Feminist geography is an approach in human geography which applies the theories, methods and critiques of feminism to the study of the human environment, society and geographical space.[1]
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Rather than a specific sub-discipline of Geography, feminist geography is often considered part of a broader postmodern, critical theory approach, often drawing from the theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler among others. More recent influences include critiques of feminism from postcolonial theorists. Feminist geographers often focus on the lived experiences of individuals and groups in their own localities, upon the geographies that they live in within their own communities, rather than theoretical development without empirical work.[1]
Many feminist geographers study the same subjects as other geographers, but often with a focus on gender divisions.[2] This concern has developed into a concern with wider issues of gender, family, sexuality, race and class. Examples of areas of focus which stem from this include:
In addition to societal studies, Feminist Geography also critiques Human Geography and other academic disciplines, arguing that academic structures have been traditionally characterized by a patriarchal perspective, and that contemporary studies which do not confront the nature of previous work reinforce the masculine bias of academic study.[3] The British Geographer Gillian Rose's Feminism and Geography[1] is one such sustained criticism, focused on Human Geography in Britain as being historically masculinist in its approach. This includes the writing of landscape as feminine (and thus as subordinate to male geographers), assuming a separation between mind and body. The following is referenced from Johnston & Sidaway (2004)[4], and further describes such a separation and its influence on geography:
"'Cartesian dualism underlines our thinking in a myriad of ways, not least in the divergence of the social sciences from the natural sciences, and in a geography which is based on the separation of people from their environments. Thus while geography is unusual in its spanning of the natural and social sciences and in focusing on the interralations between people and their environments, it is still assumed that the two are distinct and one acts on the other. Geography, like all of the social sciences, has been built upon a particular conception of mind and body which sees them as separate, apart and acting on each other (Johnston, 1989, cited in Longhurst, 1997, p. 492)' Thus, too, feminist work has sought to transform approaches to the study of landscape by relating it to the way that it is represented ('appreciated' so to speak), in ways that are analogous to the heterosexual male gaze directed towards the female body (Nash 1996). Both of these concerns (and others)- about the body as a contested site and for the Cartesian distinction between mind and body - have been challenged in postmodern and poststructuralist feminist geographies."
Other Feminist Geographers have interrogated the ways in which the discipline of Geography itself represents and reproduces the heterosexual male gaze. Feminist Geographers such as Katherine McKittrick have asserted pointed critiques of the ways in which we see and understand space are fundamentally bound up in how we understand the hegemonic presence of the white male subject in History, Geography and in the materiality of everyday space. Building off of Sylvia Wynter's theories of the racialized production of public and private space, Katherine McKittrick challenges “social landscapes that presume subaltern populations have no relationship to the production of space” [5] and writes to document black female geographies in order to "allow us to engage with a narrative that locates and draws on black histories and black subjects in order to make visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic" (x). [5] McKittrick's feminist approach to Geography stakes claim in the co-articulation of race and gender as they articulate space and she writes, “I am emphasizing here that racism and sexism are not simply bodily or identity based; racism and sexism are also spatial acts and illustrate black women’s geographic experiences and knowledges as they are made possible through domination” (xviii). [5]
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