, Radical Philosophy 67:32–9.
Calhoun, C. (ed.) (1993) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cobbe, S. (1868) Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors, in J.Cohen and A.Arato (1992) Civil Society
and Political Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cohen, J. and Arato, A. (1992) Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
REFERENCES/ 257
Crenshaw, K. (1994) ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against
women of color’, in M.Fineman and R.Mykitiuk (eds) The Public Nature of Private Violence, New
York: Routledge.
Cresswell, T. (1996) In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
de Beauvoir, S. (1974) The Second Sex, Harmondsworth: Penguin. (First published 1949.)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl.
B.Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Edwards, S. (ed.) (1989) ‘The extent of the problem: how widespread is domestic violence?’ in
Policing Domestic Violence: Women, the Law and the State, London: Sage.
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 edited by
Colin Gordon, New York: Random House.
Fraser, N. (1992) ‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing
democracy’, in C.Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, J. (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hammerton, A.J. (1992) Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-century Married Life,
London: Routledge.
Herek, G. (1987) ‘Can functions be measured? A new perspective on functional approach to
attitudes’, Social Psychology Quarterly 50:285–303.
hooks, b. (1990) Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics, Boston: South End Press.
——(1991) ‘Marginality as a site of resistance’, in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T.Minh-
ha and Cornel West (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, pp. 341–4,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Howell, Philip (1993) ‘Public space and the public sphere: political theory and the historical
geography of modernity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11:303–22.
Lloyd, G. (1984) The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, London: Methuen.
MacKinnon, C. (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Massey, D. (1993) ‘Power geometry and a progressive sense of place’, in J.Bird, B.Curtis,
G.Robertson and L.Tickner (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, London:
Routledge.
Massumi, Brian (1992) A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Matthews, G. (1992) The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States:
1638–1978, New York: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, D. (1995) ‘The end of public space? People’s Park, definitions of the public, and
democracy’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85 (1): 108–33.
Munt, S. (1995) ‘The lesbian flâneur’, in D.Bell and G.Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire, London:
Routledge.
O’Donovan, K. (1993) ‘Sexual divisions in the law’, in S.Jackson (ed.) Women’s Studies: A Reader,
New York: Harvester Press.
Pain, R. (1991) ‘Space, sexual violence and social control: integrating geographical and feminist
analyses of women’s fear of crime’, Progress in Human Geography 15(4): 415–31.
Pence, E. and Shepard, M. (1988) ‘Integrating feminist theory and practice: the challenge of the
battered women’s movement’, in K.Yllo and M.Bograd (eds) Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse,
pp. 282–98, Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Pleck, E. (1987) Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy from Colonial Times Until the
Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robbins, Bruce (ed.) (1993) The Phantom Public Sphere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
258 REFERENCES/
Saland, S. (New York State Senator) (1994) ‘News release’, distributed 2 February.
Schneider, E. (1994) ‘The violence of privacy’, in M.Fineman and R.Mykitiuk (eds) The Public
Nature of Private Violence, New York: Routledge.
Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies, New York: Verso.
Spivak, G.C. (1988) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge.
Squires, J. (1994) ‘Private lives, secluded places: privacy as political possibility’, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 12:387–401.
Stone, L. (1977) Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, New York: Harper & Row.
Thomas, D. and Beasley, M. (1993) ‘Domestic violence as a human rights issue’ 15 Human Rights
Quarterly 36.
Tosh, John (1994) ‘What should historians do with masculinity? Reflections on nineteenth-century
Britain’, History Workshop Journal 38 (Autumn).
United States Commission on Civil Rights (1982) Under the Rule of Thumb, Washington, DC.
Valentine, G. (1989) ‘The geography of women’s fear’, Area 21:385–90.
——(1992) ‘(Hetero) sexing space: lesbian perceptions and experiences of everyday spaces’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11:395–413.
——(1994) ‘Girls, girls, girls—contested femininities in everyday spaces’, paper presented at the
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, San Francisco.
Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Zorza, J. (1992) ‘The criminal law of misdemeanor domestic violence, 1970–1990’, 83 Journal of
Criminal Law and Criminology 83–46.
CHAPTER 9
(RE)NEGOTIATING THE ‘HETEROSEXUAL STREET’
Aurand, S., Addessa, R. and Bush, C. (1985) Violence and Discrimination against Philadelphia Lesbian
and Gay People: A Study by the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force, Philadelphia: Philadelphia
Lesbian and Gay Task Force.
Bell, D. (1995) ‘Perverse dynamics, sexual citizenship and the transformation of intimacy’, in
D.Bell and G.Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, London: Routledge.
Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (1995) ‘The sexed self: strategies of performance, sites of resistance’, in
S.Pile and N.Thrift (eds) Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, London:
Routledge.
Bell, D., Binnie, J., Cream, J. and Valentine, G. (1994) ‘All hyped up and no place to go’, Gender,
Place and Culture 1:37–47.
Berrill, K. (1992) ‘Anti-gay violence and victimisation in the United States: an overview’, in
G.Herek and K.Berrill (eds) Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence against Lesbians and Gay Men,
London: Sage.
Bradby, B. (1993) ‘Lesbians and popular music: does it matter who is singing?’ in G.Griffin (ed.)
Outwrite: Lesbianism and Popular Culture, London: Pluto Press.
Bristow, J. (1989) ‘Being gay: politics, pleasure, identity’, New Formations 9:61–81.
Bunch, C. (1991) ‘Not for lesbians only’, in S.Gunew (ed.) A Reader in Feminist Knowledge, London:
Routledge.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge.
Comstock, G.D. (1989) ‘Victims of anti-gay/lesbian violence’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence 4:101–
6.
——(1991) Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men, New York: Colombia University Press.
REFERENCES/ 259
Coward, R. (1984) Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today, London: Paladin Books.
Davis, T. (1995) ‘The diversity of Queer Politics and the redefinition of sexual identity and
community in urban spaces’, in D.Bell and G.Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire: Geographies of
Sexualities, London: Routledge.
Diva (1994) ‘Lesbian avengers campaign kicks off with series of zaps’, 9 October.
Evans, D. (1993) Sexual Citizenship: The Material Constructions of Sexualities, London: Routledge.
Foley, C. (1994) Sexuality and the State: Human Rights Violations against Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and
Transgendered People, London: National Council for Civil Liberties.
Forrest, K V. (1984) Amateur City, London: Pandora.
Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish, New York: Vintage.
Hayes, J (1976) ‘Gayspeak’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 62:256–66.
Herek, G (1988) ‘Heterosexuals’ attitudes toward lesbians and gay men: correlates and gender
differences’, Journal of Sex Research 25(4):451–77.
Hopkins, R. (1994) ‘Sisterly subversion’, Rouge 18:22–3.
London Lesbian Offensive Group (1984) ‘Anti-lesbianism in the Women’s Liberation Movement’ in
H.Kanter, S.Lefanu, S.Shah and C.Spedding (eds) Sweeping Statements: Writings from the Women’s
Liberation Movement 1981–83, London: The Women’s Press.
Massey, D. (1991) ‘The political place of locality studies’, Environment & Planning A 23: 267–81.
McDowell, L. (1995) ‘Bodywork: heterosexual gender performances in city workplaces’, in D.Bell
and G.Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, London: Routledge.
Meono-Picado, P. (1995) ‘Redefining the barricades: Latina lesbian politics and the appropriation of
public space’, paper presented at the New Horizons in Feminist Geography conference,
Kentucky, USA. Available from author at the School of Geography, Clark University, USA.
Mitchell, D. (1995) ‘The end of public space? People’s Park, definitions of the public and
democracy’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85(1):108–33.
Munt, S. (1995) ‘The lesbian flâneur’, in D.Bell and G.Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire: Geographies of
Sexualities, London: Routledge.
Painter, D.S. (1981) ‘Recognition among lesbians in straight settings’, in J.W.Chesbro (ed.)
Gayspeak, New York: Pilgrim Press.
Probyn, E. (1992) ‘Technologising the self: a future anterior for cultural studies’, in L.Grossberg,
C.Nelson and P.Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies, pp. 501–11, London: Routledge.
——(1995) ‘Lesbians in space. Gender, sex and the structure of missing’, Gender, Place and Culture 2
(1):77–84.
Reekie, G. (1993) Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store, St Leonards, NSW, Australia:
Allen & Unwin.
Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Rubin, G. (1984) ‘Thinking sex: notes towards a radical theory of the politics of sexuality’, in
C.Vance (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, London: Routledge.
Scene Out (1991) ‘It ‘Asda’ be perv-ect…’, December, issue 33:9.
Sinfield, A. (1993) ‘Should there be lesbian and gay intellectuals?’ in J.Bristow and A.Wilson (eds)
Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Politics, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Smyth, C. (1992) Lesbians Talk Queer Notions, London: Scarlett Press.
Valentine, G. (1993) ‘(Hetero) sexing space: lesbian perceptions and experience of everyday
spaces’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11:395–413.
——(1995) ‘Creating transgressive space: the music of kd lang’, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geography 20:474–85.
260 REFERENCES/
Walker, L. (1995) ‘More than just skin-deep: fem(me)ininity and the subversion of identity’,
Gender, Place and Culture 2(1):71–6.
Ware, V. (1992) Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History, London: Verso.
Weeks, J. (1992) ‘Changing sexual and personal values in the age of AIDS’, paper presented at the
Forum on Sexuality Conference, Sexual Cultures in Europe, Amsterdam, June.
CHAPTER 10
RENEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL/SEXUAL IDENTITIES OF
PLACES
Anderson, Craig L. (1982) ‘Males as sexual assault victims: multiple levels of trauma’, Journal of
Homosexuality 7:145–62.
Berrill, K.T. (1992) ‘Anti-gay violence and victimization in the United States: an overview’, in
Gregory M.Herek and Kevin T.Berrill (eds) Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence Against Lesbians
and Gay Men, pp. 19–46, Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Bursik, Robert J., Jr. and Grasmick, Harold G. (1991) Neighborhoods and Crime: The Dimensions of
Effective Community Control, New York: Lexington Books.
Comstock, Gary David (1991) Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men, New York: Columbia
University Press.
D’Emilio, J. (1981) ‘Gay politics, gay communities: the San Francisco experience’, Socialist Review
55:77–104.
Davis, T. (1994) ‘Gay territories, queer spaces: reinforcing and destroying the power of the “gay
ghetto”’, paper presented at Syracuse University Symposia, Syracuse, NY, 11 February.
England, Kim (1991) ‘Gender relations and the spatial structure of the city’, Geoforum 22(2):135–
47.
Herek, G. and Berrill, K.T. (1992) ‘Primary and secondary victimization in anti-gay hate crimes:
official response and public policy’, in Gregory M.Herek and Kevin T.Berrilll (eds) Hate
Crimes: Confronting Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men, pp. 289–305, Newbury Park, CA:
Sage.
McDowell, L. (1983) ‘Towards an understanding of the gender division of urban space’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1:59–72.
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (1994) Anti-Gay/Lesbian Violence, Victimization, and Defamation
in 1993, Washington: National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute.
Pain, R. (1991) ‘Space, sexual violence and social control: integrating geographical and feminist
analyses of women’s fear of crime’, Progress in Human Geography 15: 415–32.
Peake, L. (1993) ‘“Race” and sexuality: challenging the patriarchal structuring of urban social
space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11:415–32.
Riger, Stephanie (1991) ‘On Women’, in Dan A.Lewis (ed.) Reactions to Crime, Newbury Park, CA:
Sage.
Smith, S. (1986) Crime, Space and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Valentine, G. (1989) ‘The geography of women’s fear’, Area 21:385–90.
——(1993) ‘(Hetero) sexing space: lesbian perceptions and experiences of everyday spaces’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11:395–413.
van der Wurff, Adri, van Staalduinen, Leendert and Stringer, Peter (1989) ‘Fear of crime in residential
environments: testing a social psychological model’, Journal of Social Psychology 129(2):141–
60.
REFERENCES/ 261
CHAPTER 11
ON BEING NOT EVEN ANYWHERE NEAR ‘THE PROJECT’
Adler, S. and Brenner, J. (1992) ‘Gender and space: lesbians and gay men in the city’, International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 16:24–34.
Anderson, P. (1980) Debates in Western Marxism, London: Verso.
Barrett, M. and Phillips, A. (eds) (1992) Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Bart, P.B. and Moran, E.G. (1993) Violence Against Women: The Bloody Footprints, London: Sage.
Bechdel, Alison (1994) Dykes to Watch Out For: 1994 Calendar, Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books.
Bell, D. (1991) ‘Insignificant others: lesbian and gay geographies’, Area 23:323–9.
Bell, D., Binnie, J., Cream, J. and Valentine, G. (1994) ‘All hyped up and no place to go’, Gender,
Place and Culture 1:31–48.
Bondi, L. (1992) ‘Politics of identity’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Institute of
British Geographers, Swansea, Wales, January.
Bowlby, S., Lewis, J., McDowell, L. and Foord, J. (1989) ‘The geography of gender’, in R.Peet
and N.Thrift (eds) New Models in Geography, pp. 157–75, Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Chouinard, V. (1989) ‘Class formation, conflict and housing policies’, International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 13(2):390–416.
——(1992) ‘Geography and law: which ways ahead?’ paper presented in special session on
Geography and Law, Institute of British Geographers Annual Meeting, Swansea, Wales,
January.
——(1994) ‘Geography, law and legal struggles: which ways ahead?’ Progress in Human Geography
18:415–40.
Christopherson, S. (1989) ‘On being outside “the project”’, Antipode 21:83–89.
Dear, M. (1981) ‘Social and spatial reproduction of the mentally ill’, in M.Dear and A.J. Scott (eds)
Urbanization and Planning in Capitalist Societies, pp. 481–97, London: Methuen.
——(1988) ‘The postmodern challenge: reconstructing human geography’, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 13:262–74.
Dear, M. and Wolch, J. (1987) Landscapes of Despair: From Deinstitutionalization to Homelessness,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Deutsche, R. (1991) ‘Boys’ town’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9: 5–30.
Disabled Persons for Employment Equity (1992) unpublished flyer, Toronto, Canada.
Dobash, R.E. and Dobash, R.P. (1992) Women, Violence and Social Change, New York: Routledge.
Dorn, M. (1994) ‘Disability as spatial dissidence: a cultural geography of the stigmatized body’,
unpublished MA thesis, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University.
Duncan, S. and Goodwin, M. (1988) The Local State and Uneven Development: Behind the Local
Government Crisis, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Duncan, S. and Ley, D. (1982) ‘Structural Marxism and human geography’, Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 72:30–59.
Elliott, S. (1992) ‘Psychosocial impacts in populations exposed to solid waste facilities’, unpublished
PhD dissertation, Geography Department, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.
England, K.V.L. (1994) ‘Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research’,
Professional Geographer 46:80–9.
Faludi, S. (1992) Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women, New York: Crown.
Fincher, R. (1991) ‘Caring for workers’ dependents: gender, class and local state practice in
Melbourne’, Political Geography Quarterly 10:356–81.
262 REFERENCES/
Findlay, S. and Randall, M. (eds) (1988) ‘Feminist perspectives on the Canadian state’, Special Issue
on Women and the State, Resources for Feminist Research, 17(3).
Fraser, N. (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Thought,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gilbert, M. (1994) ‘The politics of location: doing feminist research at “home”’, The Professional
Geographer 46:90–6.
Golledge, R. (1993) ‘Geography and the disabled: a survey with special reference to vision impaired
and blind populations’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18:63–85.
Hahn, H. (1986) ‘Disability and the urban environment: a perspective on Los Angeles’, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space 4:273–88.
——(1989) ‘Disability and the reproduction of bodily images: the dynamics of human
appearances’, in J.Wolch and M.Dear (eds) The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life,
pp. 370–88, Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Harvey D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
——(1992) ‘Postmodern morality plays’, Antipode 24:300–26.
hooks, b. (1990) Black Looks: Race and Representation, Toronto: Between the Lines.
Johnston, G. (1979) Which Way Out of the Men’s Room? South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes & Co. Inc.
Johnston, J. (1973) Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Katz, C. (1994) ‘Playing the field: questions of fieldwork in geography’, The Professional Geographer
46:67–72.
Knopp, L. (1987) ‘Social theory, social movements and public policy: recent accomplishments of
the gay and lesbian movements in Minneapolis, Minnesota’, International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 11:243–61.
——(1990a) ‘Social consequences of homosexuality’, Geographical Magazine 62: 20–5.
——(1990b) ‘Some theoretical implications of gay involvement in an urban land market’, Political
Geography Quarterly 9:337–52.
Knox, P.L. (1991) ‘The restless urban landscape: economic and sociocultural change and the
transformation of Metropolitan Washington, D.C.’, Annals of the American Association of
Geographers 81:101–209.
Kobayashi, A. (1994) ‘Coloring the field: gender, “race”, and the politics of fieldwork’, The
Professional Geographer 46:73–80.
Kobayashi, A. and Mackenzie, S. (eds) (1989) Remaking Human Geography, Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Lauria, M. and Knopp, L. (1985) ‘Toward and analysis of the role of gay communities in the urban
renaissance’, Urban Geography 6:152–69.
Ley, D. and Mills, C. (1993) ‘Can there be a postmodernism of resistance in the urban landscape?’
in P.L.Knox (ed.) The Restless Urban Landscape, pp. 255–78, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall.
Massey, D. (1991) ‘Flexible sexism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9: 31–57.
Masuda, S. and Ridington, J. (1992) Meeting Our Needs: An Access Manual for Transition Houses,
Toronto: DAWN Canada.
McDowell, L. (1992a) ‘Doing gender: feminism, feminists, and research methods in human
geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17:399–416.
——(1992b) ‘Multiple voices: speaking from inside and outside “The Project”’, Antipode 24:56–72.
——(1993a) ‘Space, place and gender relations, Part I: Feminist empiricism and the geography of
social relations’, Progress in Human Geography 17:157–79.
——(1993b) ‘Space, place and gender relations, Part II: Identity difference, feminist geometries
and geographies’, Progress in Human Geography 17:305–18.
REFERENCES/ 263
Miliband, R. (1991) Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism, Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press.
Morris, J. (1991) Pride Against Prejudice, London: The Women’s Press.
Mouffe, C. (1988) ‘Radical democracy: modern or postmodern?’ in A.Ross (ed.) Universal Abandon?
the Politics of Postmodernism, pp. 31–45, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Murgatroyd, L., Savage, M., Shapiro, D., Urry, J., Walby, S., Warde, A. and Mark-Lawson, J.
(1985) Localities, Class and Gender, London: Pion Ltd.
Nast, H.J. (1994) ‘Women in the field: critical feminist methodologies and theoretical
perspectives’, The Professional Geographer 46:54–66.
National Council of Welfare (1990) Women and Poverty Revisited, Ottawa: Minister of Supply and
Services.
Oliver, M. (1990) The Politics of Disablement, New York: Macmillan.
Palmer, B. (1990) Descent into Discourse, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Peake, L. (1993) ‘“Race” and sexuality: challenging the patriarchal structure of urban social space’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11:415–32.
Peet, R. and Thrift, N. (eds) (1989a) New Models in Geography, Vols 1 and 2, Boston: Unwin
Hyman.
——(1989b) ‘Political economy and human geography’, in R.Peet and N.Thrift (eds) New Models in
Geography, pp. 3–29, Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Pratt, G. (1993) ‘Feminist geography’, Progress Report in Urban Geography 13:385–91.
Pratt, G. and Hanson, S. (1994) ‘Geography and the construction of difference’, Gender, Place and
Culture: a journal of feminist geography 1(1):5–30.
Rooney, F. and Israel, P. (eds) (1985) ‘Women and disability’, Special Issue of Resources for Feminist
Research 4(1).
Ross, A. (ed.) (1988) Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Ross, B. (1990) ‘The house that Jill built: lesbian feminists organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980’,
Feminist Review 35:75–91.
Staeheli, L.A. and Lawson V.A. (1994) ‘A discussion of “women in the field”: the politics of
feminist fieldwork’, The Professional Geographer 46:96–102.
Statistics Canada (1993) The Violence Against Women Survey: Highlights, Ottawa: Minister Responsible
for Statistics Canada.
Taylor, S.M. (1989) ‘Community exclusion of the mentally ill’, in J.Wolch and M.Dear (eds) The
Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life, pp. 316–30, Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Thompson, E.P. (1978) ‘The poverty of theory or an orrery of errors’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other
Essays, pp. 1–210, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Valentine, G. (1992) ‘Towards a geography of the lesbian community’, paper presented at the
Women in Cities conference, Hamburg, 10 April.
——(1993a) ‘“Desperately seeking Susan”: a geography of lesbian friendships’, Area 25:109–16.
——(1993b) ‘Negotiating and managing multiple sexual identities: lesbian time-space strategies’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18:237–48.
——(1993c) ‘(Hetero) sexing space: lesbian perceptions and experiences of everyday spaces’,
Society and Space 11:395–413.
Walker, G. (1990) Family Violence and the Women’s Movement: The Conceptual Politics of Struggle,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Winchester, H.P.M. and White, P.E. (1988) ‘The location of marginalized groups in the inner
city’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6:37–54.
264 REFERENCES/
Wolch, J. and Dear, M. (eds) (1989) The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life, Boston:
Unwin Hyman.
CHAPTER 12
ENGENDERING RACE RESEARCH
Adilman, T. (1984) ‘A preliminary sketch of Chinese women and work in British Columbia 1858–
1950’, in B.Latham, R.Latham and R.Pazdro (eds) Not Just Pin Money, pp. 53–78, Victoria:
Camusun College.
Amos, V. and Parmar, P. (1984) ‘Challenging imperial feminisms’, Feminist Review 32.
Anderson, K. (1990) ‘Chinatown re-oriented: a critical analysis of recent redevelopment schemes in
a Sydney and Melbourne enclave’, Australian Geographical Studies 28(2):137–54.
——(1991) Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980, Montreal: McGill-
Queens University Press.
Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. (1992) Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle,
London: Routledge.
Back, L. (1994) ‘The “white negro” revisited: race and masculinities in South London’, in
A.Cornwall and N.Lindisfarne (eds) Dislocating Masculinities, pp. 172–83, London: Routledge.
Bear, L. (1994) ‘Miscegenations of modernity: constructing European respectability and race in the
Indian railway colony, 1857–1931’, Women’s History Review 3(4): 531–48.
Bhabha, H. (1990a) ‘The other question: difference, discrimination and the discourse of
colonialism’, in R.Ferguson, M.Gever, T.Minh-ha and C.West (eds) Out There: Marginalisation
and Contemporary Cultures, pp. 71–88, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
——(ed.) (1990b) Nation and Narration, London: Routledge.
Bottomley, G. (1991) ‘Representing the “second generation”: subjects, objects and ways of
knowing’, in G.Bottomley, M.de Lepervanche and J.Martin (eds) Intersexions: Gender/Class/
Culture/Ethnicity, pp. 92–110, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Bottomley, G., and de Lepervanche, M. (1984) Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Australia, Sydney:
Allen & Unwin.
Bottomley, G., de Lepervanche, M. and Martin, J. (eds) (1991) Intersexions: Gender/ Class/Culture/
Ethnicity, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
Canada (1885a) Debates of the House of Commons.
——(1885b) Sessional Papers, No. 54a, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration.
——(1887) Debates of the House of Commons, 31 May.
——(1922) Debates of the House of Commons, 8 May.
Chong, D. (1994) The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London: MacGibbon & Kee.
Collins, P. (1991) ‘Learning from the outsider within: the sociological significance of black feminist
thought’, in J.Hartman and E.Messer-Davidow (eds) (En)gendering Knowledge: Feminists in the
Academe, pp. 40–65, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Donald, J. and Rattansi, A. (eds) (1992) ‘Race’, culture and difference, Milton Keynes and London:
The Open University/Sage.
Donaldson, L. (1992) Decolonizing Femimsms: Race, Gender and Empire-building, Chapel Hill and
London: The University of North Carolina Press.
REFERENCES/ 265
Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, transl. by A.M.Sheridan Smith, New York:
Harper & Row.
——(1979) Discipline and Punish, New York: Viking.
hooks, b. (1981) Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Politics, London: South End Press.
——(1991) Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround.
Jackson, P. (1994) ‘Black male: advertising and the cultural politics of masculinity’, Gender, Place
and Culture 1(1):49–60.
Jennett, C. and Randal, S. (eds) (1987) Three Worlds of Inequality: Race, Class and Gender, South
Melbourne: Macmillan.
Kobayashi, A. and Peake, L. (1994) ‘Unnatural discourse: “race” and gender in geography’, Gender,
Place and Culture 1(2):225–43.
Kwong, P. (forthcoming) ‘Back to basics: politics of organizing Chinese women garment workers’,
Social Policy.
Larbalestier, J. (1991) ‘Through their own eyes: an interpretation of Aboriginal women’s writing’,
in G.Bottomley, M.de Lepervanche and J.Martin (eds) Intersexions: Gender/Class/Culture/
Ethnicity, pp. 75–91, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Lee, S. (1990) Disappearing Moon Cafe, Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre.
Li, P. (1988) The Chinese in Canada, Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Lowe, J. (1991) Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
Nicholson, L. (ed.) (1990) Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge.
Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pettman, J. (1992) Living in the Margins: Racism, Sexism and Feminism in Australia, Sydney: Allen &
Unwin.
Plumwood, V. (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge.
Poovey, M. Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in Modern Victorian England, Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1989.
Pratt, G. (1993) ‘Reflections on feminist empirics’, Antipode 25(1):51–63.
Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Sacks, K. (1989) ‘Towards a unified theory of class, race and gender’, American Ethnologist 16(3):
534–50.
Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Random House.
Satzewich, V. (1989) ‘Racisms: the reactions to Chinese migrants in Canada at the turn of the
century’, International Sociology 4(3):311–27.
Schaffer, K. (1995) ‘The Elisa Fraser story and constructions of gender, race and class in Australian
culture’, Hecate 17(1):136–49.
Singleton, C. (1989) ‘Race and gender in feminist theory’, Sage 6(1):12–17.
Spelman, E. (1978) Inessential Women: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, Boston: Beacon Press,
1988.
Stepan, N. (1991) The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America, Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press.
Thomas, N. (1994) Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government, Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press.
Walby, S. (1992) ‘Post-post modernism? Theorizing social complexity’, in M.Barrett and A.Phillips
(eds) Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, pp. 31–52 Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ware, V. (1992) Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History, London: Verso.
266 REFERENCES/
Ward, P. (1978) White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British
Columbia, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Wickberg, E., Con, H., Johnson, G. and Willmott, W. (1982) From China to Canada: A History of the
Chinese Communities in Canada, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
Yee, P. (1988) Saltwater City, Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre.
Yuval-Davis, N. (1991) ‘The citizenship debate: women, the state and ethnic processes’, Feminist
Review 39:58–68.
CHAPTER 13
DISPLACING THE FIELD IN FIELDWORK
Bell, David, Binnie, Jon, Cream, Julia and Valentine, Gill (1994) ‘All hyped up and no place to go’,
Gender, Place and Culture 1(1):31–47.
Butler, Judith (1994) ‘Gender as performance’, Radical Philosophy 67:32–9.
Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
——(1990) ‘Notes on (field) notes’, in Roger Sanjek (ed.) The Makings of Anthropology, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Cosgrove, Denis (1993) ‘Commentary’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83(3):515–
16.
Cosgrove, Denis and Daniels, Stephen (1989) ‘Fieldwork as theatre: a week’s performance in
Venice and its region’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education 13(2): 169–82.
de Lauretis, Teresa (1987) Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1981) Dissemination, transl. Barbara Johnson, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
——(1982) ‘White mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, pp.
109–36, transl. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dyck, Isabel (1993) ‘Ethnography: a feminist method?’ The Canadian Geographer 37(1): 52–7.
Emberly, Julia V. (1993) Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women’s Writings, Postcolonial
Theory, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
England, Kim V.L. (1994) ‘Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality and feminist research’, The
Professional Geographer 46(1):80–9.
Foucault, Michel (1980) ‘Questions on geography’, in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, pp. 63–77, New York: Pantheon.
Freud, Sigmund (1959) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, transl. James Strachey, New York: Bantam.
(Orig. 1928.)
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.
——(1988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gilbert, Melissa R. (1994) ‘The politics of location: doing feminist research at “home”’, The
Professional Geographer 46(1):90–6.
Gordon, Deborah (1988) ‘Writing culture, writing feminism: the poetics and politics of
experimental ethnography’, Inscriptions 3/4:7–24.
Gregory, Derek (1994) Geographical Imaginations, New York: Blackwell.
Grosz, Elizabeth (1990) ‘Inscriptions and body-maps: representations and the corporeal’, in Terry
Threadgold and Anne Cranny-Francis (eds) Feminine/Masculine and Representation, pp. 62–74,
Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
REFERENCES/ 267
Haraway, Donna (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New
York: Routledge.
——(1991a) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial
perspective’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 183–202, New
York: Routledge.
——(1991b) ‘The contest for primate nature: daughters of man-the-hunter in the field, 1960–80’,
in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 149–81, New York: Routledge.
——(1991c) ‘A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth
century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 149–81, New York:
Routledge.
Harding, Sandra (1991) ‘Who knows? Identities and feminist epistemology’, in Joan Hartman and
Ellen Messer-Davidous (eds) (En)Gendering Knowledge, pp. 110–15, Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press.
hooks, bell (1990) Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics, Boston: South End Press.
Hyndman, Jennifer (1995) ‘Solo feminist geography: a lesson in space’, Antipode 22(2) 197–208.
Jarosz, Lucy (1992) ‘Constructing the Dark Continent: metaphor as a geographic representation of
Africa’, Geografiska Annaler 74, B (2):102–15.
Jay, Martin (1990) ‘Fieldwork and theorizing in intellectual history’, Theory and Society 19:311–21.
Katz, Cindi (1992) ‘All the world is staged: intellectuals and the process of ethnography’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10:495–510.
——(1994) ‘Playing the field: questions of fieldwork in geography’, The Professional Geographer 46(1):
66–72.
Katz, Cindi and Smith, Neil (1993) ‘Grounding metaphor: towards a spatialized politics’, in
Michael Keith and Steve Pile (eds) Place and the Politics of Identity, pp. 67–83, New York:
Routledge.
Kirby, Kathleen M. (1993) ‘Thinking through the boundary: the politics of location, subjects and
space’, boundary 2 20(2):173–89.
Kobayashi, Audrey (1994) ‘Coloring the field: gender, “race”, and the politics of fieldwork’, The
Professional Geographer 46(1):73–80.
LaCapra, Dominick (1980) ‘Who rules metaphor?’ diacritics 10(4):15–28.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell.
Madge, Clare (1993) ‘Boundary disputes: comments on Sidaway (1992)’, Area 25(3): 294–9.
Marcus, George (1992) ‘“More (critically) reflexive than thou”: the current identity politics of
representation’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10: 489–93.
Matless, David (1989) ‘Appendix: deconstructive commentary’, Journal of Geography in Higher
Education 13(2):182.
McDowell, Linda (1992) ‘Multiple voices: speaking from inside and outside “The Project”’, Antipode
24(1):56–72.
——(1993) ‘Space, place and gender relations: Part 1. Feminist empiricism and the geography of
social relations’, Progress in Human Geography 17(2):157–79.
Mitchell, Timothy (1988) Colonising Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——(1990) ‘Everyday metaphors of power’, Theory and Society 19:545–77.
Moss, Pamela (1993) ‘Feminism as method’, The Canadian Geographer 37(1):48–9.
——(1994) ‘Spatially differentiated conceptions of gender in the workplace’, Studies in Political
Economy 43:79–116.
Nast, Heidi J. (1994) ‘Opening remarks on “Women in the field”’, The Professional Geographer 46(1):
54–66.
268 REFERENCES/
Nast, Heidi J. and Blum, Virginia (under review) ‘This space which is not one: Henri Lefebvre and
Jacques Lacan’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
Pred, Allan (1984) ‘From here and now to there and then: some notes on diffusions, defusions and
disillusions’, in M.D.Billinge, D.J.Gregory and R.L.Martin (eds) Recollections of a Revolution:
Geography as Spatial Science, pp. 86–103, London: Macmillan.
Price, Marie and Lewis, Martin (1993) ‘The reinvention of cultural geography’, Annals of the Association
of Human Geographers 83(1):1–18.
Pringle, Rosemary (1988) Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work, London: Verso.
Probyn, Elspeth (1993) Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge.
Rabinow, Paul (1977) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ricouer, Paul (1979) The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in
Language, transl. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, Toronto:
Toronto University Press.
Rose, Damaris (1993) ‘On feminism, method and methods in human geography: an idiosyncratic
overview’, The Canadian Geographer 37(1) 57–61.
Rose, Gillian (1993) Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Rubin, Barbara (1975) ‘Prostitution in Nevada’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65:
113–15.
Sauer, C.O. (1956) ‘The education of a geographer’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers
46(3):287–99.
Scott, Joan W. (1992) ‘Experience’, in Judith Butler and Joan W.Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political,
New York: Routledge.
Skeels, Anna Clare (1993) ‘A passage to premodernity: Carl Sauer repositioned in the field’,
unpublished Masters thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Sparke, Matthew (1994a) ‘Writing on patriarchal missiles: the chauvinism of the Gulf War and the
limits of critique’, Environment and Planning A 26:1061–89.
——(1994b) ‘White mythologies and anemic geographies’, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 12:105–23.
——(1994c) ‘A prism for contemporary capitalism: temporary work as displaced labour as value’,
Antipode 26(4):295–322.
——(forthcoming) ‘Flexibility for who? Gender and resistance in the traffic of temporary
workers’, Gender, Place and Culture.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty (1976) ‘Translator’s preface’, in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
——(1992) Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-coloniality, Cape Town: University of Cape
Town Press.
Staeheli, Lynn A. and Lawson, Victoria A. (1994) ‘A discussion of “women in the field”: the politics
of feminist fieldwork’, The Professional Geographer 46(1):96–102.
Starn, Orin (1994) ‘Rethinking the politics of anthropology: the case of the Andes’, Current
Anthropology 35(1):13–38.
Stewart, Lynn (1995) ‘Bodies, visions and spatial politics: a review essay on Henri Lefebvre’s The
Production of Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13(5):609–15
Stoddart, David R. (1986) On Geography and its History, Oxford: Blackwell.
Symanski, Richard (1974) ‘Prostitution in Nevada’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers
64:357–77.
Visweswaran, Kamala (1994) Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
REFERENCES/ 269
CHAPTER 14
REFLECTIONS ON POSTMODERN FEMINIST SOCIAL
RESEARCH
Barrett, M. (1991) The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, Cambridge: Polity Press.
——(1992) ‘Words and things: materialism and method in contemporary feminist analysis’, in
M.Barrett and A.Phillips (eds) Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Brown, W. (1991) ‘Feminist hesitations, postmodern exposures’, Differences 3(1): 63–84.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
D’Amico-Samuels, D. (1991) ‘Undoing fieldwork: personal, political, theoretical and
methodological implications’, in F.Y.Harrison (ed.) Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further
Toward an Anthropology for Liberation, Washington, DC: Association of Black Anthropologists
and American Anthropological Association.
Dyck, I. (1993) ‘Ethnography: a feminist method?’ The Canadian Geographer 37(1): 52–7.
Ferguson, K. (1993) The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Gibson, K. (1991a) ‘Hewers of cake and drawers of tea: women and restructuring on the coalfields
of the Bowen Basin’, Economic and Regional Restructuring Research Unit Working Paper 2,
Department of Geography, University of Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia.
——(1991b) ‘Company towns and class processes: a study of Queensland’s new coalfields’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9(3):285–308.
——(1992a) ‘Hewers of cake and drawers of tea: women, industrial restructuring and class
processes on the Central Queensland coalfields’, Rethinking Marxism 5(4): 29–56.
——(1992b) ‘“There is no normal weekend anymore…” A report to the coal mining communities
of Central Queensland on family life and continuous shift work’, unpublished report available
from author at Dept of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Clayton,
Victoria, 3168 Australia.
——(1993) Different Merry-Go-Rounds: Families, Communities and the 7-day Roster, Brisbane:
Queensland Colliery Employees Union.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1994a) ‘“Stuffed if I know!” Reflections on post-modern feminist social
research’, Gender, Place and Culture 1(2):205–24.
——(1994b) ‘Beyond capitalism and patriarchy: reflections on political subjectivity’, in B.Caine
and R.Pringle (eds) Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Grosz, E. (1984) ‘Interview with Gayatri Spivak’, Thesis Eleven 10/11:175–87.
Harding, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kondo, D.K. (1990) Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McDowell, L. (1992) ‘Doing gender: feminism, feminists and research methods in human
geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17:399–416.
Metcalfe, A. (1987) ‘Manning the mines: organizing women out of class struggle’, Australian
Feminist Studies 4:73–96.
Nast, H., Katz, C., Kobayashi, A., England, K.V.L., Gilbert, M., Staeheli, L.A. and Lawson, V.A.
(1994) ‘Women in the field: critical feminist methodologies and theoretical perspectives’, The
Professional Geographer 46(1):54–102.
Pratt, G. (1993) ‘Reflections on poststructuralism and feminist empirics, theory and practice’,
Antipode 25(1):51–63.
270 REFERENCES/
Reinharz, S. (1992) Feminist Methods in Social Research, New York: Oxford University Press.
Rose, D. (1993) ‘On feminism, method and methods in human geography: an idiosyncratic
overview’, The Canadian Geographer 37(1):57–61.
Spivak, G. (1989) ‘A response to The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory,’ in E.Meese and
A.Parker (eds) The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory, Amsterdam: John Benjamin.
Sturmey, R. (1989) Women and Services in Remote Company Dominated Mining Towns, Armidale: The
Rural Development Centre, University of New England, NSW 2351.
Weedon, C. (1987) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Oxford: Blackwell.
Young, I.M. (1990) ‘The ideal of community and the politics of difference’, in L. Nicholson (ed.)
Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge.
CONCLUSION
Butler, Judith (1992) ‘Contingent foundations: feminism and the question of “Postmodernism”’, in
Judith Butler and Joan Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, pp. 22–40, New York:
Routledge.
Davis, Tim (1995) ‘The diversity of queer politics and the redefinition of sexual identity and
community in urban spaces’ in David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire, pp. 284–
303, London: Routledge.
Massumi, Brian (1992) A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Phillips, Anne (1993) Democracy and Difference, Oxford: Polity Press.
INDEX
ableism 169–4, 173, 179–4, 183, 184 anxiety 28–1, 51
Act for the Protection of Women and Girls Anzaldua, Gloria 137
(1935, British Columbia) 206 Apuzzo, Virginia 146
ACT-UP 138, 150, 164 Aquinas, Thomas 14
action research 234, 237 Aristotle 14
Adilman, T. 198, 207 Association of American Geographers 184
Adler, S., and Brenner, J. 175 Augustine 14
adolescents 159–1 Aurand, S. et al 146
Adorno, Theodor 1, 22 Australia 221, 229–5, 238n, 240n
Africa 214 author, death of 34
African Americans 135 authority 83–5
African Ancestral Lesbians for Societal Change authorship of texts 34–7
151
ageism 169, 173, 184 Bachelard 64
agency 243 Back, L. 201
Agnew, J. 58 Bacon, Francis 14, 82
Agricola, Georgius 83 Barrett, M. 229, 238n, 239n;
Akeley, Carl 215 and Phillips, A. 168
Albania 99 Bart, P.B. and Moran, E.G. 182
Alberti, Leon Battista 85 Bartky, Sandra 20
Alcoff, Linda 3, 6; Baudrillard 78, 85, 92n
and Potter, Elizabeth viii Beauvoir, Simone de 14, 23, 112, 122
Alexander, Magistrate 201 Bechdel, Alison 177
alterity 2, 3; Bell, D. 139, 144, 145, 175, 177;
see also Others et al. 137, 175;
Althusser, Louis 57, 228n and Valentine, G. 138, 144
America 45, 46–9; Bell, Linda 26n
North, mining communities in 231; Benhabib, Seyla 140, 141
see also United States of America Benjamin, Jessica 54n
Amos, V. and Parmar, P. 195 Benjamin, Walter 78
Anderson, Benedict 6, 37, 97–9 Bennington, Geoffrey 97–8
Anderson, Craig L. 159 Berger 131
Anderson, Kay 8, 199, 205, 206 Berkeley, George 85
Anderson, P. 188 Berrill, K.T. 147, 160
anthropology 212 between-ness 38–1, 210, 221, 223, 225, 226
Antic, Milica 103
271
272 INDEX/
Bhabha, Homi 28, 38–1, 60, 195, 198 ethnic relations in 195–208
binarism, optical 78 Cartesian subject 31–4, 43
Black people see colour, people of Cartesian table 92n
blasphemy 216–1, 218 Cartesianism 1, 5, 33, 46, 47, 75, 214, 216
bodily difference see corporeal difference cartography viii, 5, 43–7, 92n, 152, 215
body: Castells, Manuel 26, 30
desiring 13, 16; Central Queensland, Australia 229, 240n
as machine 79; Chamberlain, Chief of Police 201
see also dualism, mind-body Champlain, Samuel de 46–49, 51
body politic 79, 81 Chapleau, John 198
body-map 215 Charles I, King 83
Bondi, L. 58, 70 Chatterjee, Partha 102
Bordo, Susan 5, 75, 85 children:
Bosnia-Herzegovina 100 and geography 54n
Bottomley, G. 208 Chinese Benevolent Association (Vancouver)
Bourdieu, P. 107 206
Bowlby, S., et al. 173 Chinese Exclusion Act (1923, Canada) 199
Bradby, B. 149 Chinese immigrants in Vancouver 195–208;
Braidotti, Rosi 16 men, and possible relations with White
Braverman, Harry 83 women 201, 205–8;
Brennan, T. 63 women 198, 199, 205, 207
Bristow, J. 144 Chong, D. 207
Britain: Chouinard, Vera 180;
laws interpreted to criminalize sex and Grant, Ali 7–8
dissidents 146; Christopherson, S. 60, 168, 177
laws on prostitution 139; citizenship 6
lesbians in 144, 146, 151–4; The City Paper 156
mining communities in 231 Clifford, James 210, 211, 228n
British Columbia 195–208 closet, metaphor of 137
British Geographers Conference 184 Cobbe, S. 131
Brown, W. 232, 233, 239n Cockburn, Cynthia 115, 124n
Brown, Wendy 229 cognitive mapping 51–3
Brownmiller, Susan 131 Cohen, J. and Arato, A. 129
Brunelleschi, Filippo 85 Cold War 99
Buel, S 143n Collins, Patricia Hill 93n
Bulgaria 102 colonial economy 3
Bunch, C. 147 colonialism 204
Bursik, Robert J., Jr and Grasmick, Harold G. colonization 48–49
162 colour, people of 36–9, 38, 41, 135, 186
Butler, Judith 3, 39, 55, 58, 59–60, 61, 73, commodification 174–7
74n, 97, 137, 144, 145, 238n, 241–6 commodity fetishism 187
communist regimes 99–4, 135
Cambridge, UK, study of employees in 107–21 Communities United Against Violence 160
Cambridge Phenomenon 107 computers, attachment to 110, 113
camera obscura 75–7, 80–2, 82, 83–7 Comstock, G.D. 146–9, 159, 160, 161
Campbell, David 105 concept, idea of 65
Canada 139, 175, 177, 185; Conrad, Joseph 211–16
consumerism (in West) 107n
INDEX/ 273
conversations 237–2 disciplinary power 31
Cornum, Rhonda 99 dislocation 26–8, 31
CORP 143n displacement 3, 26, 30
corporeal difference 5, 74, 79 Dobash, R.E. and Dobash, R.P. 182
corporealized vision 76–9, 87 Donaldson, L. 196
Cosgrove, Denis 85, 212; Donne, John 13
and Daniels, Stephen 212 Dorn, M. 173
Coward, Rosalind 145 Douglas, Justice 133
COYOTE 143n Drakulic, Slavenka 99
Crary, Jonathan 5, 74–9, 79, 80–7 dress codes 137, 143n, 145–8
Crenshaw, Kimberlé 135 dualism 214–19;
Cresswell, Tim 138 academy/field 214–19;
crime rates 162 domestic/work 100–2, 114, 116–21, 134;
Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) family/state 101;
129 and gender 6–7, 107–26;
Croatia 99 Man/Nature 79, 82, 83–5, 86;
mind/body 1, 2, 3, 13–16, 26, 32, 33, 36,
Dalby, Simon 105 81;
Daniels, S. and Cosgrove, D. 58 reason/non-reason 111–13, 120;
dating scenario 222 transcendence/immanence 1, 6, 111–13,
Davis, Tim 150, 158, 165, 243 113, 115, 120, 134
DAWN study 189n Duncan, Nancy 158
de Lauretis, Teresa 210, 216, 228n Dupont Circle, Washington, DC 7
Dear, M. 168, 173; Dürer, Albrecht 85
and Wolch, J. 173 Dworkin, Andrea 143n
death drive 69 Dyck, Isabel 217, 229
Debord 78 dynamism 59
deconstruction of concept of women 8–9, 232–
7 Eastern Europe 6, 97, 98, 99, 100–5, 134
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 128, 140, 243 economics 18
D’Emilio, John 166 education, women’s 17
Depression 207 Edwards, Karen 221–6, 225
depression, clinical 178 Edwards, S. 130
Derrida, Jacques 59, 213–18, 216, 226n, 228n Egypt 89n
Descartes, René 14, 75, 79, 116, 214; Elliott, A. 63
see also Cartesianism Elliott, S. 173
deterritorialization 2, 6, 128, 132, 142 Emberly, Julia 219–4
Deutsche, R. 168, 188 embodied knowledge 33
dialogue 61, 73 embodiment 20, 34, 39, 146
différance 59 embodying 5, 6
diorama 78, 82 empowerment 184;
disability 8, 169–7, 185; and autonomy 136
research into 173–6; engendering 6
rights movement 180; England, Kim 8, 158, 175, 216, 218, 225
see also ableism; Enlightenment 5, 43, 46, 48, 51, 243
women, disabled Enloe, Cynthia 102, 105
Disabled Persons for Employment Equity 175 envelope, metaphor of 70–1
274 INDEX/
environmental needs, ‘special’ 8 ‘The “Foreign Mission Field” in Vancouver’
epistemology, feminist 21–4, 32 205, Fig. 12.4
equality, defining 241 Forrest, Katherine 148
essentialism 16, 229, 233 Foster, Chief Constable W. 206
Etheridge, Melissa 149 Foucault, Michel 6, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 57, 78,
ethnicity 38, 41 78, 81, 92n, 104, 134, 146, 197, 205, 208,
ethnocentrism 3 210, 211, 233
ethnography, new 34 fragmentation 3, 31, 239n;
Euclid 214 of nations 36
Eurocentricity viii Fraser, N. 40, 129, 168
Evans, D. 145 Freud, Ernst 226n
exclusion of women 1–2, 5, 13, 14, 37, 63, Freud, Sigmund 13, 16, 31, 45, 226n
90n, 105, 106, 128, 238n, 241, 243; Frye 93n
radical and disabled 173–81; Funk, Nanette 99;
see also ableism and Mueller, Magda 101
Fuss, Diana 93n
Fábián, Katalin 101
Faludi, S. 168 gay and queer, as terms 243
family 99, 100–2, 104, 114–16, 127–9, 130–4, ‘gay ghetto’ 165
134; Gay Pride parades 138, 150
and homosexuality 158, 170; gays see homosexuality
and shiftwork 234–40 Gays and Lesbians Opposing Violence 160
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) 131 gaze:
fear of crime 161–5 geographical 211;
feminism 31–4; masculine 8, 212, 214
and deconstructed concept of women 8–9, Geertz, Clifford 33, 35, 224, 226n
232–7; gender:
and disability 180; division of labour by 53, 220–7, 236;
in Eastern Europe 100–4, 106; identity 19–1, 37, 97, 100–2, 105, 145–8,
‘imperial’ 195; 159;
and Otherness 1, 17, 25; ideology of 19–2;
radical 143n; and public/private division of space 127;
see also geography, feminist relations 3–4;
feminist panic 229, 232 and sexuality 125–45;
feminist theory: and vision 74–6;
and social sciences 13–26; see also nationalism, and gender
spatializing 26–42; gender blindness 90n
Western location 24–6, 37 General Motors 93n
Ferguson, K. 232–7 ‘generic woman’ 195
field research viii, 8, 208–33 geo-political fields 74
Findlay, S. and Randall, M. 180 Geographical Magazine 177
Firestone, Shulamith 15 geography 27, 30, 33–42, 55–62, 70, 152,
fixity 59 244;
Flax, Jane 20 feminist 13, 26, 158, 183, 215–22, 229,
Flemming, Dr Stewart 146–9 239n;
Foley, C. 146 radical 162, 168, 173–92, 208–16
geometry of difference 33
INDEX/ 275
Germany, East and West 99 heterosexism 169–89
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 8–9 heterosexist violence see violence, against gays;
Giddens, Anthony 26 violence, against lesbians
Gilbert, Melissa 218, 225 heterosexuality:
Gilroy, Paul 38 compulsory 3, 7, 87, 172, 185;
global localism 3, 36 power structures of 7, 137;
globalization 3, 36, 41, 216 and public spaces 136–8, 143–55
‘glocalization’ (global localism) 30 Ho, M.W. 123
‘God-trick’ 3, 80 Hobbes, Thomas 79
Golledge, R. 173 Holmlund, Chris 60
Gorbachev, Mikhail 101–3 home 130–2
Gordon, Deborah 228n homophobia 105, 137, 146–9, 150, 177–80;
grand narratives 26 and violence 7, 146–9, 150, 153–69
Gray, Dr Justice 201 homosexuality 3, 7, 93n, 125, 134, 136–9;
Gregory, Derek 64, 211 editing of behaviour 161, 163;
Grosz, Elizabeth 2, 62, 87, 215, 239n public expression of 137–9, 140, 144–55,
Gulf War 98, 105 170;
see also lesbians;
Habermas, Jürgen 129, 135–7, 142n violence, against gays
Hagerstrand 226n hooks, bell 25, 39, 87, 135, 141, 228n
Hahn, H. 174 Hoover, Herbert and Lou 83
Hall, P. 107 Hopkins, R. 151
Hall, Stuart 31–4, 38 Howell, Philip 129
Hanson, Duane 50 Hume, David 14
Hanson, S. 58 hybridity 2, 5, 38
Haraway, Donna 1, 2, 30, 33–6, 35, 40, 57, Hyndman, Jennifer 208
79, 80, 86, 87, 90–2n, 215, 216, 223, 226n hyperspace, postmodern 49–3
Harding, Sandra 2–3, 23, 54n, 210, 226n, 229
Harley, J.B. 45, 46, 54n, 85, 92n identity:
Hartsock, Nancy 3, 32–5, 40, 41–4 binary 33;
Harvey, David 3, 26, 45, 58, 59, 71, 72–3, of community 103;
188, 226n construction of 31, 32, 39, 184;
Harvey, William 83 multiple 8, 39;
Hauser, Ewa et al. 101 national 6, 36, 38, 97, 102, 104–6;
Havel, Václav 100 as network 34
Hayes, J. 149 identity politics 3, 31
health, women and 18, 65–6 imaginary, concept of 62–6, 67, 71–2, 73;
Hegel, Friedrich 3, 13, 23–5, 112 national 98
Heidegger, Martin 13 imagined community 97–9
Helgerson, Richard 45 immanence/transcendence 1, 6, 111–13, 120,
Henry, Nick 124n; 134
and Massey, Doreen 107, 117, 124n immersion 5
Herek, G. 146; imperialism 25, 43, 211, 212;
and Berrill, K.T. 159, 160 cultural 241
Hérodote 208 in-between spaces 4, 9n, 28–1
heteropatriarchy 83, 87, 158, 177, 182–5, 186, India 102
189n individualism 32, 43
276 INDEX/
industry, high-technology 107–24 gender division of 53, 220–7, 236;
interiority/exteriority divide 82, 83–5, 87, 93n long hours worked 109–12, 114–16, 121–
International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights 3;
143n as play 117;
invisibility: preoccupation with 117–19
of disabled women 8, 170–4, 173–7, 178– labour power, and competition 109–12
1; Lacan, Jacques 54n, 62–3, 64
of lesbians 8, 172–5, 175–81; LaCapra, Dominick 213, 226n
see also ableism Laclau, E. 27
Invisible College 92n Lagopoulos, A.P. 58
Iraq 105 lang, kd 149
Irigaray, Luce 5, 26, 55, 60–73 Las Buenas Amigas 151
Lauria, M., and Knopp, L. 175, 176
Jackson, P. 195 Laurier, Wilfred 199, Fig. 12.1
Jacobs, Harriet 87 Le Doeuff 64
Jameson, Fredric 5, 27, 28, 38, 43–6, 48–53 Lee, S. 205, 207
Jankowska, Hanna 101 Lefebvre, Henri 57, 85, 119–1, 123, 226–1n
Jarosz, Lucy 214 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 79, 90n
Jay, Martin 214 Leidner, R. 39
Joanne (community worker) 235, 240n Lesbian Avengers 151
Johnson, Nuala 105 Lesbian and Gay Pride Day 177
Johnston, J. 176, 177 lesbians 7, 8, 125, 134, 136–9;
and gay men 176;
Kant, Immanuel 13, 13, 14, 16 and ‘gayspeak’ 149;
Katz, Cindi 210, 216, 217, 218, 226; and heterosexism 175–81;
and Smith, Neil 213, 214, 226n, 226n ‘in your face’ tactics 151–4;
Keith, M. and Pile, S. 58 ‘lipstick’ lesbians 137, 138, 145;
Keller, Evelyn Fox 54n and ‘The Project’ 169, 172–5;
Kelly Services 224 public acts of subversion 144–50, 151–4;
Kirby, Kathleen 4, 6 in Toronto 218
Kiss, Yudit 101 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 19
Kittay, Eva Feder 24 linguistics 31
Knopp, Larry 175, 177, 189n Lloyd, Genevieve 13, 15, 17, 112, 116, 119
knowledge 13–13, 15–16, 22, 26; local knowledge 33
local or embodied 33; local/global viii, 3, 41
systematic 40 localism 243
Kobayashi, Audrey 218, 219; location 39
and MacKenzie, S. 168, 186; locational terminology 26
and Peake, L. 195 London Lesbian Offensive Group 145
Kondo, D.K. 232 Longino, Helen 22, 24
Konrád, George 100 Los Angeles, Bonaventure Hotel 49
Kripke, Saul 23 lost, being 47–9, 52
Kwong, P. 207 Lowe, J. 197
labour: MacDonald, John 198
divisions of 83; MacKinnon, C. 131, 143n
enthusiasm for 109–11, 114–16; Madge, Clare 217
INDEX/ 277
male heads of household 127, 130, 131, 142n spatial 30, 55–8, 60, 67–8, 208, 210, 210,
Man/Nature dualism see dualism, Man/Nature 211, 213, 215, 226n;
Manpower Services Inc. 228n see also mirrors
mapping 5, 43–54 Metcalfe, A. 238n
Marcus, George 228n migration 3
market economy 79 militarism 211
marriage, refusal of 14 military techniques 89–1n
Martin, Kay 207 Millard, Mrs 205
Marx, Karl 13, 16, 19, 26, 31, 187 Miller, Mayor M. 206
Marxism 50, 53, 174; Min-ha, T.T. 33
and post-Marxism 64, 188 mind/body see dualism, mind/body
Marxism-feminism 231 mining town women/miners’ wives 231–40,
Mascia-Lees, F. et al. 34 238n
masculinism viii, 3, 5, 7, 8, 13–16, 55, 59, 72, Mintz, Sidney W. 83
73, 82, 106, 115, 120, 241; mirrors 66–8, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 212
of fieldwork 208–19 ‘Miss British Columbia’ 199, Fig. 12.1
masculinities (Father and Son) 83–5, 86–8 Mitchard, Jacqueline 54n
Mason, Attorney-General 205 Mitchell, Don 129, 150
masquerade 73 Mitchell, Timothy 83, 89n, 214–19
Massey, Doreen 6, 27–28, 30, 34, 58, 100–2, Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 25, 41
120, 128, 134, 148, 188 monadism 47, 51, 79
Massumi, Brian 128, 243 Montreal Pride Parade 138
master subject 62, 68–9, 195 Moore, Henrietta 32, 34, 35, 36–9, 39, 40,
master/slave dialectic 3, 23 107
Masuda, S. and Ridington, J. 179, 189n Morocco 212–17
material power 13 morphology 66
Matless, David 212 Morris, J. 180
Matthews, Glenna 138 Morris, M. 60, 64
Mazey, Mary Ellen and Lee, David 52, 54n Moss, Pamela 217, 219, 228n
McClintock, Anne 98 mother, relationship with 68–70, 72
McDowell, Linda 3, 5, 33, 146, 158, 175, 177, motherhood, refusal of 14
178, 181, 188, 217, 219, 229 mothers, slave women as 86, 87
McLennan, Deputy Chief of Police 201 Mouffe, Chantal 103–5, 106
meaning, fluidity of 34 multinational [realities] 3
media and national identity 97 multiple difference, geometry of 3
mediation 23–5 multiplicity 32
Meono-Picado, P. 151 Munch, Edvard 50
Merchant, Carolyn 5, 74–6, 78–79, 82, 83, 85 Munt, Sally 138, 147, 150
Merrifield, A. 69, 70 Myslik, Wayne 7, 142n
metaphor: mythology, Greek 66
closet 137;
of conversation and performance 237; Nast, Heidi 215, 228n, 239n;
of field 208–14, 213; and Blum, Virginia 226n;
of gender 23–5, 105; and Kobayashi, Audrey 5
of machine 79, 83, 89n; nation-state, modern 97–106
militaristic 210; National Council of Welfare 174
of network 27, 30; National Gay and Lesbian Task Force 146, 160
organic 79;
278 INDEX/
nationalism 6, 41; Pateman, C. 199
Black 38; patriarchality 2, 7, 21, 127–9, 130
and gender 6, 97–107 Peake, L. 158, 175, 176
Native Americans 48 peephole metaphysics 22
Natter, W. and Jones, J.P. 92–3n Peet, R., and Thrift, N. 168, 173
Nazism and women 25 performance 74n, 237
network, metaphor of 27, 30 phallocracy/phallocentrism 60, 61, 65–6, 73
Nevada, brothels in 211 phallogocentrism 3, 23, 87
New Formations 30 phenakistiscope 78, 82
New York: Philadelphia 146
East Harlem 218; Phillips, Anne 241
Stonewall Inn 167 philosophy 13–14
New York Lesbian and Gay Pride 151 physiology 83–5
Newsweek 182 place viii;
Nicholson, L. 196 attachment to 30;
Nietzsche, Friedrich 13, 16 spatial organization 3
Noble, David 112 Plato 13–14
North, Oliver 105 Plumwood, V. 195
Nottingham, UK, lesbians in 144, 146, 152 Poland, women of 101
politics, definition 18
observer: Poovey, M. 199
interiorized 80–2, 82, 89n; Posadskaya, Anastasya 101
model 1, 3, 5 post-colonialism 3, 36, 43, 54n, 97
The Office 229n post-communism 100–4
Oliver, M. 180, 181 post-postmodernism 196
Ong, Aihwa 25 postmodernism 26, 28, 43–6, 48–53, 188, 229
Ontario, Canada 175 power, discursive 58
Operation Spanner 143n power-geometry 30
oppression viii, 3, 8, 33, 168, 184, 232 Pratt, G. 58, 175, 208, 229, 233
optical devices 76–8, 79, 82, 83 Pred, Allan 217, 226n
Orr, City Prosecutor O. 206 Price, Marie and Lewis, Martin 212
Others 5, 9n, 16, 21, 26, 37, 41, 48, 137, 186– primatology 215
90, 197, 211, 212, 216, 231, 238n; principled positions 40
disabled people as 171, 179, 185; Pringle, Rosemary 39, 221
ethnicized/racialized 87; privacy:
feminists as 1, 17, 25; positive concept of 133–5;
inappropriate/d 33; redefining 140, 141
women as 68–9 Probyn, Elspeth 39, 145–8, 148, 151, 152,
‘outing’ 139–1 219
ownership 45 The Professional Geographer 210, 217
‘The Project’ 168–1;
Pain, R. 131, 162 reconstructing 183–7, 186–92
Painter, D.S. 148, 149 prostitution see sex workers
Palmer, B. 168 Province 205
partial determination 22 Prussian army 89–1n
partial identification 235 psychoanalysis 21, 31, 43, 64, 65
partiality 1 psychology, women and 18
‘public woman’, definition 138–40
INDEX/ 279
public/private spheres see space, public/private sadomasochistic practices 143n
division Said, Edward 197
San Francisco 146–9, 165, 189n;
Queer Nation 150, 164 Castro District 160
Queer Nation Rose (QNR) 138 Sartre, Jean-Paul 64
queer spaces 7, 138, 153–8, 160, 164–9, 243 Saturday Sunset Figs 12.1–4
Satzewich, V. 207
Rabinow, Paul 212–17 Sauer, Carl 208, 211, 226, 226n, 228n
race and racism 8, 136, 187, 214; Saussure, Ferdinand de 31
see also colour, people of Schaffer, K. 199
‘race hygiene’ debates 199 schizophrenia 50
Radhakrishnan, R. 103 Schneider, Elizabeth 130, 133
‘radical openness’, sites of 141–3 Schopenhauer, Arthur 14
Ragland-Sullivan, E. 62–3 Schulman, Sarah 151
Ragon, Bernice 42 Scott, Joan 219
rape 99–1, 105, 130, 134, 162, 189n Sedgwick, Eve Kosowsky 93n
Rastafarianism 38 Segal Quince & Partners 107
rationalism 5 self 33;
reading strategies 23–5 and environment 45;
reason: see also identity
critique of 13–13; self-centring 220
and gender 1, 3, 13, 15–16, 26; self-reflexivity, male 219–4
and non-reason 6, 111–13, 113, 115, 119 separatism, dilemma of 41–4
Reekie, G. 151 Serbia 99–1
Reichert, D. 58, 70, 72, 73 Seven Years War 83, 89–1n
Reinharz, S. 234 sex workers 7, 104, 125, 138–40, 211
relativism 3 sexism 20, 21, 115–17
Renaissance 43–6, 46, 52, 78, 79 sexual difference 13, 17, 20, 21, 26, 31, 59,
Renan, Ernest 97 232
representation, crisis of 34–7 sexual dissidents 7, 144–55;
resistance, sites of viii physical attacks on 146–9, 150, 159, 189;
rhetoric 21, 220 see also homosexuality;
Ricoeur, Paul 213, 226n lesbians
Riger, Stephanie 162 sexual harassment 107n, 189n
Robbins, Bruce 129 sexual minorities 7, 125, 139
Roiphe, Katie 25 sexuality 4, 19–1, 138–41;
romance fiction 54n metaphors of 104–6
Roosevelt, Eleanor 224 Sharp, Joanne 6, 134
Rose, D. 226, 229 shiftwork 234–40
Rose, Gillian 2, 5, 6, 55, 80, 85, 87, 93n, 152, Sinfield, Alan 146
175, 195, 208, 211, 217, 226n, 243 situated knowledge 2–3
Ross, A. 168 Skeels, Anna 211
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14 skein, metaphor of 30
Rubin, Barbara 211 skinheads 137
Rubin, Gayle 19–1, 145 slave-owners 83;
women as 25
Sacks, K. 204 Smith, Janet 205
Smith, Neil 34, 59, 62, 68, 210;
280 INDEX/
and Katz, Cindi 57–8, 59, 67, 68, 69, 70, Stoddart, David 211–16, 213, 215, 217
71, 72–3 Stone, Lawrence 127
Smith, S. 162 Stonewall Riots 160
Smyth, Cherry 149, 150 street, use of term 153n
social sciences 10 subjectivity 39, 43–6, 53
socio-spatiality 83, 83, 85, 87 Sudan 218
Socrates 24 Supervisory Management 229n
Soja, E. 27, 57, 131, 168; surveying 85
and Hooper, B. 59 Symanski, Richard 211, 213, 215
Soviet Union, former 99, 100
space viii, 27; ‘Tailhook’ Convention 99
absolute 57, 210, 214, 226n; target and space domains 57
abstract 226n; Taylor, S.M. 173
derealization of 50; telecommunications 41
of flows 26, 30; Temp Slave 228n
material, geographical, social 57–9, 119–1; temping 219–30, 228n
public/private division viii, 2, 6–7, 14, 32, third space 4, 9n, 38–1, 225
37, 125–45; Thompson, E.P. 180, 188
real/unreal 58–61, 73; time-space see space-time
smooth or open-ended 140, 243; Ting, Charlie 206, 207
see also metaphor, spatial; Todova, Maria 102–4
third space Toronto, Canada 177, 185
space-time: transcendence 1, 6, 111–13, 113, 115, 119,
compression/distanciation 3, 26–30, 34, 134
36, 41, 226n; transnationality 26, 28
envelope 118–20, 123 Tuan, Yi-Fu 52
Sparke, Matthew 8, 98, 105, 214, 220, 228n Turner, Frederick 48
spatial metaphor see metaphor, spatial
spatial relations 27–28 ‘The Unanswerable Argument’ 201, Fig. 12.3
spatial revolution 6–7, 139–3 unconscious 31
spatiality 3; United Mineworkers’ Federation (Queensland)
and visuality 74–86 240n
spatialized performances 5, 55, 73 United States of America 7;
Spelman, E. 204 gays and lesbians in 146–9, 150–3, 153–7;
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty 25, 142n, 226, socialization of men in 159;
226n, 233, 239n women in 98–99
Squires, Judith 40, 127–9, 133 universality 1, 241, 243
Staeheli, L.A. and Lawson, V.A. 186, 208, Unknown Soldier, memorials to 98
210, 216 urban theory 26
Stalin, Josef 100 Urquart, License Inspector H. 206
standpoint theory 2, 32–6, 229, 238n
Starn, Orin 226n Vaca, Cabeza de 46, 47–9, 49
Statistics Canada 182 Valentine, Gill 7, 136, 143n, 144, 147, 149,
Stepan, N. 199 158, 162, 173, 175, 182, 185, 189n
stereoscope, binocular 78, 81 van der Wurff, Adri, et al. 162
stereotypes of gay men and lesbians 145, 159, Vancouver, Canada 210, 218–3, 220;
172 Art Gallery 221;
Stewart, Lynn 226n
INDEX/ 281
Chinatown 8, 195–208; and citizenship 98–99;
city council 206; deconstructed concept of 8–9;
Retail Merchants’ Association 206 definitions of 24;
‘Vancouver must keep this team’ Fig. 12.2 disabled 169–4, 173–7, 178–1, 181, 189n,
Vermeer, Johannes 90n 190n;
victims, women as 25 education of 17;
Victoria, Queen 151 and health 63, 65–6;
violence: and labour 53;
against disabled women 189n; as metaphor 24;
against gays 7, 146–9, 150, 153–69; and Nazism 25;
against lesbians 189n; as Others 68–9;
against women 99–1, 182 and psychology 18;
vision and gender 74–6 ‘public’, definition 138–40;
visuality 74–86, 87–89n as slaves 86, 87;
Visweswaran, Kamala 225–30 as soldiers 98–99, 106, 107n;
vitalists 79 as symbols of nation 98–99;
and vacations 54;
wage differentials, gender-based 18 as victims 25;
Walby, S. 196 White, in Vancouver’s Chinatown 206–10;
Walker, G. 168, 182 women only spaces 42;
Walker, L. 148 women’s studies programmes 17–19;
Wara, Vron 145 and work outside home 101;
Ward, P. 197 see also ableism;
Ware, V. 199 colour, people of;
The Washington Blade 156 exclusion, of women;
Washington, DC 160; feminism
Dupont Circle area 153–8, 159, 159, 161, ‘Women in the Field’ 210, 215, 218, 219
162, 163, 164–7, 166; women’s shelters 132–4, 143n
Georgetown 163, 167n Worcester, Massachusetts 218
Weedon, C. 233, 239n work see labour
Weeks, J. 144 Workstyle pamphlet 224
West, as category 36–9 World Charter of Prostitutes’ Rights 143n
Westenhoefer 182 World Whores’ Congresses 143n
WHISPER 143n
Whitford, M. 62, 64 Yee, P. 207
Wickberg, E., et al. 207 Young, Iris Marion 1, 20, 34, 103, 129–1, 136
wife-beating 131–4 Yugoslavia, former 102–4
Wigley, Mark 83 Yuval-Davis, N. 199
Williams, Raymond 30
Winchester, H.P.M., and White, P.E. 175
Wolch, J., and Dear, M. 168
women:
abuse of 7, 125, 131–4;
black 135;
blamed for social problems 101–3;
as category 241–6;
Chinese immigrant, in Canada 198, 207;
