feminist praxis that is transnational in its
response to and engagement with global
processes’. This involves acknowledging, and
working through, the productive tension between
the ‘centrifugal force of discrepant feminist his-
tories and the promising potential of political
organising across cultural boundaries’ (Sinha et al.,
1999: 1). It also requires working with women at
grassroots level in different cultural contexts,
breaking down hierarchies of knowledge/power
that privilege the expert/outsider, undermining
western universalisms and providing a basis for a
new understanding of global diversity (Marchand
and Parpart, 1995: 19). Here there are clear par-
allels with approaches in anthropology and mod-
els of local hybrid cultures, which challenge the
orthodoxies of western thinking by bringing
local knowledge to the fore in ways that disman-
tle the a prioricategories of feminist theory.
The tensions and dilemmas in new ways of
conceiving a cross-cultural feminist politics
should both inform, and be informed by, feminist
cultural geographies. Criticism from black
women and feminists in the south has had a
considerable impact on gender studies within
geography, and a politically relevant cultural
geography would gain a great deal from engag-
ing further with these critiques. A more global
perspective would help to countervail Eurocen-
trism. It would facilitate engagement by feminist
cultural geographers in arguments about ‘why
women are important, and why gender is an
indispensable concept in the analysis of political-
cultural movements, of transition, and of social
change’ (Moghadam, 1994: 17). It would also
allow cultural geographers to contribute to the
critical exploration of relationships between cul-
tural power and global economic power. More-
over, cultural geographical themes might
potentially contribute to these feminist debates.
How space and spatiality are conceptualized is
particularly significant, for if localities are pro-
duced through links elsewhere, then something
of the divide between difference and the inter-
national can be framed differently. Alison Blunt’s
(forthcoming) work on the spatial politics of
home and identity at a range of spatial scales is
one example of a productive engagement with
these ideas. This chapter has explored how femi-
nism has practically built a form of knowledge
and cultural politics that perhaps transcends the
locatedness that is evident in much of contempo-
rary cultural geography. The increasing influ-
ence of these ideas within cultural geography
suggests that it is ideally placed to engage with
more radical notions of identity and developing a
stronger sense of what a feminist politics might
look like in different places.NOTES1 I use these terms to distinguish between the former
European colonial powers and their former colonies,
and between Anglo-European (often referred to as
'western') countries and non-Anglo-European countries.
I consider north–south preferable to other epithets
(First World, Third World; developed, developing),
while recognizing that such binaries can hide the real
causes of oppression and exploitation and are not
strictly geographically accurate (Australia and New
Zealand, for example, are predominantly white and
western but located in the southern hemisphere).
2 See, for example, Ferguson (1992), Lewis (1996),
Melman (1992), Midgley (1992), Ware (1994). This
more critical understanding of feminist historio-
graphy has also informed the work of cultural geo-
graphers on gender and imperialism (Blunt, 1994;
McEwan, 2000a; Morin, 1998).
3 See also El Saadawi (1997), Schech and Haggis
(2000: 103–4).
4 See, for example, McEwan (2000b), Schech and
Haggis (2000), Skelton and Allen (1999).
5 See, for example, the work of Kay Anderson (1989;
1990; 1991) on Vancouver's Chinatown, and Jane
Jacobs (1996) on postcolonialism in British and
Australian cities; also see Anderson and Jacobs
(1997), Driver and Gilbert (1999).
6 See Barnaby (2000), Cook and Crang (1996), Cook
and Harrison (1998).
7 For example, the exploration of gender and national
identity in Ecuador by Radcliffe and Westwood (1996).
8 See, for example, Driver (1992), Gregory (1995),
Nash (1999).
9 Similarly, cultural geography has been charged with
becoming too theoretical and removed from the mate-
rialities of everyday life, of being too culturalist and
neglecting political economy and sociological expla-
nations. Aspects of life such as poverty are neglected
by much of cultural geography and it therefore lacks
political influence and, indeed, relevance (Thrift,
2000: 1–2).
10 Key texts in cultural geography are predominantly
Anglocentric (for example, Crang, 1998; Cosgrove
and Daniels, 1988; Daniels, 1993; Jackson, 1989).REFERENCESAfary, J. (1996) The Iranian Constitutional Revolution,
1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy,
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