as an intersection of oppressions. Because of
geographers’ extensive work on identity, differ-
ence and power, the body in relationship to
power and subjectivity is probably the most
popular type of body interrogated in geography,
especially in regard to the intersection of gender,
‘race’, sexuality and ability, and to a lesser extent
age, citizenship and nationality. Together these
studies of power and the body tend to focus on
spatial responses to everyday phenomena, the
performance of identity in an array of contexts,
and the destabilization of categories in terms of
dominance and privilege. In what could be a
far-reaching analysis of an emancipatory poli-
tics, Joanne Sharp (1996) explores how the
relationship between gender and nationhood, its
constitution and the contingency of its material
manifestation, might contribute to a radical
democratic feminist politics (following Mouffe,
1992). She argues that denaturalizing the consti-
tutive process of dominance and subjugation is
useful in supporting a radical democracy. The
move to denaturalize any oppressive arrange-
ment of the deployment of power speaks to how
specific bodies find spaces to resist. Theorizing
the body as a site of both oppression and resis-
tance can access the intersection of multiple
oppressions as well as the intersection of mean-
ing and materiality (Moss and Dyck, 1996: 749).
What is missing analytically in many studies
of the intersection of oppressions, as Kristen Day
(1999) has pointed out, is scrutiny of the ‘white-
ness’ of various constructions of oppression and
the complexities of ‘race’. ‘Race’, so denoted to
emphasize the socially constructed nature of the
category, should be very much a part of body
work in social and cultural geography (see
Bonnett and Nayak, Chapter 15 in this volume).
Understanding bodily experience in terms of
‘race’ enhances embodied knowledge especially
because ‘“racial” knowledge about the “other” is
what provides the contradictory experience of
“race”’ in everyday life (Nkweto Simmonds,
1999: 57). Embodied knowledge is perhaps the
most effective way to challenge the hegemony of
‘whiteness’ so prevalent in the west. At stake in
the production of academic knowledge and, more
widely, in society is the denaturalization of dif-
ference (after Kobayashi and Peake, 1994) and
the deinternalization of dominance (after
Chouinard and Grant, 1995). Although not
explicitly addressing either bodies or knowledge
grounded in bodily experience, social and
cultural geographers nevertheless include racial-
ized bodies in their interpretations of ‘race’ and
spatial politics. In a nuanced study of collective
politics, Laura Pulido (1997) complicates the
category ‘woman’ in feminist theory and politicsby questioning whether or not the subaltern can
speak. In a study of environmental justice activist
women’s groups, she showed how low-income
women of colour chose to show a united front
within their respective racialized communities in
lieu of drawing on ‘woman’ and feminism. She
goes on to argue that academics and other
activists tend to identify these activists in terms
of gender rather than ‘race’, further demonstrat-
ing the lack of political astuteness of people
invoking feminist theory and practising feminism.
This theme of misreading racialized identities
appears in Alastair Bonnett’s (1996) work scruti-
nizing ‘white’ identities in anti-racist discourse.
He argues that through the reification of ‘white’
identities, white anti-racists have failed to con-
sider ‘whiteness’ fully as a contingent, socially
constructed category, and this has resulted in a
mixture of white confessions, white guilt and
whites trying to understand the ‘non-white’ as
different. With this focus on privilege, analysts
have provided insight into the ways power oper-
ates diffusely, subtly and hegemonically.
As in feminist and queer theory, in cultural
geography much of the theorizing of both the
body itself and knowledges emerging from the
body appears in studies of space and sexuality.
Although not all social or cultural geographic
works in the area of sexuality deal with bodies
(see recent reviews by Binnie and Valentine,
1999 and Hubbard, 2000), works specifically on
the sexualized body invoke and develop argu-
ments that destabilize dichotomous categories
while at the same time emphasizing that the body
as an intersection of oppressions is also a site of
resistance. For example, Ki Namaste (1996), in
her study of ‘genderbashing’ in Montréal, argues
that the fusion of gender and sexuality has dis-
tinct implications, often with severe conse-
quences in public spaces. Women and men
who transgress the socially accepted norms of
gendered and sexualized limits are most at risk of
assault. Scrutiny of the intersection of sexualized
subject positions of identity formation also
includes examination of the ways in which
power differentiates, oppresses and marginalizes
particular people within sexualized groups –
whether they be part of the compulsory hetero-
sexuality that regulates public and private spaces
(see Nast, 1998) or already identifiable margi-
nalized groups, as for example lesbians, gay men
and bisexual individuals.
Much of the explicit ‘body work’ in social and
cultural geography has been with disabled,
impaired and ill bodies. Discontent over research
methods involving disease mapping in epidemio-
logical studies produced calls for an embodied
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