Women in the Field: Critical Feminist Methodologies and Theoretical Perspectives∗

∗Earlier versions of the papers in this collection were presented in a GPOW session at the 1993 Association of American Geographers meeting in Atlanta, GA. The session was organized by Heidi Nast.

Feminist scholars have traditionally emphasized the importance of incorporating “the everyday” worlds of women into the historically masculinist theoretical and empirical foundations of the social sciences. Such emphases have commonly resulted in smaller-scale research projects and more interactive kinds of research methods and methodologies. Feminist geographers have uniquely contributed to the body of feminist scholarship through drawing out the importance of place in everyday constructions of gender and, more recently, sexuality. Critical field-based research has therefore from the beginning been the mainstay of subdisciplinary research. Like the discipline as a whole, however, little explicit attention has been given in publications or pedagogically to the politics of fieldwork (including how a “field” is defined and the politics involved in choosing and working in a particular “field”) or the politics of representation (which includes considerations of the partiality of knowledge and how and to whom we represent our work, ourselves and others in various kinds of texts). These “Opening Remarks” show how these issues are addressed in the papers that follow and how feminist geography has much to contribute to critical analyses of global and multinational processes, including patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.

Key Words:

• feminist geography
• fieldwork
• place
• politics

Notes

∗Earlier versions of the papers in this collection were presented in a GPOW session at the 1993 Association of American Geographers meeting in Atlanta, GA. The session was organized by Heidi Nast.

∗∗I would like to thank Audrey Kobayashi, Linda Peake, Sarah Radcliffe, Sue Roberts, Angela Martin, Karen Falconer, Rich Schein, Karl Raitz, and Cindi Katz for suggestions in organizing the panel and/or for commenting on earlier drafts of these remarks. Thanks also to Stan Brunn and Dennis Lord for their interest in, and support of, the session.