The Dictionary of Human Geography

day-to-day and generational reproduction of
workers and the development and continuation
of ‘traditional’ gender relations in capitalist
societies (MacKenzie and Rose, 1983). Given
a feminist commitment to agency, efforts
were made to read these processes in non-
functionalist terms and as strategies to man-
age the effects of a capitalist economy (cf.
functionalism). For example, MacKenzie
and Rose argued that the isolation of women
as housewives in suburban locations
emerged from the combined influence of
working-class household strategies, govern-
mental policy and male power within fam-
ilies and trades unions. Socialist feminist
geographers also have been attentive to the
ways in which gender relations differ from
place to place, and are sedimented within
place-specific social and economic relations,
in ways that not only reflect but partially
determine local economic changes. This
argument has been made at urban (Hanson
and Pratt, 1995), regional (McDowell and
Massey, 1984) and international scales
(Pearson, 1986).
Beginning in the late 1980s, many feminist
geographers moved away from an exclusive
focus on gender and class systems, to consider
more expansive geographies ofdifference
(seeidentity;recognition). Feminist geog-
raphers were increasingly attentive to the dif-
ferences in the construction of gender
relations across races, ethnicities, ages, (dis)
abilities, religions, sexualities and national-
ities; to exploitative relations among women
who are positioned in varying ways along
these multiple axes of difference (seeageism;
ethnicity;homophobia and heterosexism;
race;racism;sexuality); and to the ways
that gender classification orders the existence
not just of men and women, but animals,
commodities, ideas and other entities.
Gender is a powerful means of naturalizing
difference. They began to draw on a broader
range of social, and particularly cultural,
theory, including psychoanalysis, post-
colonialism,post-structuralismandqueer
theory, in order to develop a fuller under-
standing of how gender relations and iden-
tities are shaped and assumed (seesubject
formation). This led to fundamental rethink-
ing of the category,gender, and attending to
the contradictions and possibilities presented
by the seeming instability of gender. With a
focus on multiple identifications andperfor-
mativity, the emphasis shifted from material
constraint and spatial entrapment to possibil-
ities beyond fixity. This was articulated in

Rose’s (1993) notion of paradoxical space:

the sense that the multiplicity and contradict-

oriness of the ways in which we are positioned

in space generates possibilities excessive to

hegemonic heterosexual norms and spaces

(for further thoughts about the ways in which

performativity and space are intertwined, see

also Gregson and Rose, 2000; Pratt, 2004).

Metaphors of multiplicity, mobility and

fluidity, of hybridity and paradoxical, in-

between, spaces were immensely popular in the

1990s, including Gibson-Graham’s (2006b

[1996]) influential re-theorizing of capitalism

andclassprocesses. A considerable amount

of writing developed around gendered cul-

tural representation, which extended the

focus to imaginative and symbolic spaces

(seefilm and geography;imaginative geog-

raphies;vision and visuality). A small but

growing number of studies of masculinities

(Berg and Longhurst, 2003) began to deliver

on the promise of a gender relational

approach, by directing the focus away from

women to a larger network of heteropatriar-

chal relations. The influence of identity polit-

ics and post-structural theories refocused

attention onsexualityand the scale of the

body.

Nonetheless, new fault lines emerged

among feminist geographers. Monk (1994)

observed that national differences between

American and British geographers diminished

as both pursued these new directions, but divi-

sions between feminist geographers located in

the globalnorthand globalsouthincreased,

an institutional schism that repeats geopolit-

ical ones in troubling ways. By 2006, Ramon-

Garcia, Simonsen and Vaiou declared that

Anglophone hegemony within institutional-

ized feminist geography was not improving;

on the contrary, it was getting worse. And by

the mid-1990s, cautionary reactions to a focus

onmobility, identity and difference suggested

the need to re-invigorate links with a renewed

socialist feminism.

To a considerable extent this has happened,

and a fourth strand of feminist geography

could be called ‘transversal’ feminist geog-

raphy. Connections are being drawn in many

directions. Seager (2003b) reviews fruits of

‘boundary breakdown’ within feministpolit-

ical ecologyandanimalgeography. The lat-

ter traces structures of oppression across

gender, race, class and species, as well as

exposing gendered assumptions that underlie

human relations to non-humans and what is

conceived asnature. The lessons from the

debates about difference in the 1990s have

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FEMINIST GEOGRAPHIES