Towards a feminist political geography?

Abstract

The next challenge for the subdiscipline (of political geography) is to incorporate new politicizations of human geography through… feminist geography (the politics of ‘public’ and ‘private’) (1994: p. 450). (T)he subdiscipline has still yet to meet the challenge of feminist geography whose concerns for power in place and space from a gender perspective have only appeared intermittently in contemporary political geography. The study of place/space tensions may be one way of integrating feminist geographical concerns into political geography (2000: p. 597). These quotes are the closing words in the ‘political geography’ entry in the third and fourth editions of The Dictionary of Human Geography . The 1994 entry basically represents feminist geography as the politics of the ‘public–private’ divide; while the 2000 entry broadens the scope (and possibly the geographic scale?) of the feminist challenge, framing it in terms of power and space—a central concern of political geography. (Notably, feminist geography is not even mentioned in the ‘political geography’ entry in the first two editions.) I want to think about a feminist political geography that takes formulations of the politics of ‘public’ and ‘private’, power, space, and scale seriously as one way of engaging part of Kevin Cox and Murray Low’s charge: “attempt to situate issues about what counts as ‘political’ subject matter in political geography in a broader field of geographic and social science concern, and in relation to ‘current affairs.’ Panelists will explore these questions of subdisciplinary approach, identity, and focus in relation to an array of topical areas in political geography which form actual or potential sites for exchange between subdisciplines and with other disciplines.”