Cultural Geography

The differentiation of human beings by gender

is so powerful and pervasive that it is very diffi-

cult to imagine (or write about) a person without

drawing upon one of the two labels ‘male’ and

‘female’ either implicitly or explicitly. In

western societies (and in many non-western soci-

eties) most of us allocate people to one category

or the other so routinely and so habitually that we

become aware of our practice only when con-

fronted by a body or a voice or a name that we

cannot categorize with confidence. Think, for

example, of the curiosity aroused by chance

encounters – maybe walking on a city street or

through a mall – with individuals whose appear-

ance prompts us to question whether they are

male or female. Or think of the surprise at dis-

covering that the voice heard as ‘male’ turns out

to belong to a woman (or vice versa). Note also

how particular contexts are called into play by our

injunction to imagine a particular person, indicat-

ing how our ascription of gender categories is

necessarily situated culturally and geographi-

cally. Reflecting on gender in these ways also

renders untenable any clear distinction between

‘doing’ and ‘theorizing’: gender is equally about

our ideas, practices and reflections about our-

selves and others in a way that weaves these

aspects together (Ahmed, 1998). This under-

standing of theory as practice is very influential

within feminist politics and feminist geography

(Katz, 1994; 1996; Kobayashi, 1994; McDowell,

1992), and is increasingly influential in discus-

sions about reflexivity and activism in cultural

geography (Blomley, 1994; Maxey, 1999).

The taken-for-grantedness of gender categories

has often been just as powerful within research

and scholarship as elsewhere. But this has not

gone unchallenged. Feminist geographers have

worked hard to denaturalize gender, with impor-

tant consequences throughout human geography

including the field of cultural geography.

Denaturalizing gender has entailed demon-

strating implicit and naturalizing assumptions

within existing work, thereby opening up new

questions for investigation. Since the mid 1970s,

feminist geographers have pointed to two conse-

quences of the widespread failure to problema-

tize gender. First, there has been a strong

tendency to neglect the perspectives and con-

cerns of certain groups, either by omission or by

stereotyping, especially those different from,

other than and disadvantaged relative to the

groups from whom the majority of geographers

are drawn. Gender is one aspect of this: most

geographers, and particularly ‘powerful’ geo-

graphers, are men, and women have been mar-

ginalized in terms of the substance and practice

of geographical research (Hayford, 1973;

McDowell, 1979; McDowell and Peake, 1990;

Monk and Hanson, 1982; Tivers, 1978).

Secondly, as well as reinforcing the disadvantage

and devaluation underpinning this neglect, fail-

ure to problematize gender has undermined

geographical thought quite generally, generating

‘androcentric’ or ‘masculinist’ claims to knowl-

edge that purport universality (Rose, 1993;

Women and Geography Study Group of the

IBG, 1984).

These critiques have paved the way for a sub-

stantial and wide-ranging body of work which

focuses in a variety of ways on the gendering of

human lives and human geographies. Much of this

work has been informed, and often inspired, by

political and moral commitments, for example to

challenge gender and other inequalities, or to con-

tribute to emancipatory or liberatory goals. Such

commitments are suggestive of ‘Enlightenment’

ways of thinking about issues of equality, justice,

self-determination and so on, in the sense of

invoking universal ideas about human life and

human values. This prompts interpretations of

feminism as a modern political movement depen-

dent on metanarratives of progress. But against this

are the poststructuralist and post-Enlightenment

perspectives with which critiques of universal

knowledge claims are more commonly associ-

ated, which have been deeply influential in cul-

tural geography and which we have also

suggested are influential in understandings of

gender. We would argue that feminist perspec-

tives need to deploy both Enlightenment and

post-Enlightenment ways of thinking (Bondi,

1990; Bondi and Domosh, 1992; Deutsche, 1991;

Massey, 1991; McDowell, 1991; Morris, 1988;

Soper, 1990) and in so doing have the potential to

foster productive paradoxes (Rose, 1993).

In the remainder of this chapter we examine in

more detail the notions of subjectivity invoked in

analyses of gender within and around the field of

cultural geography. There already exist several

pertinent reviews, which offer particular

accounts of conceptualizations of gender. For

example, McDowell (1993a; 1993b; also see

McDowell, 1999; McDowell and Sharp, 1997)

traces the development of feminist perspectives

in geography, emphasizing the growing influ-

ence of poststructuralist ideas and associating

this with the so-called cultural turn. Implicit in

McDowell’s account is a view that feminist

geography has progressed from important but

necessarily less sophisticated understandings

towards more powerful and nuanced engage-

ments with gender. The Women and Geography

Study Group (1997) stress the existence of

diverse uses of the concept of gender among

feminist geographers, and acknowledge some of

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