Feminist Geography Research Articles

Geographies of vulnerability: Mapping transindividual geometries of identity and resistance

Queer, feminist, and non‐representational geographies have highlighted the ways that a predetermined and self‐contained idea of the subject limits the options for theorising the politics of identity and resistance. Transgender lives speak to this problem in new and productive ways, alerting us to the constitutive vulnerability of individual bodies and ideas – a vulnerability that does not map neatly onto a passive/active binary of political agency and identity. This paper asks how a commitment to constitutive vulnerability might open up a space to think differently about the relationship between identity and resistance, by foregrounding processes of individual and collective becoming as the site of knowledge generation. It appeals to two readerships: to geographers already committed to non‐representational theory, with the suggestion that taking identity seriously as an operative concept is not irreconcilable with the tenets of process‐oriented ontology, and to queer and feminist geographers with the suggestion that process ontology offers a way to untangle some of the knotty and persistent problems of identity‐based social analysis. Drawing on Simondon's philosophy of transindividuation, it suggests a reconfigured geometry of subjectification, such that identitarian and representational claims are rendered incidental to the problem of individuation of political terms. This possibility is addressed in relation to a singular mode of transformative becoming – an account of gender transition – and in relation to a broader transgender and radical femme politics. The paper maps out a productive resonance between concepts of vulnerability, femininity, and resistance – in a reading that refuses not only the passive/active binary of political agency, but also the essentialist logics within which these concepts are habitually framed. This paper therefore explores the possibilities of a conceptual orientation to constitutive vulnerability for moving beyond anxious reproduction of existing orders of knowledge.

Rooted flexibility: social reproduction, violence and gendered work in the Indian city

Drawing on feminist marxist and feminist geography scholarship the article develops the concept 'rooted flexibility' to examine the latent frictions between flexible labour regimes and the rooted, gendered demands of social reproduction in worker tenements and factories in Gurgaon, India. The article explores the everyday gendered terrain through which migrant women are incorporated into, disciplined and navigate flexible labour and precarious social reproduction in the city. Unlike the male migrant workers who are made flexible through ideologies and practices of mobility, the mobility of migrant working-class women whose stories are narrated in this article is constrained by patriarchal control and responsibilities to social reproductive labour. In the absence of labour mobility, the article explores how migrant women workers navigate conflicting demands of being both flexible waged-workers and rooted, ‘respectable’ housewives, resisting violent practices of labour discipline on the shop-floors and tenements. In doing so, the article examines how an embodied and differentiated politics of 'respectability' comes to materialise how ‘rooted flexibility’ is lived, contested and secured.

Woman’s entrepreneurship as a gendered niche: the implications for regional development policy

AbstractIn this article, we argue that entrepreneurship is a socio-spatial embedded activity and that the social construction of gender, time, space, economy and culture is manifest in the masculinities that are ascribed a normative role in entrepreneurship development policies. Drawing on feminist approaches to articulate and perform resistance to the hegemonic ‘masculinist’ discourses on entrepreneurship, we argue that women’s entrepreneurship is contextually embedded in institutional and social structures that both limit and provide opportunities for its enactment. Regional economic development policy has focused, inter alia, on stimulating and supporting women’s entrepreneurship through the establishment of women-only entrepreneurial networks to provide support, role models and access to resources. Grounded in feminist geography and based on a detailed qualitative study of network managers and members of formally established women-only networks, we provide evidence of the disconnect between the emancipatory intent and the actual impact of these initiatives. While these networks aim to empower and encourage women into entrepreneurship, in practice, they perpetuate women’s marginalisation and ghettoisation in gendered niches.

Time and Care in the “Lab” and the “Field”: Slow Mentoring and Feminist Research in Geography

abstractBuilding on calls for “slow scholarship,” we highlight the importance of time and care in producing rigorous, ethical research through our advising practices. We describe how feminist ethics and epistemologies shape each of our research clusters: the Hydro-Feminist Lab at West Virginia University and the Feminist Geography Collective at the University of Texas at Austin. We show a couple of ways that feminist geographers can adopt the “lab model” and use it to build meaningful mentoring networks, fostered through time and care, and in a way that both meets and transgresses the demands of academic neoliberalism. We then show how this approach extends into our fieldwork, recounting instances where the importance of mentoring through a caring ethic emerged. Unfolding over weeks, months, and years we show the value of time and care, both in deepening the quality of advising relationships and in creating mentoring relationships of trust and support. We contend that this better prepares students for the intellectual and emotional challenges of feminist research and, in turn, strengthens that research. In the face of neoliberalism’s quickening drives, we highlight the benefits and the contradictions of this kind of slow and caring “lab-field” feminist mentoring for geographic research.

As relações e os atravessamentos das questões de gênero no ensino: uma análise da Revista Latino-Americana de Geografia e Gênero

The present work has as its central purpose to investigate the gender category and its approach in the Latin American Journal of Geography and Gender, aiming to analyze the scientific productions of this journal between 2010 and 2019. It adopts a qualitative approach, and the documentary and bibliographic research as its methodology. The selection of papers resulted in a total of twelve articles, which were evaluated and distributed in the categories of Education and Geography Teaching. From the analyses, it was concluded that it is indispensable to work with the theme of gender within geography studies. The social essay of these studies allows students to understand the different forms of local empowerment by different social groups.Keywords: Gender; Education; Geography teaching; Feminist Studies; Feminist Geographies.

Beyond the public/private dichotomy: The study of domestic violence in feminist geography

Beyond the public/private dichotomy: The study of domestic violence in feminist geography

“Periferias” móveis: (homo)sexualidades, mobilidades e produção de diferença na cidade de São Paulo

Resumo Este artigo é parte de um exercício etnográfico conjunto com vistas a problematizar noções de “periferia”, ou do que é “periférico”, articuladas a determinados marcadores sociais da diferença presentes nas circulações de sujeitos que se autoidentificam pela via da masculinidade e da (homo)sexualidade. A partir de dois campos na cidade de São Paulo, discutimos as possibilidades de cruzar contribuições da geografia feminista para os estudos antropológicos urbanos e vice-versa, partindo principalmente da produção do espaço pelas circulações dos sujeitos.

Feminist Geographies in Latin America: Epistemological Challenges and the Decoloniality of Knowledge

Feminist Geographies in Latin America: Epistemological Challenges and the Decoloniality of Knowledge

Imagining Plural Territories of Life: A Feminist Reading of Resistance in the Socio-Territorial Movements in Ecuador

As the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador, we have collaborated with socio-territorial movements in struggles for their territories. Based on our work in four communities in Ecuador, this article aims to expand the conceptualization of new forms of resistance developed by movements in processes of reterritorialization. These forms of resistance challenge not only processes of capitalist accumulation, but also patriarchal, racist, and colonial dynamics. From the perspective of Latin American feminist geography, we discuss the potential of socio-territorial movements to recreate meanings of territory based on intersectional and multiscalar understandings of their struggles in the construction of plural territories of life.

Marita Bonner’s Aesthetics of Discrimination

This article situates the short stories of Marita Bonner in the context of Black women’s modernist techniques and Black feminist geography. Bonner’s work emphasizes the aesthetic basis of racial ideologies, and a formalist reading highlights how her stories’ fictional Frye Street setting, sentence-level mechanics, and multipart structures call attention to and destabilize the normative perceptions that produce and reinforce both gender roles and structures of antiblackness.

CLAGistas: The Rise of Women in Latin American Geography

CLAGistas:The Rise of Women in Latin American Geography T. Shawn Mitchell the conference of latin american Geographers (CLAG) and I are both fifty this year, making it an apt time for celebration and introspection. When I finished my doctorate in 1997, pregnant with my second child, I didn't know how to balance fieldwork in Central America with motherhood, so I continued to teach as an adjunct but put my career on hold. Now that I am re-entering the academic world, I feel like Rip Van Winkle waking up after a twenty-year maternity leave to find an explosion in the number of women engaged in Latin American geography. In honor of our semi-centennial, I'd like to use this essay to outline the growth of women in CLAG ("CLAGistas") over the past five decades and then provide my perspective as an academic late bloomer. Statistically, men still dominate geography, making up 65 percent of faculty in colleges and universities and 70 percent of employees in non-academic geographical professions (AAG, 2018). Those numbers belie the gains made by women on many fronts, from leadership to publications and employment. Publications serve as a valuable metric for assessing women's progress because they reflect not only the ability to conduct research, but also access to resources and institutional support. In most universities, peer-reviewed articles remain the "corner-stone of professional advancement" (Fredrich & Salazar, 1990, p. 361). To put CLAG's numbers in perspective, female contributors to the Annals of the American Association of Geography rose from zero in 1956 to 35 percent in 2016, with a similar trend in The Professional Geographer (AAG, 2015). According to Fredrich and Salazar (1990), women authored only 10 percent of articles in the first decade of CLAG's Publication Series. To provide a more complete picture of female authorship over time, I used the online archives of CLAG publications (Publication Series, Proceedings, Yearbook, and Journal of Latin American Geography) to tally articles with female authors and co-authors in fiveyear intervals between 1980 and 2019. There was little growth over the first three decades, but female contributions rose significantly after 2000, and in 2019 women (as authors and co-authors) contributed an impressive 65 percent of articles and 43 percent of reviews (Figure 1). CLAGista research is diverse and leans more toward applied than theoretical topics. Agricultural and historical themes dominated the early decades, but migration, globalization, and environmental issues are now ascendant. Feminist geography "[a]lthough not solely a subject of interest to women … is perhaps the only subfield in geography [End Page 20] that is clearly dominated by women" (Schroeder, 2002, p. 149). Of the thirty-two articles and reviews with gender-related titles published between 1990 and 2019, 82 percent were authored or co-authored by women. The word "women" appeared in eighteen titles, "gender(ed)" in eight, and "mujer(es)," "feminist/feminism," "feminista," and "latina" each showed up twice. Since this count is based solely on titles, it overlooks articles in which the content might be gender related. It also neglects work CLAGistas do outside of academic publication to promote women in geography, like the "Let Girls Map" program started by Patricia Solis. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Female authorship as a percent of total journal content for select years, 1980–2019. (Articles include introductory essays, research articles, JLAG Perspectives, and "From the Field" notes. Those written by female co-authors may also have male authors. Reviews include reviews of films, websites and books). Conferences provide another gauge of women's participation in Latin American geography. There were no female presenters at the first CLAG meeting in Muncie, IN, in 1970 (Davidson, personal communication, 18 May 2018). In the subsequent decade, women presented only 9 percent of papers, inching up to 17 percent in the 1980s (Fredrich & Salazar, 1990). At the 2018 conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, women presented nearly half of the papers, and received all eight of that year's student travel awards. While host universities are disproportionately represented at any given conference, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, and the University...

Embodied Exhibits: Toward a Feminist Geographic Courtroom Ethnography

Courtroom ethnographies are very rare in English-, German-, and Spanish-language legal geography. Yet courtrooms are dense spaces through which legal subjects, spaces, and instruments are performed, created, disciplined, and managed. In this article, we develop a feminist geographic ethnography of the court. This approach attends to the affective, intimate, and bodily politics of courtroom subjects, spaces, and moments, connecting these with wider structural processes of legal, sociocultural, political, and economic life. To develop this approach, we draw collaboratively on our work on immigrant detention hearings, corporate fraud, antiterrorist trials, and our conversations and reflections together as feminist geographers. We use four embodied exhibits—the file cabinet, the legal pad, the cloakroom ticket, and the cell phone—to make manifest four elements of our feminist methodology. These integrate grounded data sets, embodied transcriptions, global intimate analyses of legal power, and antithetical-activist scholarship. We assert that feminist courtroom ethnographies offer vital and deeply geographical insights into the spatial work of power in and through the legal system, connecting everyday legal goings-on and the transscalar structural machinations of state violence. Key Words: courtroom ethnography, feminist geography, feminist methodology, legal geography, political geography.

Teaching sexuality across time, space and political contexts

ABSTRACT Reflecting on a previous article, I evaluate changes encountered around teaching sexuality over the past 22 years in different geo-political settings. This article examines the ways in which my teaching practices, as an academic committed to equality, have developed in relation to different academic and political contexts. This personal pathway through learning and teaching work linked to sexuality has been, and still is, embedded within social, and feminist geography modules based on a political focus on social justice and injustice. I worked in two UK universities during the time when the Civil Partnership Act 2004 was enacted but left the UK prior to the Equality Act of 2010 and the Marriage (same sex couples) Act of 2013. I now teach in Singapore where Penal Code 377A still exists. This British colonial code criminalizes sex between consenting adult men in private or in public. This paper discusses my commitment to integrate sexuality into the curriculum and analyses the ways in which styles of delivery, content and engagement between and with students has varied across what I define as two ‘eras of teaching geographies of sexuality/sexualities’.

Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography—Annual International Conference Award for New and Emerging Scholars, 2020

Application closing date: 31 January 2020The editorial team of Gender, Place and Culture is pleased to announce an annual award valued at a maximum of US$1,500 for new and emerging scholars. The aw...

Will Review for Points: The Unpaid Affective Labour of Placemaking for Google’s ‘Local Guides’

A growing number of people are relying on technologies like Google Maps not only to navigate and locate themselves in cartographic space but also to search, discover and evaluate urban places. While the spatial data that underlies such technology frequently appears as a combination of Google-created maps and locational information passively collected from mobile (GPS-enabled) devices, in this article we argue that for such systems to function as both useful tools for exploration for users and sources of revenue, users must actively produce massive quantities of granular spatial data that would otherwise be significantly more difficult and expensive to collect. The production of this qualitative information about places constitutes significant unremunerated affective labour. In this article, we build on the tradition of feminist geographies, especially feminist and critical Geographic Information Systems (GIS), to examine how the labour done by gendered, raced and often classed members of a local community is alienated by Google (i.e. Alphabet, Inc.) to produce commodified spatial data/media in the Local Guides platform. We analyse how Google’s presentation of the platform hails women as care labourers—sharing their thoughts, feelings and knowledge of place for free in the name of supporting and caring for a community, however vaguely it may be constituted. At the same time, we argue that digital labour that produces the Local Guides platform draws from and reproduces specific gendering of spaces. We draw on a case study of a commercial corridor in the US city of Worcester, Massachusetts to show how the dialectic between affective digital labour and urban space has material effects on the production of raced, classed and gendered spaces and places. The article concludes with a call to maintain critical, feminist engagements with these types of platforms in order to further develop forms of digital praxis towards more just cities.

Counting gender (in)equality? a feminist geographical critique of the ‘gender data revolution’

Powerful international development institutions have called for a ‘gender data revolution.’ They posit that progress on gender equality depends upon our collective ability to close ‘the gender data gap,’ by which they mean that we know less about women’s lives than men’s in statistical terms. Some feminists within and outside the academy treat the gender data revolution with suspicion, likening it to a ‘measurement obsession’ (Liebowitz and Zwingel 2014) that is overly quantitative (Buss 2015) and ill-fit to capture the complexities of gender subordination. In this paper, we suggest that feminist geographers as academics and scholar-activists have a unique and important contribution to make to the gender data debate, which at present is largely aspatial. Drawing on empirical examples we first illustrate how feminist geography’s conceptual and methodological contributions enrich the gender data debate; second, we reflect on the possibilities and limitations of a practical intervention that we are currently staging as co-founders of a feminist research venture that seeks to shape policymaking, critically considering the possibilities and limitations of such an endeavour.

Vibrant mentoring landscapes in feminist geography

Building on the feminist geography tradition of mentoring, in this brief introduction, I advance a vision of vibrant mentoring landscapes that are alive with difference and that continually renew the discipline. The diverse contributions to this themed issue approach questions around mentoring from a variety of perspectives and positionalities, including: gender, national origin, racialized identity, sexuality, career stage, life stage, parenting status, scale, geography, and type of educational institution. Some articles divulge personal experiences while others focus on roles that mentors play within a continuum of change versus stasis in institutions of higher education. Of particular note is a call to those with relative privilege to engage self-reflexively with the ways in which one may become more accessible to those who are structurally oppressed. Anything less than a truly diverse mentoring landscape within feminist geography impoverishes us collectively as well as the knowledge we produce.

Mentoring across difference: success and struggle in an academic geography career

This autobiographical account of a black female feminist geographer’s experiences with mentoring and success in the academy offers analysis, lessons and strategies. My distinctive graduate school experience, with a pioneering all-female feminist geographers dissertation committee, plus a complex mix of intentional and fortuitous multidimensional mentoring has contributed to a successful academic geography career. Yet, I’ve had to overcome obstacles stemming from intersections of gender and other forms of difference, primarily race and immigrant status. Although there are limits to mentoring practices that emphasize caring and collegiality, I highlight and recommend feminist-inspired mentoring strategies that forge alliances across race-ethnicity, gender, nationality, generation, institutional and locational differences as interventions that lessen the struggles, challenges or marginalization reported by many foreign-born black feminist geographers and other women of color in US institutions of higher education.

Las Geografías Feministas y la producción científica de la Geografía argentina en la última década (2008- 2018): un análisis a partir de las revistas científicas

Las Geografías Feministas y la producción científica de la Geografía argentina en la última década (2008- 2018): un análisis a partir de las revistas científicas

A space for feminist mentoring: the role of Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) specialty group in higher education

Higher education and organizations within academic disciplines are important spaces for mentoring and other forms of networking. These spaces, however, are often situated in environments that limit equitable and inclusive opportunities for early career and underrepresented scholars to effectively engage in mentoring. This paper contributes to critical feminist scholarship that examines how organizations in higher education can offer supportive mentoring spaces for women, early career faculty, and scholars from diverse backgrounds. The analysis focuses on the Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) as a space for faculty, students and other geographers to enhance their professional and personal success. Our analysis draws from the results of an international survey, a focus group discussion, and reflexive participation of feminist geographers aligned with this specialty group. We examine the ways in which this academic organization, and the informal and formal networks it cultivates, attempts to foster an anti-oppressive mentoring community of feminist geographers. We also analyze how these networks are shaped by and embedded in neoliberal institutions in the discipline of geography and higher education as a whole. This discussion offers important insights to growing research and initiatives that support mentoring for women, feminists, and others concerned with building more inclusive and socially just spaces in academia.