For example, there are many different ways of
being ‘women’ or ‘men’. Indeed as soon as
adjectives are added we imagine ‘women’ and
‘men’ in many different ways: consider for
example how you imagine ‘young women’ or
‘old men’ or ‘a white woman’ or ‘a homeless
man’, and so on. In other words, gender cate-
gories are analytical abstractions. Moreover,
many of us resist particular labels or the assump-
tions attaching to them at least some of the time,
but at other times we use them of ourselves with-
out question. For example, whether as students,
research workers or lecturers, those of us
involved in higher education are likely some-
times and in some places to experience our
gender as irrelevant but at other times and in
other places as important to what we do, and we
are likely sometimes to accept and sometimes to
question assumptions others make about us
under the heading ‘gender’. This does not
depend upon an explicit awareness of issues of
gender: it is evident in unspoken responses of the
kind ‘but I’m not like that’ or ‘I’m not sure if that
applies to me’. In such responses, although gen-
der may be an aspect of what is disputed, it may
be impossible (and irrelevant) to discern whether
what is rejected pertains to gender or to another
kind of category, illustrating that the notion of
gender as a discrete facet of human experience is
a way of thinking that relates problematically to
the experiences to which it refers. Indeed, as
many feminist scholars have argued persua-
sively, categories of gender, race, class, age and
so on cannot be ‘disentangled’ or ‘separated’
from one another, so we cannot isolate some-
thing called ‘gender’ from other aspects of lived
experience (Battersby, 1998; Grosz, 1994; Pratt,
1984; Ramazanoglu, 1989; Spelman, 1988; West
and Fenstermaker, 1995; Young, 1990).
Differences between women have been an
important theme and focus of attention within
feminist politics and feminist thought. We would
argue that, despite all its limitations, the
sex–gender distinction has encouraged an associ-
ation between gender and difference. To elabo-
rate, whereas ‘sex’ is typically defined in terms
of two mutually exclusive categories, male and
female, feminists deployed ‘gender’ in order to
foster the possibility of multiple versions of
femininities and masculinities. In this sense ‘gen-
der’ highlights and opposes stereotypical repre-
sentations of, and assumptions about, women and
men that abound, whether in academic disciplines
(in relation to geography, see Monk and Hanson,
1982; Rose, 1993; Tivers, 1978) or in wider
cultural and political contexts (Coward, 1984;
Williamson, 1980), and which underpin a wide
variety of exclusionary practices.One way of challenging such representations
and assumptions has been to demonstrate the exis-
tence of multiple femininities (and masculinities),
which entails bringing into question general
claims about the nature of ‘women’ (and ‘men’).
But overgeneralized claims about ‘women’ (and
‘men’) are not the sole preserve of ‘mainstream’
academia, ‘mainstream’ politics or ‘mainstream’
culture: in advancing the case for women’s liber-
ation, feminists have sometimes, often unwit-
tingly, reproduced the same exclusionary
practices for which they have criticized others. In
particular, white, middle-class, heterosexual
women have sometimes written or spoken as if
representing women ‘in general’ but in so doing
have eclipsed and effectively silenced women
unlike themselves. Critiques advanced by black
women, by working-class women, by lesbians, by
Third World women, by disabled women and so
on, have all, in a wide variety of ways, ensured
that differences among women have become
central to the politics of feminism (Bhavnani,
2001; Carby, 1982; Chouinard, 1999; Chouinard
and Grant, 1995; hooks, 1989; Mohanty, 1988;
Mohanty et al., 1991; Wittig, 1992).
Such critiques have been associated with
struggles around cultural identities and represen-
tations, which Nancy Fraser (1995; 1997)
describes as a ‘politics of recognition’, and
which she argues are analytically distinct from a
‘politics of redistribution’, that is, struggles
around material inequalities. Fraser’s distinction
has generated a good deal of debate, much of
which revolves around the value of making such
analytical distinctions (Fraser, 2000; Phillips,
1997; Young, 1997). However, neither Fraser
nor her critics disagree that in practice political
struggles often address issues of poverty andof
representations, as several studies in cultural
geography have illustrated. Geraldine Pratt and
Susan Hanson, for example, examine how geo-
graphy constructs interconnecting differences of
gender, race and class which have significant
material consequences:Gender is constituted differently in different places, in
part, because residents in those places differ in class or
racial or other social variables; that is, places are sites
where particular sets of social relations are experienced
and compressed. But geography is implicated in a deeper
way. Class itself is a process that is mediated by place
and space ... The experiences of class and gender are
structured by local resources, including locally available
forms of paid employment, as well as local cultures.
These resources develop synergistically in relation to the
social characteristics of existing residents. (1994: 11–12)Drawing on evidence from neighbourhoods in
Worcester, Massachusetts, they tease out severalTROUBLING THE PLACE OF GENDER 3333029-ch17.qxd 03-10-02 10:56 AM Page 333