Gender geography: history of development and theory

Abstract

There are four periods in the development of gender geography since its inception in the 1970s in the Anglo-American school of human geography to nowdays. It’s periods were changing with the development of the methodology of feminist and gender studies. Contemporary gender geography has moved beyond the Anglo-American school, because it has become an international subdiscipline, and beyond analyses of gender differences because in the direction of intersectionality it began to focus on intersection of gender with other differences (racial, ethnic, class, etc.). Russia has not yet formed its own school of gender geography, but this area is receiving increasing attention as well as by Russian geographers, as by anthropologists, sociologists and economists. Classical gender geography is based on gender and feminist theories and human geography. Gender, like place, is a social construction. At different scales of space, there are different mechanisms for constructing gender differences. The scales and objects of research in classical gender geography can be divided into traditional and specifi (new) ones for Russian socio-economic geography. Traditional scales include local, regional, and national scales, while objects include mobility and migration. Specifi (new) scales are the micro-levels of home, work, and public urban space, and the object is the human body. The article illustrates that gender geography occupies an important place in foreign socio-economic geography, and gender processes – in regional development, which, in turn, emphasizes the need to develop gender geography in Russia.