empowerment – has become increasingly
identified with GAD.
Since the 1980s, writings by post-colonial
and Third World feminists have sparked sus-
tained reflection and debate on the political
and intellectual representations of the Third
World woman in Western feminist discursive
practices, and underscored that ‘woman’ is
not a ‘real’ but a politicalsubject, shaped
throughdiscoursesand institutional actors
with high political stakes (seepost-structur-
alism;post-colonialism). For geographers,
engagements with post-structuralist insights
also translated into examination of how strug-
gles over labour and resources reveal deeper
contestations over gendered (and other)
meanings in the ways that rightsto re-
sourcesare negotiated and redefined within
the political arenas ofhousehold, workplace
and state (Carney, 1996). Katz (2004, p. 227)
further spatializes processes of development
and resistance through the notion oftime–
space expansion, which allows a simultaneous
theorizing of: (a) the expanded field within
which gendered and generational subjects en-
gage in material social practices of production
and reproduction; (b) the growing distance of
the Third World’s villages from global centres,
whose own interactions have been intensified
throughtime–space compression; and (c) an
acute awareness among people living in
impoverished rural places, not only of being
marooned in a reconfigured globalspace, but
also of what is to be had and the pain of
absences created by this expansion of desire.
(See alsofeminist geographies.) rn
genealogy A mode of historical enquiry
that seeks to trace the emergence and descent
of terms and categories, and the interrelation
of power and knowledge in their deployment.
The term is used in German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1882 workOn the ge-
nealogy of morality(1994; see Ansell-Pearson,
1994), although it is in a key essay by the
French thinker Michel Foucault (1977c
[1963]) and his subsequent adoption of the
term to describe his own work that it took on
its modern importance.
Foucault is concerned with showing how
taken-for-granted phenomena actually have
complicated and often-forgotten histories.
In works on disciplinary power (1976a
[1975]), sexuality (1978 [1976]) and political
rationalities (seegovernmentality), Foucault
sought to undermine – in the sense of excavate
and challenge – standard accounts and inter-
pretations. He suggested that genealogy did
not confuse itself with a quest for origins, but
rather looked to the moment of emergence
of a problematic and to trace its descent
through all the circuitous paths it may have
taken. Words have not remained with the same
meanings, and so etymology may reveal much
about a subject – an approach favoured by
Nietzsche, and his fellow German philosopher
Martin Heidegger – nor have established
logics always been seen the same way.
Foucault claimed that his purpose in writing
was not to write a history of the past, but a
history of the present, in order to illuminate
how we have arrived where we are, which will
open up future possibilities of change and
resistance. Foucault’s earlier writings had
been described as archaeologies, and although
the two approaches are sometimes seen as
opposites, it makes more sense to see them as
complementary, as Foucault often intimated.
In Foucault’s usage,archaeologytended to look
at the logics that conditioned the formations of
knowledge in a given epoch (seeepisteme),
whilegenealogyintroduced a complementary
analysis ofpower, of the practices that follow
from, and enable, knowledge.
Critics have charged Foucault’s approach as
too negative, with Nigel Thrift (2000b, p. 269)
claiming that ‘in Foucault country it always
seems to be raining’. However, Foucault’s an-
alysis of power sought todecentreit from con-
centration in the hands of a monarch, astate
or a dominantclass, and to show how power
flowed throughoutsociety, was not simply re-
pressive and worked in complex interrelations –
what he called ‘games of power’. In his terms,
‘where there is power, there is the possibility of
resistance’, which his genealogical works
sought to exploit. It was in this period that
Foucaulthimselfbecamemuchmorepolitically
active in campaigns aroundprisons,sexuality
and in journalism on the Iranian revolution.
Foucault refused any kind ofteleologyin
history, suggesting that there was no preor-
dained logic to the course of events. Things
could have been otherwise, and could be other-
wise in the future. Geographers have made use
of these ideas to take into account the spatial
and well as temporal aspects (see, e.g., Driver,
1993; Philo, 2004), to which Foucault himself
was generally attentive (see Elden, 2001). A
whole range of historical analyses have been
undertaken that are inspired by Foucault’s ge-
nealogical work, which are informed by a pol-
itical and critical sensibility, an attentiveness to
small details and textual analysis, and to de-
ployments of power and constructions ofiden-
tityandsubjectivity. seGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 270 2.4.2009 6:30pmGENEALOGY