Space, Place and Gendered Identities

Feminist History and the Spatial Turn

Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis, Kathryn Gleadle, Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis, Kathryn Gleadle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317569565
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the last two decades, historians have increasingly sought to understand how environments, 'built' and otherwise, architectural surroundings, landscapes, and conceptual 'places' and 'spaces' have affected the nature and scope of political power, cultural production and social experience . The essays in this collection expand upon this already rich field of inquiry by combining an analytical approach sensitive to questions of gender with an exploration of ideas of political space. The volume demonstrates how the gendered and political meanings of space—be that space domestic or public, rural or urban, real or imagined, or a combination of all these and more—are fashioned through the movement of historical actors through space and time. Whether in delineating the gendered and politicized space of the pulpit; the sickroom; the Irish farmyard; the London suffrage atelier; the domestic space created by the wireless; the lesbian 'scene' of rural Canada; the eighteenth-century ladies' 'closet'; or the public space within the 'public history' of historic houses, the volume demonstrates how the meanings of these spaces are not fixed, but are challenged and reformulated.

This book was originally published as a special issue of women's History Review.

Introduction: Space, Place and Gendered Identities: feminist history and the spatial turn

Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis and Kathryn Gleadle

In the last two decades, historians have increasingly sought to understand how environments, ‘built’ and otherwise, architectural surroundings, landscapes, and conceptual ‘places’ and ‘spaces’ (the terms are not synonymous) have affected the nature and scope of political power, cultural production and social experience. The impact of Jürgen Habermas (whose hugely influential work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, was translated into English in 1989) is readily apparent in historians’ responses to these themes. Habermas’s attention to the ways in which the new urban spaces of eighteenth-century Britain created an oppositional counter-public was a defining text in encouraging historians to consider the precise significance of sites of cultural and political contestation.¹ In a parallel development the perspectives encouraged by the ‘new cultural geography’ of the 1980s, which emphasized the relationships between space, place and the construction of identity led to a so-called ‘spatial turn’ across the humanities and social sciences.² Feminist scholarship and historians of gender have played a full part in this ‘turn’. They have recognized, as Linda McDowell has argued, that ‘the mapping of a place or location onto gender identities has been a key part of the establishment and maintenance of women’s position and is reflected in both the materiality and the symbolic representation of women’s lives’.³ The eighteenth annual Women’s History Network conference convened at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, in September 2009, entitled ‘Women, Gender & Political Spaces: historical perspectives’, invited closer examination of just these themes.

While for most of the 1970s and 1980s the concept of ‘place’ tended to be the domain of empirical historical geographers, David Harvey’s influential work in the 1980s, especially his The Limits to Capital (1982) and The Urbanization of Capital (1985), was formative in a ‘turn’ toward a concept of ‘space’, rather than ‘place’.⁴ In these works, Harvey drew upon a Marxist analysis to argue that space reflected commodity production; thus, class conflict was apparent in conflict over space. Through this more theoretical approach, both cultural geographers and others in the humanities gradually came to consider ‘space’ as somewhat removed from the old idea of a static geographical ‘place’. Space was dynamic, constructed, and contested. It was where issues of sexuality, race, class, and gender—amongst a myriad of other power/knowledge struggles—were sited, created, and fought out.

Throughout the 1980s, as ‘place’ became increasingly problematized as ‘space’, the concept of ‘place’, as Tim Cresswell has suggested, became ‘not simply an outcome of social processes… it was, once established, a tool in the creation, maintenance and transformation of relations of domination, oppression and exploitation’.⁵ For the religious historian and cultural critic Michel de Certeau, ‘space is a practiced place’.⁶ De Certeau also emphasized the spaces of ‘everyday life’, which has been particularly of interest to scholars writing history ‘from below’.⁷

Following the lead of cultural geographers, historians have begun to explore and mine the agency of ‘space’ in a range of historical contexts, especially in the fields of urban, architectural—and most recently—political history. Denis Cosgrove, particularly in his Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape (1985) and in editorial collaboration with Stephen Daniels in The Iconography of Landscape (1988), influenced historians’ view of the concept of ‘landscape’, arguing that it could be ‘read’ as a ‘text’ representative of the relations of production and of power.⁸ For Cosgrove and Daniels, who like Harvey, employed a Marxist analysis to study the concept of ‘landscape’, ‘landscape’ was ‘a “way of seeing” that was bourgeois, individualist, and related to the exercise of power’.⁹ Yet this somewhat ‘passive’ view of ‘reading’ landscape has been refined by a number of scholars who view ‘landscape’, and its inhabitants, as having more agency than Cosgrove and Daniels suggest. For example, Beat Kümin’s 2009 collection, Political Space in Pre-Industrial Europe provides a careful delineation of the nuances of space/place as constructed sites of agency, and as nodes of the interaction of physical and mental relations, all at a specific geographical point.¹⁰ Recent considerations of the production of space have also addressed issues of belonging, exclusion and the creation and maintenance of boundaries.¹¹ Boundaries have themselves been shown to be ambiguous, liminal spaces and remarkably permeable. These are insights which feminist scholars, including many of the contributors to this issue, have found particularly helpful in probing the complexities of gendered space.

Two decades ago now, Doreen Massey and Daphne Spain investigated the significance and construction of space and the ramifications of that understanding for our perceptions of gender.¹² Yet, whereas Spain saw a fierce, reciprocal dichotomy between the ‘definitions of femininity and masculinity’ that were ‘constructed in particular places—most notably the home, workplace, and community’ a wealth of feminist scholarship has now problematized the utility of these stark binaries. As the work of feminist geographer Gillian Rose has demonstrated, spaces are ‘extraordinarily complicated’. Rose insists that ‘feminist maps’ are ‘multiple and intersecting, provisional and shifting’.¹³ Anthropologists such as Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga have further developed such an approach noting, in 2003, that ‘spatial analyses often neglect the body because of difficulties in resolving the dualism of the subjective and objective body, and distinctions between the material and representational aspects of body space’. They argued instead for a concept of ‘embodied space’ that would unite these disjunctions and assert the ‘importance of the body as a physical and biological entity, as lived experience, and as a centre of agency, a location for speaking and acting on the world’.¹⁴ Similarly, a generation of feminist historians has now developed sophisticated analyses that problematize the salience of the ‘separate spheres’. For example, in Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, Helen Hills explored ‘how the social organization of women’s and men’s bodies (sexual and otherwise), the institutions of family, class relationships, and religious and social regulation are defined by, relate to, and resist architectural discourses’.¹⁵ Likewise that same year (2003), Roxanne Mountford explored the ‘placement’ of bodies, according to status and gender, within the ‘rhetorical space’ found in sacred locations.¹⁶ Moreover, as much as the study of space informs our understanding of gender, the inverse is also true. As Simon Gunn pointed out in 2001, ‘the study of gender and sexuality reveals how public space is regulated by powerful norms, whose force resides partly in the fact that they are implicit, taken for granted’.¹⁷

The work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre lies behind many of the approaches and ‘spatial metaphors’¹⁸ that have been employed by historians working in this field and the contributions to this issue are no exception.¹⁹ It is therefore worth exploring some of their key insights first.

Michel Foucault

In 1976 Foucault was interviewed by the French Marxist geography journal Hérodote. The editors remarked with some surprise that Foucault’s work seemed to have been ‘constantly bordering on geography without ever taking it explicitly into account’.²⁰ At the end of the Hérodote interview, Foucault himself admitted that the conversation had changed his thinking. He now saw that ‘geography acted as the support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate’.²¹ These factors—the analysis of how power actually operates in society; and what Foucault’s 1984 editor Paul Rabinow termed ‘dividing practices’, ‘scientific classification’, and ‘subjectification’—i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Space, Place and Gendered Identities: feminist history and the spatial turn
• 2. Sexuality in Heterotopia: time, space and love between women in the historic house
• 3. Making a Scene: struggles over lesbian place-making in anglophone Canada, 1964–1984
• 4. Place and Power in Irish Farms at the End of the Nineteenth Century
• 5. Making Space: English women, letter-writing, and the life of the mind, c.1650–1750
• 6. Homes Both Sides of the Microphone: the wireless and domestic space in inter-war Britain
• 7. Changing Spaces: art, politics, and identity in the home studios of the Suffrage Atelier
• 8. ‘Unduly conscious of her sex’: priesthood, female bodies, and sacred space in the Church of England
• 9. ‘To console, to nurse, to prepare for eternity’: the Catholic sickroom in late nineteenth-century England
• Index