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Title: Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference by Women and Geography Study Group of the Royal Geographical Society, Institute of British Geographers, Women and Geography Study, Wgsg, Carolyn B. Mitchell ISBN: 0582246369 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: August, 1997 Format: Textbook Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $31.20

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Average Customer Rating: 4

Rating: 4
Summary: Teaching Feminist Geographies
Comment: This book is intended to be a teaching text "which does justice to the breadth, diversity, intellectual vibrancy, debate and difference currently to be found in feminist geography." To encourage readers to do more than passively absorb information, the authors insert questions and activities at the end of most sections, asking the reader to stop and reflect and question, in short, to do something for a bit. In addition there are boxes, similar to sidebars, position to identify key concepts and highlight particular information. Finally, autobiographical testimonies are smattered throughout the book, in line with the feminist goal of situating the author in relation to her work. The book is committed to the premise that a focus on gender relations "greatly improves geographical analyses. It also attempts to make clear that feminist geography is so diverse it would be incorrect for any one book to claim to fully encompass the field. Gender itself is defined variously, depending on the context within which it is situated, its definers, and mitigating factors such as race and class. What the book intends to offer is the notion that because feminist geographies are so diverse, we must all of us keep thinking and adding our contributions, without which geography simply ceases to be, literally speaking, geography. At first glance, Feminist Geographies seems an attempt to add to and draw attention to gender and geography, an effort it performs both subtly and brilliantly. However, both by virtue of the way the book is structured and its incessant command that we should think just a little harder/broader/more creatively than we thought before, its net result is as transformative as it is additive. For instance, although the book takes up the same argument against the public/private dichotomy as other feminist geography texts, it also suggests greater movement yet: "Given the embeddedness of dichotomies like that between home and work...it is perhaps not surprising that feminist geographers have paid them so much attention. This attention has certainly been one of feminist geography's main contributions to feminism more generally. However, we would like to...suggest that perhaps feminist geography needs to push its diverse interests in the complexity of gendered geographies even further. Thus perhaps feminist geographies need to consider starting with non-dichotomous frameworks of analysis. What is needed then...is a non-dichotomous way of thinking about space and place." Clearly, such a move would transform the fields of both geography and urban studies. As the title indicates, the authors are committed to inclusion of difference and diversity--to this end they continually ask the reader to explore her own perceptions and conceptions about various discussed subjects, and remind us of the contested nature of and diversities within feminism, particularly feminist geography. The book itself includes a wide range of feminism, feminists, and brief reviews of feminist texts both in and out of geography. Chapter three includes a brief section on postcolonial feminist theory, "a large body of work which explores the interrelationships between identity, knowledge and power," especially as situated within the historical and geographical context of the colonialization of the Third World from the 16th century onwards. Although much to short for my tastes, it was a relief to read an urban studies text that contextualized itself within a geography that includes rather than peripheralizes/otherizes the Third World. The inclusion of diverse theories is important both because they offer an important and alternate perspective on existing geographies, but also because much of the newer poststructuralist theorizing going on within feminism is built on the back of this work to include a postcolonialist perspective. (I was sorry, however, that one of the earliest of these theorists, Gloria Anzaldua, was not given credit for her pioneering work on borderlands, work that in great part led us to this point.)