Mind the gap: bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics

Abstract

Abstract The intersections and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few. Feminist geographers’ forays into geopolitics and international relations within political geography have been relatively rare compared to their presence and influence in social, cultural, and economic geography. Likewise, only a few political geographers concerned with IR and geopolitics have engaged with scholarship in feminist geography. In an attempt to traverse this gap, the notion of a feminist geopolitics is elaborated; it aims to bridge scholarship in feminist and political geography by creating a theoretical and political space in which geopolitics becomes a more gendered and racialized project, one that is epistemologically situated and embodied in its conception of security. Building upon scholarship in critical geopolitics, feminist international relations, and transnational feminist studies, a theoretical framework for feminist geopolitics is sketched in the first part of the paper. Feminist geopolitics represents more accountable and embodied political responses to international relations at multiple scales. Its application to pressing issues of security and mobility is illustrated in the second half of the article.