Cultural Geography

relations between (gendered) people and places.

It is thus well placed to reveal something of the

nature of this ‘betweenness’, given that, in so far

as the source and sense of panic are locatable at

all, they arise neither internally nor externally in

relation to the subject, but rather from the bound-

ary between. As a boundary crisis, panic under-

mines the distinction between subjects and

environments, underscores their inescapable

interrelation and reveals the ‘normal’ sense of

separateness from our surrounds to be a partly

fictitious, imagined distinction. Our sense of this

discrimination – between what is self and what is

not – is maintained by habit and confidence that

the world will behave according to our projections

and expectations, that is, by a kind of ‘ontological

security’. Once this has been disrupted, our

‘imaginings’ inevitably alter.

This research on agoraphobic geographies and

subjectivities contributes to the deconstruction of

conceptual separations between subjects and

environments by showing that there is no possi-

bility of subject or experience without situation.

Whether we are aware of this or not, each is con-

tinually co-constitutive of the other. To beis to be

somewhere, and our changing relations and inter-

actions with this placing are integral to under-

standings of human geographies. Moreover,

gender is inscribed deeply within these processes.

So, even as dualistic separations between people

and places are brought into question, binaries per-

sist, in this instance producing family resem-

blances in the mutual imbrication of subjectivity

and space.

CONCLUSION: ON THE

PARADOXES OF GENDER

In this chapter we have explored the cultural and

geographical imaginings of gender in relation to

four themes which have been influential in fem-

inisms within and beyond cultural geography.

We have emphasized throughout that binary

gender categories are both deeply problematic

and extremely pervasive. On the one hand, to

think about gender productively, we need to

escape from the confining straitjacket of binary

oppositions, whether of sex and gender, or body

and mind, or biology and culture, or subject and

environment, and so on. But on the other hand,

it is important to acknowledge that the concepts

we deploy, such as gender, are often, if not

always, linked to such binaries. In other words,

dualistic thinking necessarily clings to the

concept of gender. Consequently we are not

arguing that cultural geographers need to move

‘beyond’ binary thinking, or ‘beyond’ the

themes of equality, autonomy, difference and

deconstruction. We wish instead to problematize

the very idea of going ‘beyond’, and in so doing

to encourage further discussion of the political

and spatial commitments implicit in the various

conceptualizations of gender deployed in cul-

tural geography.

Notions of progress are very influential in

academic research and scholarship. Reviews of

existing bodies of literature often conclude by

identifying gaps or research ‘frontiers’, or by

arguing for new research agendas. Although

such arguments are not necessarily presented as

normative claims about a field of research, they

nevertheless encourage a view of knowledge as

developing in a discernible direction. Several

characteristics follow from this, including the

tendency for specialist subfields to emerge

successively, and a view of the scholar or

researcher as capable of (re)viewing a subfield

as a whole. We would argue that any review,

such as this one, is paradoxical: it is necessar-

ily situated, and yet to perform the function of

a review it also claims the capacity to delimit

and thematize a body of knowledge. Tensions

or paradoxes of this kind are pervasive in

academic scholarship. We would argue that

fostering and working with such paradoxes is

a highly productive way of doing cultural

geography.

In conclusion we therefore argue for the

acknowledgement and strategic ‘acceptance’ of

paradoxes on a number of different levels. We

wish to encourage cultural geographers to

reflect on the interplay, tensions and contradic-

tions between them, to recognize that we need

to work with paradoxes, and that their inher-

ently problematic nature can be used to positive

advantage, enabling forms of academic practice

that simultaneously perform and subvert estab-

lished ways of thinking and writing about gen-

der. ‘Doing’ and theorizing gender in such ways

will necessarily entail ‘doing’ and theorizing

space and place as well. For example, as we

have shown, conceptualizing subjects and envi-

ronments as separate has been enormously fruit-

ful for understanding cultural geographies of

gender, but so too are understandings of subject

and environment as inseparable. Exploring

(rather than resolving) the contradiction

between separability and inseparability is likely

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