Nayak point to contradictions and paradoxes
around resistance. They cite the work of
Kobayashi and Peake (2000) who argue that
geographers need to embark upon a critical
engagement with whiteness.The lives of dom-
inantly white geographers, argue Kobayashi
and Peake, ‘are sites for the reproduction of
racism, but they also hold the potential of
being strategic sites of resistance’ (2000: 399).
To sum up thus far, there are at least three
key themes that run throughout the chapters
in this section. The first and foremost is that
subjectivities are performed not simply in but
throughspace. Probyn concludes her chapter:We need to think of subjectivity as an unwieldy, con-
tinually contestable and affirmable basis for living in the
world. Subjectivities are then simply a changing ensem-
ble of openings and closings, points of contact and
points which repel contact. In space, we orient our-
selves and are oriented.That is the spatial imperative of
subjectivities. (see p. 298)The second theme to emerge is that subjec-
tivity is grounded in the materiality of bodies,
in everyday lived experiences, and in particular
sites. Nast and Pile remind us ‘we live our lives –
through places, through the body’ (1998: 1).
They explain that there is a pressing need to
examine the interconnections between bodies
and places because the ways in which we live
out these interconnections, these relation-
ships, are political.This point leads to the third
theme – that subjectivities and spaces cannot
be separated from politics.
A commitment to rethinking questions of
race, sex and gender with a view to opening
up productive possibilities for change for the
better is evident in all the chapters. The
authors are keen to draw attention to the
myriad spaces of political contestation and in
particular, of resistance.
I now want to turn attention to the ques-
tion: what exciting new work might lie just
around the corner for cultural geographers
interested in subjectivity and space? This ques-
tion is difficult to answer. However, one possi-
bility signalled by several authors in this
section is that we might continue to see emerg-
ing research on the complex intersections
between race, sexuality, gender, class and
other facets of subjectivity.
One recent example of this type of work is
Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff’s Class andIts Others (2000).The argument underlying this
book is that individuals often participate in
various class relations at different times: class
subjectivities are multiple and unstable, inter-
acting with other aspects of subjectivity in
contingent and unpredictable ways. These
subjectivities are constituted simultaneously at
the interpersonal, community, national and
global levels. We are increasingly seeing
research that decentres one specific aspect of
subjectivity as the primary category of analysis
(see Longhurst, 2002). While it is difficult, and
not always politically strategic, to examine
simultaneously multiple axes of subjectivity, in
some instances it may prove enlightening.
Readers will note that the chapters in this
section (with the exception of Probyn’s) are
organized around three important aspects of
subjectivity – ‘race’, sexuality and gender.This is
not to suggest that these are the onlyimportant
aspects of subjectivity. Issues such as body size
and shape, disability, age and class are equally
significant. ‘Subjects are created in multiple
positionings in material and discursive prac-
tices’ (Walkerdine, 1995: 325). For example,
Bondi and Davidson focus on gender but they
recognize that ‘gender is always bound up with
other dimensions of human experience and
subjectivity including those described by such
terms as class, race, sexuality, age and so on’.
Brown and Knopp suggest that a ‘queer
geographical focus specifically on the interplay
between sexualities and postcoloniality could
provide some badly needed foundational
knowledge for broader understandings of
both colonialism and postcolonialism’. They
cite Elder’s (1998) work on the complicated
intersections of race, class and sexuality in
post-apartheid South Africa as an example of
this kind of research. Drawing on a multi-
dimensional matrix of differing axes of subjec-
tivity might offer interesting possibilities. This
matrix could include not just the conscious
but also the unconscious. Bonnett and Nayak
claim that Nast’s (2000) work on black spatial
containment, white ‘flight’ and urban renewal
in Chicago offers a new route to understand-
ing the socio-spatial processes of racialization.
They claim that one of the most productive
aspects of Nast’s (2000) work is the explicit
use of psychoanalysis (also see Pile, 1996).
Over the last five years we have seen what
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