Into the 1990s: A gendered agenda for political geography

Abstract

The 1983 article, ‘Sexist bias in political geography’ (Drake and Horton, 1983), was a lone response to the research agendas outlined in the early issues of Politica/ Geography Quarter/y. This is hardly surprising given that knowledge is a social creation; the content of political geography simply reflects the ove~helming~y male dominance of the discipline; gender is absent from the political world and its spatial organization as interpreted by political geographers. The ‘big’ issues of traditional political geography-boundaries, state structures, international conflicts-have seemingly little to do with gender. They are, after all, the affairs of statesmen. Furthermore, if women are taken into consideration, they are primarily seen as passive beings devoid of political identities and irrelevant to our understanding of the allocation and distribution of resources in society. But feminist geographers and political scientists have now begun to expose the vanishing acts performed on women in their disciplines (for a typology of tricks of the trade, see Thiele, 1986). Hence, in this article we begin with a brief review of current developments in these respective fields. We then present suggested areas of research for a reconstructed and gendered political geography. By no means is this intended to be an exhaustive agenda, but rather an exploration of the contributions that gender perspectives can make to a fuller understanding of some of the key areas of political geography, such as the global economy and politics, the state and urban politics, and to the introduction of new concerns. such as sexual politics.