Cultural Geography

the political tensions around its theorization. We

aim to explore important aspects of such debates

by organizing our remarks in terms of four

themes or strands of feminist politics, concerned

with gender equality, women’s autonomy, multi-

ple differences and the deconstruction of cate-

gories, which between them straddle some of

the tensions between Enlightenment and post-

Enlightenment ways of thinking (Warner, 2000).

We provide an overview of the knowledges gen-

erated within the domain of cultural geography

by each of these themes, drawing out the con-

ceptualizations of the (gendered) human subjects

invoked. We also attend to the concepts of space

brought into play by different ideas about

gender, thereby linking the themes of equality,

autonomy, difference and deconstruction associ-

ated with feminist politics to the problematics of

cultural geography.

RE-PLACING GENDER

We have been using the term ‘gender’ in a way

that is peculiar to the English language and

which cannot readily be translated into other

languages, even those with words deriving from the

same linguistic root, such as Spanish and French

(Haraway, 1991; Moi, 1999; Widerberg, 1999).

Moreover, it is a usage traceable to particular

contexts and purposes, and redolent of particular

ways of thinking about the politics and subjects

of feminism. To elaborate, in English the term

‘gender’ has become deeply and problematically

bound up with the idea of a distinction between

sex and gender. In feminist writings, this distinc-

tion is widely attributed to research by Robert

Stoller (1968) concerned with psychological

aspects of transsexualism. In his work as a

psychiatrist he gathered information about indivi-

duals seeking surgery to change sex, who typi-

cally reported experiencing a profound mismatch

between their biological categorization as male

(or more rarely as female) and their own sense of

themselves. Theorizing this mismatch, he argued

that our understandings of ourselves as male or

as female arise culturally through processes

independent of the biology or morphology of our

bodies. While these different dimensions of defi-

nition often correspond, there is nothing neces-

sary or causal about this. He suggested that the

cultural form of differentiation and identification

be termed ‘gender’, while the biological differ-

ence be termed ‘sex’. Throughout his work on

transsexualism he insisted on the psychological

primacy of (cultural) gender over (biological)

sex (Stoller, 1985).

Second-wave feminist scholarship began to

emerge at much the same time as Stoller’s origi-

nal research, and the notion that differences

between women and men were attributable

primarily to cultural processes rather than to bio-

logical givens was argued widely and power-

fully, often drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s

claim that ‘One is not born but rather becomes a

woman’ (1997: 295). A common theme in femi-

nist arguments that sought to denaturalize

assumptions about women and men concerned

the absence of any binary distinctions in biologi-

cal attributes associated with ‘sex’: feminists

drew on evidence about chromosomal, hormonal

and other patterns to argue that the mutually

exclusive categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are

imposed on, rather than given by, nature (Cream,

1995; Greer, 1971). In parallel with this, femi-

nists pointed to various sources of cross-cultural

and historical evidence that revealed wide varia-

tions in the allocation of tasks between women

and men, and in the attributes imputed to women

and men, evidence that endorsed the argument

that differentiation between male and female has

much more to do with culture than biology

(Moore, 1988; 1994). Early anglophone feminist

writers did not use the term ‘gender’ (Firestone,

1972; Mitchell, 1971), until Ann Oakley (1972)

took up Stoller’s notion of a distinction between

(biological) sex and (cultural) gender. Thereafter

this understanding of the term ‘gender’ swiftly

took hold, so that by the time the Women and

Geography Study Group of the IBG published

their landmark text Geography and Genderthis

usage was offered unproblematically:

We use the term ‘gender’ to refer to socially created

distinctions between masculinity and femininity, while

the term ‘sex’ is used to refer to biological distinctions

between men and women. (1984: 21, emphasis in

original)

This line of argument has been of profound

importance in the development of western,

anglophone feminism(s). If the major differences

between women and men are cultural rather than

biological in origin, then the ways in which

women are disadvantaged relative to men are not

given in nature but are cultural in origin, main-

tained through the exercise of power, and can be

modified through social and political means. In

this way the sex–gender distinction has been

crucial for feminists working for the emancipa-

tion of women.

The demands for equality associated with this

application of the sex–gender distinction can be

traced historically to the eighteenth-century

Enlightenment thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft

and the tradition of liberal humanism. Within

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