Feminist geopolitics and the global-intimacies of pandemic times

Abstract

COVID-19 has brought to unavoidable prominence what feminist geopolitics has long insisted, namely that the global and the intimate are always, everywhere, already entangled. Drawing on Anglo-American experiences of the pandemic, this paper aims to make two key arguments. The first is that feminist geopolitics is a conceptual approach that is perhaps uniquely placed to make sense of COVID geographies. The second is to propose that this account of COVID speaks back to recent debates about the future of feminist geopolitics. Reflecting on recent debates about possible futures for feminist geopolitics, the paper will make the case for a materially-engaged feminist geopolitics which nevertheless keeps the socially-marked body at the heart of analysis.

Keywords:

• Feminist geopolitics
• materialism
• virus
• zoonoses
• pandemic

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Amanda Thomas for prompting me to think through the feminist geopolitical implications of COVID for the New Zealand Geography Society annual meeting in 2020. My ideas benefitted hugely from early discussions in the GOSSIP research group in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, and then with participants at the NZGS and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geographie, and with Jennifer Hyndman, Elizabeth Militz and Dan Clayton. Thanks, as always, to the anonymous reviewers for their thorough engagement with my ideas.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jo Sharp

Jo Sharp is Professor of Geography in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews. She is a feminist political geographer with varied research interests including postcolonialism, global health, and critical geopolitics. Her work has sought to extend what is considered to be the geopolitical beyond the formal spheres of statecraft to include popular culture and the everyday, and more recently in postcolonial work on subaltern geopolitics, materiality, and the meanings of global health.