constructedness of identity but also the reality of
historically constructed divisions such as
national borders. The boundary is a lived reality:
not just a mark on the map but inscribed over and
over again on her own body. What is of particular
interest in the context of the cultural influences
on understandings of national and international
politics is Anzaldúa’s style of writing. She does
not write in standard academic prose but offers
a series of interventions on questions of iden-
tity, territory and borders. She alternates her
writing between English, Spanish and Chicana,
sometimes translating, sometimes not. There is
then a political geography to Anzaldúa’s texts,
sometimes allowing a monolingual reader into
her community, at other times excluding the
reader:^4To live in the Borderlands means you
are neither hispana india negra espanola
ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed
caught in the crossfire between camps
while carrying all five races on your back
not knowing which side to turn to, run from ...In the borderlands
you are the battleground
where enemies are kin to each other;
you are at home, a stranger,
the border disputes have been settled
the volley of shots have shattered the truce
you are wounded, lost in action
dead, fighting back. (1987: 194)EMBODYING THE INTERNATIONALThe work of Anzaldúa and other feminists
implicitly warns of the danger of going too far
down the line of ironic postmodern distanced
analysis. Just as with the work it seeks to chal-
lenge, the textual critiques of critical geopolitics
can privilege the words and texts of elites, so per-
petuating the silencing of those who are seen as
outside of this.
On a practical level, this makes it all too easy
for those outside these critical circles to ignore
the critique and carry on regardless. As Demeritt
(1996) observes for human geographers’ criti-
ques of scientific and objective forms of knowl-
edge more generally, concentrating on this level
of complex discourse makes it too easy for
critiques to be ignored. Similarly, Peck (1999)
has illustrated the difficulties of getting ‘deep’ or
critical academic work taken seriously by policy-
and decision-makers who are looking for more
straightforward answers. The cultural turn has
led many geographers to think carefully aboutthe voices of those being represented in their
texts. Perhaps it is now time to think more care-
fully about the ears of our audiences.
Of equal importance, there is a danger in going
too far along the poststructural path as it can
erase agency. Perhaps by moving too far into
the realm of the cultural, the political, has been
undervalued: by labelling all as political, perhaps
a sense of what might comprise more important
issues has become lost. Similarly by shifting atten-
tionfrom the actor to the action some of the
important historical contexts for struggle have
been hidden. Although critical geopolitics might
offer very eloquent deconstructions of dominant
political discourse, there is often little sense of
alternative possibilities. As Paasi (2000: 284)
suggests, there is a need to move from text and
metaphor which had dominated radical political
geography.
Just as the formal actors of international politics
have been disembodied, offering a ‘spectator’
theory of knowledge (George, 1996: 42), undif-
ferentiated by the marks of gender, race, class,
sexuality or physical ability, in some ways so do
their critics. Women and others omitted from this
tradition have not generally been included on the
pages of the international texts. Thus they remain
invisible to critical geopoliticians for whom
resistance is a textual intervention, a sub-
version of a sign or displacement of meaning.
Ó Tuathail’s (1996b) influential Critical Geopoli-
tics offers an intellectual history of geopolitical
practitioners and critical geopoliticians as a
history of ‘big men’ (in order): Mackinder,
Ratzel, Mahan, Kjellen, Hausehoffer, Spykman,
Wittfogel, Bowman, Lacoste, Ashley and Dalby.
A few women are allowed into the footnotes, but
the central narrative is one of the exploits and
thoughts of men. The history of struggles for
space and representation are reduced to a male
genealogy when discussing not just the masculin-
ist history of geopolitical strategies of elite prac-
titioners, but also the interventions of ‘critical
geopoliticians’ (Sharp, 2000a).
This illustrates a need to move to what
Ó Tuathail (1996a) in another guise has called an
‘anti-geopolitical eye’, an embodied and situated
geographical vision which avoids the God trick
that is both everywhere and nowhere. This posi-
tion takes responsibility for its representation
from somewhere. The knowledge produced by
an anti-geopolitical eye emphasizes moral proxi-
mity and anger: it is not distanced and dispas-
sionate, even-handed or ironic. Ó Tuathail (1996b)
offers Maggie O’Kane’s impassioned reports
of the war in Bosnia as a situated, moral and
subjective alternative to the distanced all-seeing
eye of the traditional geopolitician. Her reports480 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES3029-ch25.qxd 03-10-02 11:04 AM Page 480