Comp. by: VPugazhenthi Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 9781405132879_4_S Date:1/4/
09 Time:15:23:41 Filepath:H:/00_Blackwell/00_3B2/Gregory-9781405132879/appln/3B2/
revises/9781405132879_4_S.3d
and it is at the disjuncture between various
subject positions that agency can be located.
Third, identities arise through repeated per-
formates, and this opens possibilities for vari-
ation and change, ones that are closed off
by positions that see identities as stable (see
performance; performativity). A fourth
response is that psychoanalytic theories that
explore the effects of the unconscious widen
responsibilities insofar as they call into ques-
tion our responsibilities for actions of which
we are not conscious, such as racism and het-
erosexism (Culler, 1997).
A key area of contemporary theorizing
explores the possibilities for new processes of
subject formation whereby we come to under-
stand ourselves and others without creating
stigmatized others and hierarchies of differ-
ence (in which some groups are seen to be
superior to others). The concepts ofcyborg
andhybridity are two ways of disrupting
ideas of pure identities and rigid boundaries.
Non-representational thinking offers another
model in which: ‘intermediaries and mediaries
multiply, so that the ‘‘human’’ ‘‘subject’’
migrates on to many more planes and is mixed
with other ‘‘subjects’’ in increasingly poly-
morphous combinations’ (Thrift, 2000a,
p. 220; see alsoassemblage). Theorists of
radical democracy, such as Mouffe, are scep-
tical about such possibilities and place
emphasis instead on a continual questioning
of the inevitable process of boundary con-
struction that must, they argue, necessarily
exclude. To evade these exclusions is impos-
sible, but we can insist on a public sphere in
which the lines that discriminate inclusion
from exclusion are actively contested (for a
summary of these arguments, see Pratt,
2004). Others emphasize the need to shift the-
orizing from ‘the’ subject to intersubjectivity
(Rose, 1999b; Probyn, 2003). For Probyn,
this draws us back to the ‘hard facts’, such as
material inequality, that make such relations
and connections difficult.
If theories of subjectivity have always
informed geography, what is perhaps newer is
the extent to which geography is now woven
into theories of the subject. Probyn (2003)
notes the interrelations between the retheori-
zation ofspaceand subjectivity: ‘[t]hinking of
subjectivity in terms of space of necessity
reworks any conception that subjectivity is
hidden away in private recesses ... Thinking
about how space interacts with subjectivity
entails rethinking both terms, and their rela-
tion to each other’ (p. 290). Where one is
located is constitutive of (and not incidentalto) perceptions of self. Thus for Foucault
(1980d), the designs of European schools
and homes were both reflective of and instru-
mental in creating the sexualized nuclear fam-
ily. And one may see oneself differently in
different places: Blunt (1994) has argued
that nineteenth-century British bourgeois
women travellers were defined predominantly
in terms of (a rather frail) femininity at home,
but in their travels – in Africa, for example –
their gendered identity receded (and their
health improved), and their race and class
positions came to the fore. Constructing a
stable boundary for one’s self is an achieve-
ment: Davidson (2001) describes the fragility
of this construction for those suffering agora-
phobia. The construction of coherent places
and identities are intertwined social pro-
cesses: Anderson (1991b) describes how the
construction ofchinatownas a stigmatized
place apart from the rest of Vancouver was
instrumental in cohering a white British
Columbian identity. Non-essentialistread-
ings of subjectivity, in which identifications
are conceived as the outcome of power-laden
social processes (i.e. not as natural), thus
have been read back into theproduction of
space. Places are conceived as open-ended
sites of social contestation, and spatial politics
involve attending to the moments of closure
whereby the identitites of places are stabilized
and particular social groups claim a natural
right to that space or are entrapped within
them. This can involve a dense layering of
different subject positions: Anderson (1996)
reworks her earlier argument about the pro-
duction of Chinatown by considering how
gender discourses underwrote discourses of
nation and race in early-twentieth-century
British Columbia.
Geographies are also at the centre of recent
efforts to think about new subject formations
of hybridity, multiplicity and flexible borders.
Spatial metaphors of nomad,mobility, travel,
borderland,third space,networks, con-
nectivity and viscosity, space-off and paradox-
ical space are some of the terms used to
conceptualize these subjectivities. In some of
these discussions, geography functions only as
metaphor, but the prevalence of geographical
terminology in discussions of identity also
reflects processes oftransnationalismand
globalization, and increasingly complex
geographies of subject formation, which may
lead to pluri-local identifications (distributed
acrossandlocatedin different places) or, iron-
ically, the intensification of localized identities
(Watts, 1991).Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 730 1.4.2009 3:23pmSUBJECT/SUBJECTIVITY