Feminism: Analysing Geography and the Shadow of History | Sunita Samal

Abstract:

Today by degrading history, feminist geographers have produced an alternative feminist epistemology that not only transforms how geography accepts objects of analysis not only space but has brought to light a range of other objects of analysis such as ‘body’. To uncover history with geography in the collection of primary field-based data, it is necessary to connect women’s everyday spatial experiences with discursive analysis.

Introduction Before the arrival of feminist geography, the discipline operated with what is termed masculinist epistemology. This epistemology is based on a way of knowing the world through universalism that frames the world with compartmentalization and represents the world through objectivity. The contribution of feminist thought has been to recognize that universalism, compartmentalization and objectivity have traditionally been associated with male faculties of reason while their oppositions such as particularism, rationality and sensitivity have been constituted as the domain of unreasoning driven by mere sensibility.

Economic Man and Division of Labour

Geography in both the US and Europe in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century academic setting that was highly exclusionary in terms of class, race/ ethnicity and gender. Early universities were dominated by upper class white men. In Anglo contexts, a small number of women academics were primarily concentrated in the teaching and helping professions like nursing. Few were to be found in the disciplines from which modern geography was established.

During the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a crude form of biological stereotyping underlay not only conceptions of what women were able to achieve intellectually but also their physical capacity. This was even though many women in the early years of the discipline were engaged in intellectually stimulating and physically rigorous explorations of their own.

It was out of this broader academic climate that ‘expert’ societies arose so as to establish geography as a specialized, intellectual endeavor. The goal of these societies was to define the discipline as a science by debating theory—the kinds of phenomena to be investigated and appropriate methodologies to work within universities. The two most influential of these, the Association of American Geographers in the US and the Royal Geographical Society in UK were hardly opened for those interested in promoting geographical knowledge.

Overall, geography’s culture offered few opportunities for constructive engagement to the vast majority of college educated women as evidenced by much larger proportion of women found in the humanities and social sciences—such as anthropology and sociology. Geography’s expeditionary legacy continued to lead some to a nostalgic belief that only ‘stout hearted men’ were capable of such research what sometimes referred to as ‘muddy boots’ geography.

In the Man-Land tradition or the assumption of ‘economic man’ actually reveals an underlying assumption about what constitute primary human activities and who constitute economic, political, cultural and environmental agents. Though some may regard this practice as pedantic, it does allow contemporary writers the opportunity to explicitly distance themselves from sexist or racist language.

As many feminist geographers have pointed out the discipline’s prioritization of traditionally male, productive activities has in one way or another worked to marginalize the study of women’s lives. It has meant, for example, that geographer have spent more time examining steel manufacturing than daycare. We can see this bias reproduced in a wide range of substantive research areas.

Cultural geography, for example, was concerned with evaluating how different cultures made use of the earth and its resources in the process of making a living and constructing built environments in accord with those demands. Location theory took this abstraction of the productive activities of society to its furthest extent, deploying the assumption of economic man in an idealized space and tracing its implications for the distribution of economic activities.

Feminist geographers transform the question ‘where does work take place?’ by more targeted one ‘Who works where?’ The more specific question can help researchers better understanding of spatial dimensions of gender division of labor and their effects on women’s economic well-being historically. Now, Feminist study looks at connectivity such as migration and communication.

Comparing the spatial variation of women’s and men’s unemployment rates can yield insights into particular processes that contribute to the economic marginalization of women as opposed to men. A place as a term used to refer to the combination of cultural, economic, political character to a particular setting. For example, one might find that the degree and type of women’s political involvement in different places are influenced by contextual factors such as the gender division of labour in local economies, the quality of education in the locality or the severity of local environmental problems. In examining women’s economic viability, for example, of the presence of local social networks that partly influence their job searches. At the same times, they can not neglect how the place context within which women seeking employment is itself positioned relative to global capital flows which will affect the type and availability of employment as well as the local gendered division of labour.

Historically the spheres which marked a separation between presumptively male oriented productive activities. Feminist geographers of difference have made two significant contributors with respect to these frameworks. Feminist geographers have expanded substantive domains such as roles in neighborhood associations, household survival strategies in third world nations, provision of day care facilities and efforts to eliminate environmental pollution and toxic waste hazards in grassroots levels.

Universalization and Compartmentalization

At the inter-disciplinary level, the focus on production relative to re-production within geography meant that spatially minded social scientists who wanted to examine the family, health care or social welfare would have to look to other disciplines more sympathetic to their study e.g. sociology, social work for their graduate training, thereby diminishing the scope and ultimately the academic significance of the field.

Universalism is the belief that there exists a ‘God’s Eye’ position from which the world can be surveyed in it’s its totality. Such positions are complicating the facts of class, race/ethnicity, national origins, political persuasions and sexuality which would otherwise bias the investigative process. Yet, as feminist researchers have pointed ought the attempt to transcend such facts of life is ultimately driven by belief that they could and should be transcended.

Feminist critics of excessive compartmentalization points to the homogenizing effects which result in a tendency to overlook differences within and across research objects. In highlighting differences, feminists focused less on the objects contained within categories than on how these categories were formed in the first instance. This led feminists to develop relational as opposed to discrete understanding of phenomena in which they argued that objects were defined not by their supposedly intrinsic characteristics e.g. biology but by interrelations within social world e.g. gender division of labor.

Related to both universalism and compartmentalization is a masculinist strategy of representing the world as an objective observer. These dimensions of masculinist epistemology are not the subject of feminist debate and critique alone, for scholars have long debated the advisability and possibility of conducting distance research.

When Feminist geographers shift their focus from men and women as discrete objects of inquiry which is itself a masculinist formulation. Patriarchy is one of the key structures studied by historians who describe the systematic oppression of women and children through gender relations. The relations that link the lives of men and women take place within and between a variety of specific sites such as family, school and Church and each of which range from a patronizing paternalism to out-right violence.

For Marxist or Socialist feminism, capitalism is the key structure in modern life. The capitalism has extended its power into the home, resulting in a class of unpaid women whose household labor is expropriated by the male wage earner and by extension employer. For these feminists, capitalism determines the specific form that patriarchy takes. It is the complex and differentiated intersection of history and geography that these relations that gives us varieties of women’s exploitation across the globe.

In radical feminism, patriarchy predates capitalism and facilitated its emergences within specific socio-historical contexts. These feminists ground their prioritization not in the control over labor, but men’s control over women’s body and sexual relations and child rearing and maintained through patriarchal ideology and violence. While radical feminists were debating the theoretical primacy of patriarchy and capitalism, third-world feminist developed extensive critiques of Eurocentrism that draw attention to the extent to which women’s lives are also racialized and colonialized.

We use the term ‘discourse’ to refer to particular framings most of which rely upon one or another binary opposition such as nature/ culture, male/ female, objective/subjective, and orderly/ chaotic. Social constructivists are interested in the ways in which ‘discourse’ established distinctions or differences. In this view, people, objects, experiences and meaning until their qualities and boundaries have been framed in discourse.

Though discourses are enabled and reproduced through language, to constructivists discourse is a term more complicated than its everyday use as ‘mere words’ for it refers not only to the processes of categorization but also to everyday social practices. Applied to feminism, discursive construction points to gender coding as the key elements in establishing differences. The discursive analysis argues that biological and other discourses continually impact the body through ideas and practices surrounding medical protocols, labour practices, reproductive capabilities and legal statutes.

In 1980s and early 1990s saw the emergence of a large body of work on the intersection between gender, work and space. A key text in this regard is by Linda Mc Dowell and Doreen Massey (1984). They historicize the geographies produced by the intersection of gender and class relations.

Conclusion: By taking capitalism into account, there is no single patriarchy but a multiple variation. Feminist geographers have drawn on post-colonial theorization to better understand the global construction of gender, race, class and states. Feminists emphasize that the discourses are based on relations of political power. Discourses support compartmentalization from outside and universalization from inside temporarily because it is a flow that can be open for future study.

Bibliography:

1 Dixon, Deborah P. and John Paul Jones III ‘Feminist Geographies of Difference, Relations and Construction.
2 Mc Dowell, Linda and Sharp, Jo eds. (2000) ‘A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography’, London: Arnold.
3 Moss, Pamela (ed) (2002) ‘Feminist Geography in Practice’, MA: Blackwell
4 Massey, Doreen’s book ‘Space, Place and Gender (1994), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
5 Geography and Gender: An Introduction to Feminist Geography (1984), Institute of British Geographers’ Women and Geography Study Group.
6 Walby, Sylvia (1990) ‘Theorizing Patriarchy’, Oxford: Blackwell.
7 Rose, Gillian (1993) ‘Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge’, Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press.
8 McDowell, Linda and Massey, Doreen (1984) ‘A Woman’s Place’ in Doreen Massey and John Allen (eds) ‘Geography Matters’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(Author: Dr. Sunita Samal, Political Commentator, Author of Multiple Books Including ‘Feminism Is Not Here But Elsewhere: Think Tank Of Identity Politics’, (2024) Asian Press Books, Kolkata)