Mapping Women, Making Politics

Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography

Lynn Staeheli, Eleonore Kofman, Linda Peake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135952501
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Mapping Women, Making Politics demonstrates the multiple ways in which gender influences political processes and the politics of space. The book begins by addressing feminism's theoretical and conceptual challenges to traditional political geography and than applies these perspectives to a range of settings and topics including nationalism, migration, development, international relations, elections, social movements, governance and the environment in the Global North and South.

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Mapping Gender, Making Politics: Toward Feminist Political Geographies

LYNN A. STAEHELI AND ELEONORE KOFMAN

Belonging and inclusion are contested terms. They also are terms that have particular resonance for political geographers at the beginning of the twenty-first century, because they speak to the processes of democratization and the incorporation of political subjects as citizens. The End of History and the Last Man (Fukayama 1992) and The Third Wave (Huntington 1991) declared that democracy was on the verge of sweeping the globe with the promise of expanded procedures and institutions to ensure the rights of universal citizenship. In the context of proclamations about democratization, long-standing debates about political inclusion and belonging took on increased importance, because it seemed that beyond the establishment of formal institutions of democracy, marginalization and exclusion of particular ideas, people, and social groups continued. As became increasingly clear, the exclusion characterizing political processes also was indicative of processes of knowledge production, because the experiences and perspectives of marginalized groups seemed absent from the study of political processes and geographies.

It is in this context that we want to situate Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography. We intend the book to be a step in demonstrating the ways in which feminist perspectives on politics and political geography contribute to a better, richer understanding of political processes, activities, and behaviors. But we also hope that the book will draw attention to the considerable work by feminists that has not been included in or incorporated into political geography's vision of itself. In so doing, we use this introductory chapter to provide a short overview of political geography, highlighting questions of how it is defined and bounded. The marginalization—and even exclusion—of gender and of feminist perspectives has yielded a field that is partial in the understandings and knowledges produced within it. We outline what a specifically feminist political geography could entail through a consideration of key concepts and issues. In so doing, we demonstrate the importance of situated knowledges that are derived from the lives and experiences of women in different social and geographic locations. Through this discussion, we hope to provide a guide by which the rest of the chapters can be read.

Approaching Political Geography

The field of political geography is broad, covering myriad topics including nationalism, territory, elections, trade, state institutions, citizenship, resistance, social movements, and quotidian political practices and identities. Given its eclecticism, it is a difficult subfield to describe and to characterize. As we try to make sense of the field and to highlight the significance of gender in the making of political geographies, we choose to emphasize the different understandings of “the political” that underlie theory and research and what these mean for a feminist political geography.

Before proceeding, however, we should be clear what a feminist political geography would entail. In 1990 Kofman and Peake conceptualized politics as an activity relevant to all spheres of public and private life; it is manifested in activities of cooperation, negotiation, and struggle over the production and distribution of resources, and it involves the transformative capacity of social agents and institutions. This feminist perspective on the political involves a radical reworking of concepts that moves beyond the boundaries created by a topical focus on formal political spheres and spaces. In addition to an expansive approach to political issues, processes, and relationships, it includes normative visions of social change to combat exclusion, oppression, and marginalization. In so doing, feminists' concerns are with the formal institutions associated with conventional definitions of politics and also with the relations and practices in sites other than the state that construct, maintain, and sometimes challenge power.

Feminist political geographers have conceptualized the political in three overlapping approaches that involve the political as distribution, the political as antagonism, and the political as constitutive.¹ As we argue, gender relations are important in understanding distributional issues and antagonistic politics, but they have been underrepresented in political geography. The contributors in this book demonstrate that these issues of distribution and antagonism—which might be thought of as mapping gender—are central to the constitution—the making—of polities, political relationships, and political geographies.

A distributional approach to the political emphasizes the distribution of power, resources, and privilege in societies. In Lasswell's (1936) terms, distributional approaches emphasize who gets what and under which circumstances. Power is of central importance in creating and maintaining distributions, through the ability to control institutions, and in the ability to use the distribution of resources to achieve certain goals. Distributional approaches within political geography often have focused on spatial patterns of inequality as a way of demonstrating the exercise of power. Hartshorne identified the emphasis on areal distributions in the 1950s as the defining characteristic of political geography; it can be seen in the focus on boundaries, territorial identities, and the mapping of political outcomes that provides the backcloth of much research on geopolitics, nationalism, and the state.

Political geographers have gone beyond the study of patterns, however, to consider the antagonistic processes that give rise to distributional patterns. This perspective draws attention to the processes of interest formation, coalitions, and place making that shape political struggle. The empirical entrées to these processes by political geographers typically include elections, the passage and implementation of policy, state formation, international agreements, and wars, among other topics. The combined emphasis on distributions and antagonisms has been at the core of political geography from its inception. As with research in other disciplines, however, the significance of gender as an element of distribution or as a relationship at play in antagonism was largely absent in the early stages of political geography.

Yet at key moments, certain disruptions occurred within political geography that are significant to the development of the subdiscipline and that opened a space through which feminism could be incorporated through a focus on a wider range of experiences and through a focus on the constitutive. The constitutive implies an approach to the political as an ongoing process in which societies are made—are constituted—in and through struggle. This is understood to be a complex and multivalent struggle, involving actions and behaviors in both the formal spaces of the state and spaces of home, neighborhood, workplace, community, and media. These struggles have a strong normative element, as they revolve around the recognition of personhood and debates about what this means for the formation of just, democratic societies (Brown and Staeheli 2003).

The introduction of critical social theories (e.g., Reynolds and Knight 1989), postmodernist ideas (Dear 1988), and critical geopolitics (Dalby 1994; Ó Tuathail 1996b) into political geography was part of an increased attention to the constitutive. With this acceptance came a broader range of theoretical perspectives that were seen as relevant to politics, including theories of cultural and identity politics. The incorporation of these theories was part of a cultural turn in which feminists also participated (Sharp 2000c). In addition, these theories pointed to new sites or arenas of politics that moved outside the state and formal institutions, thereby changing the ways in which politics could be conceptualized and spatialized. Similarly, new social movements theory pointed to the ways that agents outside the state turned away from formal politics to eschew change in culture and society (Melucci 1989), thus promoting the democratization of civil society and an expansion of citizenship in substantive and formal senses.

It was in this context that feminist approaches to political geography gained currency in the 1980s and 1990s. Feminists highlighted the significance of gender and gender relationships in shaping the distributions and antagonisms that had been the focus of much political geography; in so doing, they made claims about the ways in which those distributions and antagonisms shaped polities and societies. But despite a growing body of research in the 1980s and 1990s, the integration and recognition of feminist perspectives have not yet been achieved. Dalby, for example, argued in 1994 that critical geopolitics tended to overlook gender issues and perspectives. This is somewhat disheartening, because critical geopolitics was one of the developments in the subdiscipline that would seem to be particularly receptive to feminism, given its theoretical and methodological orientations. As recently as 2001, Dowler and Sharp argued that critical geopolitics simply reproduced the masculinism of the subfield. And the absence of feminist perspectives and of gender extends beyond critical geopolitics. A review of political geography textbooks, progress reports, overviews, and programmatic statements suggests that political geography remains largely unaffected by developments in feminist geography (Staeheli 2001). Taylor's (2000a) assessment is acute: political geography has not accepted the challenges of feminism. As Dear (1999) noted, one would be hard pressed to know what political geographers think of feminism.

Toward a Feminist Political Geography

One reason that political geography has not met the challenge of feminism may lie in its masculinism. As applied to research and ways of understanding the world, masculinism is associated with the illusion of transparent space and an all-seeing vision, often described as the “view from nowhere” (Haraway 1988; Rose 1997). Such a vision allows practitioners to name, codify, and classify the world in ways that bring order to places. But it is more than this. The assumed transparency of space and its accompanying universalism typically is associated with practices that do not engage research subjects in the building of categories and the assignment of names; those categories and names appear pre-given and portable in that they can be carried from place to place so that research can be replicated in the building of theories that are spatially and temporally extensive. The field has thereby emphasized trends and changes at an aggregate level, rather than with respect to an individual or to a specific territory. Empirical research within political geography often is based on information from the latter, but that information is quickly abstracted to provide an argument at a higher level of generalization.

The implications of this approach to understanding the world and the goals of research have led to the privileging of Western theory with its emphasis on macro levels of theory and of empirical research and a concern for formal, institutional politics, particularly at the level of the state. The effect often has been to overlook the significance of gender and the ways in which power relationships structure what appears at the macro level and is represented in institutional politics. There is a tendency, for example, to focus on elite actors who either have institutional power through their roles within the state or are able to influence the state through nonstate institutions such as firms or nongovernmental organizations; the agents who wield such power are typically men. By contrast, feminists have redirected attention from elite agents to the structures and processes that create marginality and the ways in which these are necessary to the operations of political systems. In so doing, the focus shifts from the operations of elite agents to the construction of political subjects and the ability of diverse subjects to act.

Similarly, the tendency to analyze issues at a macro level makes it difficult to undertake a detailed consideration of the ways in which gender relations are implicated in the contexts of politics and in the ideas about households, families, and the body that are critical in the development of ideas about space and spatialized politics (Kofman forthcoming). In addition, the focus on formal institutions of the state has lent itself to analysis using secondary information, typically produced by the state. Yet those sources of information often are abstracted from the local and certainly from the household and body. And very often, researchers rely on aggregated statistics that are not amenable to gender-based analyses; such analyses are simply not the reason most of the information was collected. As such, a great deal of contemporary political geography describes a “world without people” or at least a world of abstract, disembodied political subjects. Feminist research, however, often combines quantitative and secondary sources of information with more qualitative and primary sources. The use of qualitative methods draws attention to the role of everyday lives. The triangulation of information and methods of analysis also makes it easier to see the ways in which gender and other dimensions of difference operate in political processes (see Sharp 2004 [this volume]).

Taken together, the ways in which knowledge is produced within political geography constitute a masculinist practice. It yields a kind of knowledge that is claimed to be universal (or at least all-encompassing) and impartial. Feminist political geographers, however, challenge the masculinism of political geography by reworking its basic concepts and the practices involved in knowledge creation. The reworking of concepts includes core ideas related to the constitution of the political, such as power, citizenship, and difference. In so doing, feminists and other critical social theorists² often invoke geographies or locations for politics that have not been the traditional focus of the subdiscipline. But it has not been enough to simply reconstruct political concepts and locations; feminist political geography has challenged the very processes of knowledge construction within the field. In particular, it has attempted to democratize knowledge production through recognition of the importance of situated knowledge and through critical engagement between scholarship and the world in which we live and work.

We introduce these issues, each of which is taken up more fully, but in diverse ways, in the chapters that follow. We do not attempt an exhaustive overview of the literature about these concepts, nor do we present a history of their development, as those would constitute a book in and of themselves. Rather, we introduce these concepts as they are developed and used in the subsequent chapters as a way of highlighting the ways in which we can move toward a political geography that better addresses the significance of gender and gender relationships in constituting the societies in which we live.

Reworking the Political

As we described previously, reworking the very concept of the political has been at the center of creating feminist political geographies. This has involved a conceptualization of the political that moves away from the masculinism of much of the field; it moves away from the macro level of analysis to consider the ways in which political relationships are shaped by—and resisted through—gender roles and relations in a variety of settings. The political is not just relevant to elections, the state, and international conflict writ large; it is seen in the ways in which women mobilize at the grass roots, in the ways an ethic of care is brought into political discourse, in the ways masculinity and femininity are invoked in ideas of nation and in international conflicts. What is important is that reworking the political involves a commitment to social change.

To say that the political involves a commitment to social change, however, is not to say that the vision of social change is shared among feminists (see Martin 2004 [this volume] and Nagar 2004 [this volume]). Although they share an abstract goal of change, there are lively, important, and often painful debates between feminists that revolve around issues of identity (e.g., racialized, sexual, religious), North-South differences, methodology, and strategy. These debates are also part of the reworking of the political, creating a sense of openness in terms of the issues, relationships, and perspectives that are brought to bear on the concept. There is no—and should be no—totalizing discourse of feminism. Rather, the political is a contested concept within feminism. The political is not tethered to particular sites or institutions as much as it is a struggle for inclusion in a wide range of settings, acts, perspectives, and embodied experience (see Cope 2004 [this volume]). But the political is not just about differences—either between people or between perspectives; it is also about the webs of power and social relationships that are the basis of connections. One of the goals of feminist political geography, then, is to disrupt the seemingly coherent—and perhaps closed—project of the subdiscipline. As demonstrated by the authors in this book, its definition of the political is one that implies a radical openness to new voices, perspectives, relationships, and strategies.

Power

Power often is conceptualized in terms of the capacity to control or shape an event, person, or process. Power has long been thought of as the ability to do certain things or of having control over events or people (e.g., Bachrach and Baratz 1970). Power, then, is associated with control, authority, or the ability to govern or rule. Power also has been thought of as an attribute or a possession associated with particular institutional roles or with types of individuals.

Social theorists (and feminists among them) have expanded on these conceptualizations of power in several ways. One way has been to situate power in networks or in webs of relationships. A second way has been to recognize the different sources of power, and, in particular, the sources of power that may be rooted in the private sphere. For example, feminist analyses of women's suffrage in the United States have shown the ways in wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Full title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Mapping Gender, Making Politics: Toward Feminist Political Geographies
• 2 Contextualizing Feminist Political Theory
• 3 Mapping Feminisms and Difference
• 4 From Dualisms to Multiplicities: Gendered Political Practices
• 5 Placing Gendered Political Acts
• 6 Doing Feminist Political Geographies
• 7 Development, Postcolonialism, and Feminist Political Geography
• 8 Critically Feminist Geopolitics
• 9 Gendered Globalization
• 10 Territory, Territoriality, and Boundaries
• 11 Embodied Nationalisms
• 12 The (Geo)Politics of Gendered Mobility
• 13 Crossing Borders: Gender and Migration
• 14 Social Movements, Protest, and Resistance
• 15 A Gendered Politics of the Environment
• 16 Making Feminist Sense of the State and Citizenship
• 17 Framing Feminist Claims for Urban Citizenship
• 18 Feminizing Electoral Geography
• References
• Contributors
• Index