abandoned territorial identity and all that it
entails and instead looked to global communities
of oppressed. Robin Morgan’s ‘global sister-
hood’ was one such attempt to look at the com-
monality which was the ‘result of a common
conditionwhich, despite variations in degree, is
experienced by all human beings who are born
female’ (1984: 4).
However, the global sisterhood has been
critiqued by Third World feminists who argued
that this image ignores all of the differences,
inconsistencies and histories which make up the
notion of womanhood in different places. For
Mohanty this automatic alliance erases the
agency of women in particular historical strug-
gles, and requires that ‘the categories of race and
class have to become invisible for gender to
become visible’ (1997: 83). For Third World
feminists like Mohanty, the global sisterhood
image silences the histories of colonialism,
imperialism and racism from which western
feminists still benefit. Second World – perhaps
now more appropriately termed ‘post-communist’ –
feminists have similarly critiqued western
feminism for its liberal, middle-class assumptions.
Responding to Virginia Woolf’s claim that ‘as
a woman I have no country. As a woman I want
no country. As a woman my country is the whole
world’, Adrienne Rich explains how this feminist
dream of universal sisterhood is unobtainable.
She insists that:As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot
divest myself of that country merely by condemning its
government or by saying three times ‘As a woman my
country is the whole world.’ Tribal loyalties aside, and
even if nation-states are now just pretexts used by multi-
national conglomerates to serve their interests, I need to
understand how a place on the map is also a place in
history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a
feminist I am created and trying to create. (1986: 212)In these ‘notes towards a politics of location’,
Rich insists that womanhood is constructed
specifically in different locations, as a result of
many geographies – and historical geographies –
playing out local and global relationships, of
colonialism, trade, exploration, struggle and so
on. Rich’s opportunities, experiences, expecta-
tions and actions are both constrained and made
possible by her multiple positionings within dif-
ferent power ‘containers’, perhaps most signifi-
cantly the nation-state within which she is a
citizen.
So an innocent view of movement and fluidity
is problematic. For a select few there is a dis-
solving of boundaries and a shortening of dis-
tance as the world apparently shrinks. For many
others, however, daily life becomes more fixedand travel more of a challenge. For the poor and
the marginal, borders become more difficult to
traverse, not less. In her work on the progressive
sense of place and power geometries, Massey
(1991) critiques the easy image of global shrink-
age offered by some theorists. Although clearly
technology is facilitating easy information con-
nections and movement for some, for many
others places are actually becoming more remote
as the world ‘shrinks’. People without resources –
money and knowledge – find it less easy to link
and move. Rather than embrace an unbordered
and accessible global space, Massey (1993) sees
the existence of ‘power geometries’ which act to
constrain and facilitate the movement of differ-
ent groups of people. This is not to suggest that
the world remains bounded by all-powerful divi-
sions. Massey (1991) calls this an ‘extroverted
sense of place’ which can be imagined to form
around networks of relations and connections
rather than being enacted by boundaries and
through exclusions. This requires us to think of
gender as something formulated through locali-
zed networks, which are nevertheless inherently
linked into global processes.
Much place-based politics is organized around
demonstrating and protecting the borders of
places, defending them from infringements to
their ‘authentic’ tradition, landscape and identity.
Place is seen as bounded. Place- or territory-
based identity is usually organized around con-
structing a sense of otherness or difference
against which the place can be defined. Defini-
tions of who belongs in a country revolve around
establishing heritage or genealogy, drawing a
border to keep out those who do not belong.
Massey (1991) suggests that this is not neces-
sarily how place should be understood. It can be
shown that in actuality the clear difference
between inside and outside, self and other, does
not exist in real life: reality does not possess the
hard lines of a map. Massey is encouraging us to
acknowledge the extra-local similarities and
linkages that make up a place, in addition to the
differences. However, given the existence and
increasing prevalence of the ‘feminization of
poverty’, women are more likely to be trapped
by globalizing processes. Borders cannot simply
be wished away.
And not all feminists would want them to be.
Anzaldúa (1987) argues for the importance of
place and identity in resistance to dominant
global powers. She offers a problematized
celebration of identity based on impurity, mixing
and diversity rather than singularity – recognition
of the importance of the historically specific bor-
der between Mexico and the US. Anzaldúa’s is
an ambivalent geography which recognizes theGENDER IN A POLITICAL AND PATRIARCHAL WORLD 4793029-ch25.qxd 03-10-02 11:04 AM Page 479