Feminism and Social Theory in Geography: An Introduction*

*We would like to thank several members of our department for their support of the 2004 Feminist Speaker Series, particularly our chair at that time, John S. Adams, without whose support the series would not have been possible. Eric Sheppard and Gwen McCrea were key members of the planning process. The series was given logistical, moral, and curricular support by Glen Powell, Helga Leitner, and Arun Saldanha. We would also like to thank the members of Supporting Women in Geography and various faculty members who helped host and welcome our speakers, and the students and faculty from across campus who attended the series and participated in its conversations. Finally, we are grateful to Tiffany Muller, Eric Sheppard, and Arun Saldanha for their helpful comments on this article.

Abstract

This essay introduces a collection of articles based on papers developed for a Fall 2004 speaker series at the University of Minnesota. The articles address the continued relevance of feminist geography and the unique contributions of feminist perspectives in various areas of geographic research. They also point out directions for needed future research. This introduction briefly reviews the successes of and remaining challenges to feminist geography, including material inequities yet unresolved in two other (nonresearch) “places” of academic life: teaching and the workplace. We discuss the ongoing underrepresentation of women and people of color on our faculties and in the front of classrooms.

Key Words:

• antiracist geography
• critical theory
• feminist geography
• marginalization
• social theory

Notes

¹What we mean by “place” here will be discussed later in this article.

²Susan Craddock, Jennifer Hyndman, Larry Knopp, Mei-Po Kwan, and Gill Valentine.

³Jennifer Blecha, Karen Dias, Alison Mountz, Tiffany Muller, Rachel Silvey, and Mary Thomas.

⁴Feminists appealed to experience as a way of recovering marginalized identities and the worldviews of social groups excluded from representation and participation in knowledge production. A focus on experience is meant to operate as an oppositional theoretical practice by resisting academic dependence on the authority of canonical Eurocentric theoretical texts, as well as critiquing the colonizing and exclusionary practices of both hegemonic academic theory and hegemonic academic feminist theory. The use of experience by hegemonic feminism was critiqued because it constructed, essentialized, and reified “the” female experience, while ignoring diverse and non-Western experiences as well as the intersectionality of other forms of oppression. The idea that experience is an authentic, reliable, or transparent mirror to reality, however, has now been widely critiqued.

⁵This scenario is a problem for academic feminism generally. Some feminist scholars have argued that the institutionalization of Women's Studies, and the development of its own faculty appointments, classes, journals, conferences, associations, and so forth, has led to its ghettoization and weakened the political thrust of feminism's challenges to institutional practices across and beyond the academy. (For more on this, see Brown 1995 [especially pp. 52–76] and 2003.)

⁶Often critiques of feminist geographies are based on how cutting-edge, theoretically sophisticated, or in vogue its theoretical repertoire is (or is not), to the neglect of the material and embodied realities of its gendered, raced, classed (etc.) subjects of analysis who are supposedly now impossible to represent.

⁷In an attempt to bridge these gaps and silences in the next decade, Gender, Place and Culture will diversify the languages in which it accepts manuscripts, publish all abstracts in Spanish as well as English, and invite more diversity on its editorial board (Peake and Valentine 2003, 109).

⁸In 2000 The Concerned Group on Race and Geography prepared a pledge form, Call for direct action on race in U.S. and Canadian geography. Letter available from Dr. Joe Darden, Department of Geography, 315 Natural Science Bldg., Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1115.

*We would like to thank several members of our department for their support of the 2004 Feminist Speaker Series, particularly our chair at that time, John S. Adams, without whose support the series would not have been possible. Eric Sheppard and Gwen McCrea were key members of the planning process. The series was given logistical, moral, and curricular support by Glen Powell, Helga Leitner, and Arun Saldanha. We would also like to thank the members of Supporting Women in Geography and various faculty members who helped host and welcome our speakers, and the students and faculty from across campus who attended the series and participated in its conversations. Finally, we are grateful to Tiffany Muller, Eric Sheppard, and Arun Saldanha for their helpful comments on this article.