Cultural Geography

global geography that he had experienced there

was little difference between turning the people

working for the federal government into minions

of an evil state apparatus and turning the people

of Iraq into minions of an evil state apparatus

(1998: 202).

Sparke shows how the Gulf representations

have played out – in a very specific way – in

this person’s biography. Analysis of the dis-

courses significant to this story might suggest

that the danger would always lie outside the

boundaries of the US. However Sparke’s almost

ethnographic account of the production of

geopolitical images and their actual impact on

people’s daily lives shows how these have been

remade in this case to provide rather different

results. A broadening of methodology from

textual analysis to what might be considered an

anthropology of international relations offers

exciting possibilities for future understandings

of the complex local embodied geographies that

reconstruct the nation and the geography of

international relations.

CONCLUSION

In her ‘notes towards a politics of location’, Rich

(1986) beautifully articulates a problem that

faces feminist theorists approaching global

geographies: how to engage with the various

exploitations and oppressions of women around

the globe and at various regional and local scales,

without producing an insipid image of global

sisterhood which ignores all of the differences,

inconsistencies and histories which make up the

notion of womanhood in different places.

A feminist take on the patriarchal world

cannot be a simple and naive abandonment of

borders. These are accepted as social constructs

but this in no way reduces their power over the

individuals and communities that need to negoti-

ate them on a daily basis. Lives are constructed

and reconstructed around political and patriar-

chal boundaries through discourses which appar-

ently operate at the global and national scales.

Attempts to understand the complex relations

between the international and the everyday

demonstrate the importance of ensuring that the

smallest, mundane daily practices of everyday

life are not silenced from reconstructions of the

international. At the same time the impacts of the

movement of global geopolitical discourses on

individual bodies need to be examined. For

instance, the recent protests against the impacts

on communities around the world of World

Trade Organization decisions are testament to an

emerging politics which recognizes and challenges

the complex processes linking bodies and nations,

communities and globe.

Methodologically there needs to be a move-

ment beyond the text to draw in other actions and

practices, to look at the relations between dis-

course and practice, to see how the discourses

work in a material sense and how they become

embodied in expected and unexpected ways

when actually used by different people and dif-

ferent communities in the pursuit of their lives

around the globe. It is this drawing together of

the global in the local, and the complex embodi-

ment of geopolitical discourses, that offer one

possibility for the production of new political

geographical imaginations.

NOTES

1 Butler’s is not a monolithic theory. There is always the

possibility of resistance and transgression in this

model which is so dependent on correct repetition.

Alternative practices – whether consciously performed

or not – can destabilize and ultimately undermine these

fragile assemblages.

2 See Nast (1998) on the differences between nations

gendered as male and female.

3 Although there is evidence that women in the military

might fear more physical and verbal violence from

their own comrades (see Enloe, 1993: 223).

4 Other feminists writing political geographies have

similarly developed different writing styles. Both

Enloe (1989; 1993) and Seager (1993) write in an

informal style, rarely referencing the ‘great men’ of

political geography or international relations. The

authorities to which they refer are embedded in real-

life political struggles rather than the discursive

exchanges of the academy.

REFERENCES

Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, 2nd edn.

London: Verso.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New

Mestiza. London: Routledge.

Ashley, R. (1987) ‘The geopolitics of geopolitical space:

towards a critical social theory of international politics’,

AlternativesXIV: 403–34.

Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.

Campbell, D. (1990) ‘Global inscription: how foreign policy

constitutes the United States’, AlternativesXV: 263–86.

Campbell, D. (1992) Writing Security: United States

Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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