Cultural Geography

sharp and stimulating contrast between existing

and aspirational social and symbolic orders.

Lucy Sargisson writes that such texts describe

cultures of women which

contain a material or cultural memory of oppression

along gender lines ... [which] can be connected to the

common search for subjectivity and identity as women,

and to the renunciation of historico-cultural traditions

that have constructed Woman as an artifice to comple-

ment (make perfect) Man. (1996: 206–7)

The non-fictional practice of l’écriture feminine,

most closely associated with the French feminist

philosophy of, for example, Luce Irigaray and

Hélène Cixous, can also be seen as a ‘utopian’

attempt to strengthen and simultaneously

recreate autonomous feminine subjectivities.

L’écriture feminine attempts to think sexual

difference anew, and suggests that ‘imagining

how things could be different is part of the

process of transforming the present in the direc-

tion of a different future’ (Whitford, 1991: 19).

Such writing thus seeks to bring about change in

the present, rather than mapping out the future in

advance. It is therefore a form of dynamic or fluid

utopianism that works to reach beyond women’s

potential for autonomous relations with men to

create a new ethics of sexual difference. As Kevin

Hannam and Pamela Shurmer-Smith note,

l’écriture feminineis not to everyone’s taste and it can

certainly be very hard work to read, but, since it resides

at the edge of experiment in generating new ways of

thinking the world and abounds in spatial metaphors, it

really cannot be ignored by cultural geographers. (1994:

119; also see Davidson and Smith, 1999)

Indeed, Gillian Rose (1996; 1999) has in recent

years engaged with Irigaray in an imaginative

and performative attempt to rethink the very

nature of space.

The theme of autonomy has provoked a great

deal of controversy within and beyond feminist

geography. For some, the women-only or

women-centred practices and spaces associated

with a feminist politics of autonomy presume an

essential sameness among all women (and

implicitly among all men). According to this

interpretation, in contrast to the notion of gender

as a superficial adornment associated with the

theme of equality, gender is understood to con-

stitute a fundamental and dualistic aspect of

human subjectivity. Such essentialism has

attracted intense and sometimes vitriolic criti-

cism (Fuss, 1989; Spelman, 1988). However, it is

an interpretation which depends upon and repro-

duces the binary thinking it criticizes: it constructs

an opposition between gender as either super-

ficial or fundamental. As our account illustrates,

engagements with women’s autonomy carry

more potent challenges to conceptualizations of

subjectivity. By questioning and exploring the

limits of the assumed universality of normative

fictions of rational, unitary and self-directing

subjects, the possibility of difference comes into

view. The theme of autonomy emphasizes

gender as a source of difference and in so doing

focuses on women, women’s experiences and

women’s spaces. But, as Minnie Bruce Pratt

(1984) and Caroline Ramazanoglu (1989)

amongst others have argued, gender is one

amongst a multitude of fluid and power-laden

differences that shape subjectivities and spaces,

which have been profoundly influential in cul-

tural geography’s engagements with gender.

FRACTURING GENDER

The processes of categorization we described in

the first section of this chapter are not unique to

gender. We make equally routine and habitual

assumptions about people’s age, about their ethni-

city and/or ‘race’, about their socio-economic

position, about the shape, capacities and require-

ments of their bodies, about their sexuality and

so on. In some ways the existence of these taken-

for-granted assumptions is essential to our ability

to interact with one another, at least in contexts

where daily routines bring ‘strangers’ into close

proximity with one another. We cannot approach

each and every interaction as if we know nothing

of what might be similar or different between

ourselves and the lives of others. Rather, we need

to be able to ‘place’ the people we come across

in our daily lives within a framework of mean-

ing, which we do by drawing upon culturally

specific repertoires of interpretation. Thus, we

use local knowledges that enable us to interpret

visual, aural and other signs (pertaining to con-

texts as much as to people) in terms of distinc-

tions of gender, age and so on. We also need to

be able to ‘place’ or ‘situate’ ourselves in relation

to others, which we do in part by ‘identifying’

ourselves as belonging within particular cate-

gories and outside others, from which we

‘disidentify’ (Skeggs, 1997). These processes of

identification and disidentification draw on

whatever ideas and resources are available to us

to think about ourselves.

The categories we so frequently apply

unthinkingly or unproblematically relate to our

own and other people’s lives in complex ways.

Contrary to much everyday usage, they do not

express uncontentious, easily definable or con-

stant attributes of the lives to which they refer.

332 PLACING SUBJECTIVITIES

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