Cultural Geography

identities, or so the theory goes. In a geographical

reading of Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic

(1973), Chris Philo (2000) reintroduces Foucault’s

interlocking ‘spatializations’, rooted in the inten-

sification of medicine after the French Revolu-

tion as well as the shifts in attitudes toward

medicines in France in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries.Even though Philo argues

that this work is inspirational in spite ofits histor-

ical and geographical specificity, we would argue

that Foucault’s work is compelling precisely

because of its specificity. Considering past

configurations of spatialities of subjectivities is but

one strategy geographers use to embody subjectiv-

ities and spatialities. Other strategies include trans-

forming space through discourse on the body

(Robinson, 2000), unsettling space through uncertain

bodily boundaries (Wakeford, 1998), transgressing

space through bodily movement (Longhurst, 2001)

and imagining space through socially imposed

exile (Munt, 1998).

Challenging binary categories through

problematizing the body

The body has become a lucrative site of theoretical

attempts to overcome various binary categories,

such as male/female, masculine/feminine, culture/

nature and discourse/materiality. By problema-

tizing the body through conceptualizing it as

multifaceted with multiple sets of complex links

into itself and to the external world, geographers

are challenging dichotomous thinking in ways

that cast difference, self and subjectivity as fluid

categories resistant to either overdetermination

of structural imperatives or unrestricted agency

with full free will (another binary). One particu-

larly popular approach to understanding the body

in various contexts is understanding categories of

difference as performative, ‘constituting the

identity it is purported to be’ (Butler, 1990: 25).

Elaborating performativity even outside theatrics

has proven to be useful in courting the notion that

identities, for example, are imitative, caught up

in a cycle of mimicry outside a pre-given state of

being, with space within their reiteration for nor-

mative and resistant acts. Thus, differentiation

and related processes such as subjectivation,

sexualization and racialization of the self are set

up within a space with no fixed representation.

Representations themselves are fluid, imitative,

mimicked and reiterative. Earlier spatial engage-

ments of performativity focused on understand-

ing bodies in space and their meanings. For

example, Linda McDowell and Gill Court (1994)

looked at how gendered representations abound

in the finance industry. They showed how gender

performances of ‘working bodies’ in banks have

shifted within the previous,financially volatile

decade. In another early work, David Bell et al.

(1994) contrasted hyper-sexualized spaces of gay

skinheads and lipstick lesbians with the predomi-

nant, normalizing heterosexual spaces of every-

day life. In performing hyper-gendered roles in

hegemonic spaces, bodies can continually recon-

stitute meanings of their identities and subvert

meanings of everyday spaces. More recent studies

in performativity tend to draw more widely on

performance theorists and promote a more

nuanced appreciation of the insight such a

theoretical framework can offer. Rather than

engaging in the closely associated gender, sex

and sexuality studies of performativity, Nicky

Gregson and Gillian Rose (2000) argue that

spaces, too, need to be thought of as performa-

tive. To illustrate their point, they expand topi-

cally into understanding the narratives of a group

of community arts workers and the phenomenon

of observing and participating in car-boot sales

while simultaneously highlighting academic

performances related to research and writing. In

contrast to the relatively open spaces of commu-

nity arts workers and car-boot sales, Teresa

Dirsuweit (1999) maps a space heavily controlled

through surveillance. She examines the coded

sexual performances of prisoners in a South

African women’s prison expressing same-sex

sexuality and engaging butch–femme roles. She

found that performances of gender and sexuality

were space-specific. Performativity matters in

studies of subjectivity in that it has the potential

to break open binary categories by mediating

interpretations of bodily activities and demon-

strating how space is intermingled with cate-

gories, constructs and expressions of the

complexities of the manifestations of identity.

GEOGRAPHIES OF BODIES

AND EMBODIED GEOGRAPHIES

These intellectual passages within geography –

examining the body as a site of regulation,

oppression and control; delving into embodied

subjectivity and spatiality; and challenging

binary categories through problematizing the

body – are manifested in a wide range of work on

the body, in the sense of both geographies of

bodies and embodied geographies. For the most

part, geographers have been preoccupied with

trying to tease out the complexities of linkages

among bodies and spaces, in the sense both of

theorizing body and of recognizing and utilizing

knowledge emerging from bodies. These

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