Cultural Geography

about a more gender-equitable global culture. In

the words of Donna Haraway, these new

approaches to gender identities and new tech-

nologies of communication between women

might allow feminists to:

negotiate the very fine line between appropriation of

another’s (never innocent) experience and the delicate

construction of the just-barely-possible affinities, the

just-barely-possible connections that might actually

make a difference in local and global histories ... These

are difficult issues, and ‘we’ fail frequently ... But ‘our’

writing is also full of hope that we will learn how to

structure affinities instead of identities. (1991: 113)

DISLOCATING WESTERN

CENTRISM AND CULTURAL

GEOGRAPHY

Intersections between the efforts to dislocate

western-centric knowledges and feminisms have

important implications for cultural geographies.

As discussed previously, these debates have

made a difference to how certain specifically

feminist geographical issues might be thought.

The ways in which public and private spheres are

conceptualized is one example. Related to this,

debates emanating from cultural contexts outside

the west might also bring into question the

spaces in which politics are articulated, beyond

the formal public sphere into homes, communi-

ties and neighbourhoods. In addition, encounters

with traditions, ideas and criticisms beyond the

west have shifted fundamentally the work of

many cultural geographers. The embracing of

global perspectives is, in part, responsible

(McDowell, 1994: 147).

There is now a wealth of contemporary

research exploring issues such as cross-cultural

processes of global change and development,^4

cultural politics of postcolonial spaces in former

imperial metropoles,^5 cultural geographies of

commodity chains that connect peoples, regions

and countries in the north and south,^6 national

identities and nationalisms in specific cultural

contexts,^7 and imaginative geographies of colo-

nial and postcolonial landscapes and cultures.^8 It

is perhaps at the margins of cultural geography,

where there are intersections with feminist

approaches in historical, development, political

and economic geographies, that the lessons of

anti-ethnocentrism have been most observed.

Debates about positionality and representation,

for example, are now well established in feminist

geographies (see Madge, 1993; McDowell,

1992; Radcliffe, 1994; Robinson, 1994; Rose,

1997). Many feminist geographers are acutely

aware of the intersections of power with acade-

mic knowledge, and this is often articulated

through recognition of their own privilege in

relation to the people they study. This privilege

means greater access to resources, the power to

produce knowledges, the luxury of professional

status (Kobayashi, 1994), and the power of inter-

pretation of the voices and opinion of others

(Gilbert, 1994). There is now greater sensitivity

within geography to recovering the agency and

voices of others, both within archives (Barnett,

1998; McEwan, 1998) and through interactions

with the researched (Pratt, 2000; Robinson,

1994; Townsend, 1995).

Despite these developments, the author of a

recent textbook on cultural geography argues

that ‘cultural geography (especially new cultural

geography) has been overweeningly Eurocentric’

(Mitchell, 2000: xvii). To be sure, the core

concerns of feminist cultural geographies (for

example, re-evaluations of masculinities and

femininities, landscapes, sexuality, public and

private spheres, gender roles) are often perceived

as side issues by feminists and women activists

in societies outside the west. As discussed previ-

ously, the kind of feminism alluded to by all

manner of feminist theorists, which has also set

the agenda for feminist cultural geographies, is

seen as largely removed from the exigencies of

daily life of women living in poverty (Karam,

2000: 176).^9 Mitchell is perhaps more progres-

sive than many commentators in recognizing

the situatedness and partiality of hiscultural

geography and the problems of implicit ethno-

centrism. However, his prescriptions on ‘what a

feminist cultural geography is, or could be’ are

also partial, and the question needs to be asked:

what relevance would these feminist cultural

geographies have outside the west? Mitchell’s

feminist cultural geography is informed by ‘direct

political imperatives’, including ‘the construction

and reproduction of gender, as it is encoded in the

spaces of cities and the space of the body’, the

‘evolution of domestic architecture, the develop-

ment of “pink collar ghettos”’, and ‘debates about

whether and how much mothers should work

outside the home’ (2000: 229).

Many of these issues are rooted deeply within

western feminism and western cultural politics,

with their specific understandings of gender

politics, spatiality and the goals of feminist strug-

gles. They do not necessarily translate in other

contexts, particularly within Asia, Africa and

Latin America, where the majority of the world’s

women happen to be located. The contemporary

‘culture wars’ that Mitchell discusses are also

relevant to struggles between different feminisms

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