The imperative of struggle: feminist and gender geographies in the United States

Abstract

The groundbreaking work of feminist and gender geographies has substantially advanced the nature of inquiry in the United States. In centering gendered ways of knowing, geographers have reframed disciplinary analyses of landscape, place, and space by troubling the normativities associated with lives, politics, and location. Though undoubtedly thriving, the visibility and impact of feminist and gender geographies have been confronted by history and changing political contexts. This essay extracts challenges to conceptualizing and doing feminist and gender geographies in the United States. By linking national freedom struggles to the current political climate and by reviewing the landscape of U.S. higher education, the essay asserts that scholars engaged with feminist and gender geographies can find utility in reflection, and by doing so, can resist contemporary disciplinary challenges to theory and practice.

Keywords:

• Feminist geography
• higher education
• social justice
• United States
• U.S. history

Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes to Marianne Blidon and Sofia Zaragocin for their invitation to participate in this dialogue and their graciousness along the way. I likewise acknowledge Pamela Moss for the patience and support towards the completion of this work. I would like to thank Gail Hollander and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on the essay, which strengthened its revisions. Finally, I am grateful for the Soul Glow Collective, whose intellectual and emotional support have sustained me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

LaToya Eaves is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Human Geography and affiliated faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her small town, Southern upbringing, informs her research, which centralizes Black geographies and women of color feminism in order to engage ideologies of race, place-based politics, and the discursive formation of the U.S. South. She is specifically interested in the interplay of these three ideas from the positionality of queer black women. Eaves is also Chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group.