Cultural Geography

HIV/AIDS) are more socially stigmatized.

Some disabilities (such as dyslexia) are relati-

vely invisible, while others are more publicly

apparent.

While, for many years, geographers and

other social scientists adopted a curiously dis-

embodied approach to human subjectivity,

recent geographies of self and identity have

been increasingly embodied (Pile and Thrift,

1995). Again, however, this is not merely a

question of reinstating corporeality(as Moss

and Dyck insist through their distinction

between ‘embodied geographies’ and ‘geogra-

phies of embodiment’). Rather, it involves an

exploration of the social and spatial construc-

tion of our embodied identities. Judith Butler’s

work has made a key contribution to this

debate, arguing that gender difference is not

merely a cultural elaboration of pre-discursive,

biologically defined sexual difference. Accord-

ing to Butler (1990), sexual difference is itself

culturally encoded through the repetitive

enactment of gender as a social practice.

Gender differences are, in turn, made cultur-

ally intelligible through the regulatory grid of

compulsory heterosexuality which renders

some bodies socially acceptable while making

others discursively impossible. Moreover, an

emphasis on performativity and practice helps

dissolve the boundaries between the discur-

sive and the material, while geographical

research on sex–gender differences has

underlined the significance of space in providing

a hetero-normative context for interpreting

the cultural significance of different embodied

identities (Bell et al., 1994; Valentine, 1993).

While Moss and Dyck’s chapter emphasizes

the maturing of qualitative methods in human

geography (see Limb and Dwyer, 2001), with

an increasing concern for the positionality and

reflexivity of the researcher, the chapters in

this section should not be read in a triumpha-

list manner, as a succession of ideas and

approaches that demonstrate a steady march

of progress towards the heroic present.

Rather, the chapters that follow represent a

more modest contribution to theoretical

enquiry. For, as the previous examples suggest,

cherished distinctions between sex and gender,

the material and the discursive, the social and

the cultural all begin to collapse as soon as

our analytical gaze intensifies. Whether the

resulting ambiguities and ambivalences are a

source of disciplinary anxiety or an opportunity

to think in new and unconventional ways

raises complex questions about the relation-

ship between power and knowledge. The

essays in this section are all motivated by a

desire to explore more cultural understand-

ings of the social without abandoning the

quest for a more critical politics of difference.

Approaching the social through the lens of the

cultural and seeing both through the lens of

the spatial establishes an exciting and open-

ended agenda for future research.

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