imprecision for which we have argued suggests
an inherent ambiguity and a necessary fuzziness
about gender and other categories. A wide range
of spatial metaphors has been used to explore
these ideas, and the theme of difference can be
thought of as invoking complex topologies and
multidimensional spaces (Pratt, 1992; Price-
Chalita, 1994). While this suggests a much more
complicated relationship between subjectivities
and environments than emerged from the theme
of equality, it still implies that, however com-
plexly interwoven, the two are analytically sepa-
rable. In the next section we outline ways of
thinking about gender that further problematize
this boundary.DE-LIMITING GENDERIn the second section we argued that the sex–
gender distinction enabled feminists to insist that
the categories ‘women’ and ‘men’ are produced
within a cultural as opposed to a biological realm;
in the third section we showed how women’s
autonomy has the potential to challenge norma-
tive views of subjectivity; and in the fourth
section we argued that the concept of gender has
served as a flexible container for difference. In
this section we discuss ways in which the theme
of deconstruction serves to unsettle the dualistic
underpinnings of such conceptualizations.
As we have stressed, the understandings of
gender associated with a politics of equality stem
from the adoption of a distinction between sex
and gender. This distinction sets up a series of
binary oppositions, in which gender is associated
with the cultural and with multiplicity, while sex
is associated with biology and with homogeneity.
This dualistic framework has become deeply
problematical for feminists (Edwards, 1989).
Distinguishing between sex and gender opens up
the thorny question about the relationship
between them and this is transposed onto the
relationship between biology (or ‘nature’) and
culture (including ‘nurture’). Within the frame-
work of binary oppositions, there are two broad
possibilities: either gender can be understood as
the cultural elaboration or embellishment of what
is given in nature, or gender radically transcends
the matter of nature (Connell, 1985). Both these
possibilities suffer serious consequences. If
gender is produced by the cultural elaboration of
an underlying biology then we are drawn back
repeatedly to arguments about precisely where
sex ends and gender begins, with biology (andtherefore sex) understood as existing indepen-
dently of, and prior to, culture. If gender floats
free of the matter of nature, this implies that
gender is an attribute of the mind while sex is an
attribute of the body. But why, if the mind tran-
scends the body, should the mind be divided by
gender? In practice, the notion of a mind operat-
ing untrammelled by bodily concerns has been
forcefully critiqued by feminists as a fiction,
which covertly positions attributes of maleness
as human norms, and through which gender
inequalities are enforced and reinforced
(Battersby, 1998; Butler, 1990; Grosz, 1994;
Hekman, 1992; Jay, 1981; Lloyd, 1984; 1989;
Moore, 1994; D. Smith, 1993).
Analytically, therefore, gender categories are
highly unstable or contingent (Butler, 1991;
Felski, 1997; Harding, 1986). Lacking any stable
content, the categories ‘women’ and ‘men’
acquire meaning only through their use in parti-
cular contexts: they are ‘produced’ through our
living of them. In this sense the categories are
always ‘fictions’ upon which we draw routinely
(see Butler, 1990; Riley, 1988).
This understanding situates gender in every-
day lives and everyday contexts: we live our
lives as ‘women’ or as ‘men’ through our routine
practices played out in the places we inhabit. Put
another way, the power of particular fictions of
gender resides in our enactment of particular
ways of being ‘women’ or ‘men’ in particular
places, and dominant understandings of gender
may be unsettled or brought into question if our
routine practices diverge from these fictions in
significant ways. Within this framework gender
is inseparable from its contexts. It is, moreover,
impossible to imagine ‘men’ and ‘women’
except as embodied – the examples in the first
section of encountering individuals whose
appearances or voices leave us uncertain about
whether they are ‘male’ or ‘female’ assume and
make central the bodies of those with whom we
interact – and feminist geographers have there-
fore explored potentially disruptive embodied
performances of gender in a variety of settings
including corporate workplaces (McDowell,
1995; McDowell and Court, 1994) and gyms
(Johnston, 1996) amongst many others.
Robyn Longhurst (2000), for example,
demonstrates the extent to which pregnant
women are expected to behave in public space in
a manner ‘becoming’ to their ‘condition’, and
correspondingly, how disruptive challenges to
such expectations can be. Her respondents
describe how their behaviour is judged against
exacting standards of ‘appropriateness’, and how336 PLACING SUBJECTIVITIES3029-ch17.qxd 03-10-02 10:56 AM Page 336