spaces, thereby ‘correcting’ a profound substantive
and conceptual neglect. A small number of stud-
ies focus on women-only living and working
spaces (Taylor, 1998; Valentine, 1997). More
numerous are analyses of women’s efforts to
‘own’, embody or reclaim spaces, in the context
of the dominance of normative, heterosexual ver-
sions of masculinity (Bondi, 1990; Duncan,
1996; Koskela, 1997; Valentine, 1996). These
studies often emphasize the importance of coun-
tering representations of women as victims at the
same time as acknowledging the profound diffi-
culty of challenging hegemonic versions of
gender. What emerges is a commitment to simul-
taneously ‘undo’ and ‘redo’ gender.
Ali Grant (1998), for example, writes about
the politically motivated exclusion of men from
spaces of feminist activism such as ‘Take Back
The Night’ marches (against violence against
women), the development of refuges for women
fleeing domestic violence, and the work of rape
crisis centres. Feminist activists have long
argued that the creation and maintenance of
women-only ‘safe spaces’ is a crucial component
of feminist projects. However, this tradition’s
‘sin of disloyalty to men’ has provoked anger
and accusations of ‘man-hating’ and lesbianism,
the latter being ‘an old but still effective way of
maintaining a strict gender hierarchy’ (1998: 50).
Such accusations can be particularly damaging
when they originate from or take hold within
locally influential organizations who, through
funding and other means, effectively regulate,
restrict, ‘domesticate’ and devalue the potential
achievements of feminist activists, resulting in
stark choices between closure and deradicaliza-
tion. The latter route has frequently entailed the
progressive institutionalization of what began as
feminist projects and spaces, in the course of
which women-only principles have been relin-
quished in order to retain funding. Grant argues
that this is in fact the purpose of the hostility
against feminist activism because women-only
spaces challenge hegemonic understandings of
appropriate gender relations:Women who contest and transgress gender materially
and symbolically expose the manufactured nature of the
category ‘women’ ... [T]ransgressive females have
tended to be marginalised, as spaces of resistance have
been institutionalised. Removing these transgressive
bodies and ideas ... reduces the possibilities in place for
the continuation of the development of radical counter-
hegemonic identities. (1998: 53)Grant’s analysis illustrates how, from the per-
spective of hegemonic versions of gender rela-
tions, ‘doing’ gender without men is deemed
wholly inappropriate and unacceptable. But thecreation of non-institutional spaces, different
environments where difference is allowed to
emerge – different ideas, attitudes and behav-
iours – is essential for feminist activists in order
to undothe dominant system of gender (compare
Shugar, 1995). For this reason, it is important
who is and who is not involved in those spaces.
The ‘women-only’ spaces that activists opposing
violence against women aim to create cannot be
understood within our usual ways of ‘thinking
gender’, and therefore challenge established
patterns of thought as well as widespread patterns
of behaviour.
Quoting from her interviews with feminist
anti-violence activists, Grant (1998) demon-
strates just how enlightening many had found
spending time with other women in spaces of
resistance, and how essential this experience was
to their developing sense of their different (often
lesbian and in Grant’s terms ‘UnWomanly’) sub-
jectivities. She argues persuasively that such criti-
cal collective spaces were and are crucial in
processes of ‘consciousness raising’ and politi-
cization, through which the category ‘woman’
may be redefined beyond its current restrictively
gendered and heterosexist basis and bias. This
argument is, therefore, not about equal access to
spheres of activity and subject positions tradi-
tionally dominated by men, but about spaces
through which to realize women’s autonomy and
difference from men. It is about women occupy-
ing and traversing spaces boldly and confidently
(Koskela, 1997); it is about women dressing and
behaving on their own terms rather then in rela-
tion to men (Skelton, 1998); it is about perform-
ing and producing spaces differently.
Challenges to the power of regulatory ‘fictions
of gender’ (Butler, 1990) have taken various
forms, with attempts to construct and imagine
sexed and spatial difference being a prominent
feature in feminist utopian literature. Such pro-
jects present images of how gender relations
could be, and thereby stretch imaginations and
aspirations beyond the ‘common-place’ of here-
and-now towards the ‘no-place’ of utopia, where
the subjectivities of women are freed from patri-
archal constraints. Often, this entails a radical
separatist agenda, where women live on their
own and on their own terms. Feminist utopian
novels such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the
Edge of Time, Joanna Russ’ Whileaway and
Monique Wittig’s Guérillèresproffer more or
less single-sex self-defining cultures where men
figure minimally or not at all (also see Munt,
1998; Valentine, 1997). By imagining a cohesive
and autonomous social identity for women, such
writings highlight the gap between our experien-
tial realities and our political ideals, providing aTROUBLING THE PLACE OF GENDER 3313029-ch17.qxd 03-10-02 10:56 AM Page 331