Feminist Principles and Practices in Geography - Essay Example

Examine the role of feminist philosophies and principles in physical geography Since the involvement of the feminist's philosophies in Geography, it has laid down a challenge to old ways of thinking, with the exposure of women of all classes in patriarchal structures. None of the developments which involved the contribution of feminists could be ignored for they were constitutive of new ways of thinking which apart from being developmental were both political and personal, that is they involved not just planning out programmes to change social structures but also a deep commitment to changing 'oneself'. (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 16) According to McDowell, "'the purpose of feminist geographers'is to challenge the very nature and construction of that body of knowledge that is designated academic geography". (McDowell, 1993) In the 20th century there has been an expansion in the number of environmental studies, many feminists were of middle-class and not working-class composition (Castells 1983). The range of these movements escorted the geographers to study and explore all feminist geographers from different aspects. They explored feminist contributions from ecological movement, black, feminist and gay movements, the forces of nationalism, and so on. They find out that each and every one of these oppositional cultures possessed a distinctive geography, which is a vital part of their ability to survive and contest dominant orders. (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 21) So what kind of feminist critical practice does the new geography of identity foster' First, let it be said that feminist criticism has not been and should not be limited to discussions of identity and subjectivity. But since these issues have been so foundational for much feminist criticism, it is important for us to think through the implication of the new geography for work that continues to explore the production and reception of women's writing and the textuality of gender. Second, feminist critical practice focused on questions of identity and subjectivity has already begun to change significantly as a result of the new geographics. The initial incursion of women's issues and feminist analysis into urban geography was an angry one. Early writers argued that geographers had ignored women's activities and that this distorted both the reality of women's lives and the understanding of human-environmental relations. They said that geographers were building models on the basis of family forms and gender-based movement patterns, which no longer existed. Yet this incursion was also a cautious one. As with any attempt to introduce new content into a discipline developed in its absence, people moved warily. They looked for footholds, places in existing frameworks for women's new and unratified patterns. (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 111) Existing frameworks did not appear to offer many such footholds. Despite the pioneering efforts of a few humanists and historical materialists, at this point still zealously and often dogmatically explicating their respective philosophies, urban geography was largely a spatial science. It focused on attempts to explain and predict patterns of movement using models, which extrapolated from empirical evidence of human, and commodity movement in the past. The patterns women created were unpredictable and even inexplicable in terms of this kind of science. Demographic predictions foundered, victims of the failure to acknowledge the growing campaigns around fertility control and new family forms. The 'units' of demographic change acquired unexpected political convictions and made themselves known as complex, conscious beings. (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 111) Similarly, discussion of residential location and the categorisation of socio-economic status were disordered by unforeseen, two-income families. Journey-to-work researchers were perplexed by women's apparently erratic non-maximizing movements, which were punctuated by trips to childcare, shops, and childrens' teachers (Monk & Hanson 1982). Initially, such problems were seen as empirical perplexities. The first reaction involved 'adding women on', trying to find models powerful enough to disaggregate families and movement patterns by gender. The application of unchanged methods to women's specific activities led to the growth of a geography of women as a separate sub discipline. Sufficient information was amassed about women's perceptions and movement patterns in cities to document their definition as an urban subgroup, deviating from the assumed male norm by virtue of occupying less space, having access to fewer resources, travelling less, and generally suffering specific spatial constraints. (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 111) However, in geography, as elsewhere, there was increasing frustration with frameworks which confused rather than enlightened. A generation of geographers who had come to maturity with feminism as an evolving parameter of their lives, and who now encountered humanism and historical materialism simultaneously with spatial science, began to search for new frameworks. Suggestions were made that such questions could not be answered using standard frameworks or that they were outside the proper realm of spatial science. While this was arguably true, they were nevertheless well within the realm of human-environmental relations, increasingly advocated as a basis for geography by humanists and historical materialists. Humanism and historical materialism appeared to provide potential support for the feminist proposal that it was necessary to go beyond positivism in order to examine gender-based questions. A feminist voice was added to the search for and development of new theory and method in geography. (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 89) Feminists within geography and other environmental disciplines found that women worked in both, and created an intersection between them. The problem was not simply that women were different. Moving between work at home and work in public places, they bridged private and public spaces and activities. Women's daily activities were carried out in opposition to a city made up of distinct workspaces and home spaces. Women were altering the nature of these spaces and the relations between them. In effect, women's daily activities were rendering current urban form obsolete. Women's activities were also rendering obsolete a geographical analysis based on this dichotomy. If women's lives merged the dichotomies of the divided city, a focus on the relations between production and reproduction was necessary to understand these lives. In terms adopted from Sayer's (1982) seminal article on the nature of abstraction, the division of production and reproduction led to chaotic abstractions in urban analysis; feminists added that it also led to bad planning (Matrix 1984). Activity became the concept linking gender roles and environmental change. It became evident that change of the gender category 'woman' was effected through alterations in the way women used, appraised, and created resources in space and time. Women were changing their space and time patterns in taking on dual roles. They were appropriating new spaces: moving into waged workplaces and public political venues. They were appropriating and creating new resources: purchasing goods rather than manufacturing them at home; redefining unused church basements as childcare drop-in centres. All of these innovations were contributing to a redefinition of gender relations. The availability, accessibility, and form of resources enabled or constrained women's capacity to change their lives. Women changing their lives in turn altered needs for and the form of resources. The question was not limited to women use of space but was about the relation between the form and change of gender and the form and change of the environment' (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 246) This broadening of the question's scope involved replacing an unexamined concept of woman with a concept of historically specific and mutable gender. This led feminist geographers to suggest that gender was a human characteristic, not just a female one. The proposal that men's activities, should also be analysed in terms of their gender a reference point hitherto reserved solely for women while confusing many pre-feminist geographers, directly challenged the concept of 'human' used in geographical analysis. Feminists argued that the term human was empirically genderless and should be conceptually recognised as such. In stating that gender change was a fundamental parameter of environmental change, they also redefined the concept of environment. So, women defined environments as human creations, produced and altered in a dialectical relation with the production and alteration of gender categories and roles. In making these suggestions, geographers were drawing upon an increasingly commodious and discerning feminism, which contained both the radical feminist concern for the development of an androgynous humanity and the socialist feminist concern for the historical and political process of change in this humanity. (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 87) By the early 1980s, feminist work in geography had a theoretical structure and contained within it methodological guidelines. As its concerns broadened, it began to draw increasingly upon the concepts of human environmental relations being proposed and elaborated by humanists and historical materialists. Many feminist geographers had realised the significance of gender through historical materialist study of human-environmental relations. Others had come to historical materialism from their feminist concerns. The merger socialist feminism was a specific kind of historical materialism from the beginning. It was one instil with the content of human life and the nature of interpersonal relations. Both this content and the organisational structures of feminism encouraged scepticism toward received categories and laws in any form, including those of historical materialism (Rowbotham et al., 1979). Feminists were especially sceptical of structuralism. Its concepts and laws while offering a certainty which was potentially tempting to people struggling with an overflow of untidy and restless human content appeared depopulated and abstract as gravity models and nearly as inhospitable to feminist questions. More hospitable was the work of critical theorists, with their emphasis on the internal unity and dialectical change of nature and human nature. Critical theory provided a basis for understanding the articulation of gender and environment. It also provided a basis for integrating emphasis on human agency and the constitution of meaning, which feminists shared with humanist geographers. Feminism incorporated and extended elements of both humanism and historical materialism and contributed to the evolution of both within the discipline. But it did more than that. In discussing the divided city and focusing on the intersection of production and reproduction, it offered elements of a new model of urban structure. This is a model, which is becoming increasingly central to urban analysis as we experience, and attempt to understand, a restructured capitalism. (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 91) Within analysis of capitalist industrial cities, the most readily available set of concepts was that developed by feminists. Women's relation to the wage labour force not only differed from men's, but had always involved the development of bridging services to help carry out their domestic work. As fiscal restraint threatened the few public-bridging services available, women both resisted and redoubled their efforts to compensate. In sustaining their dual roles, women had been creating an informal economy for decades, and feminists had been studying this process. Feminist geographers had located analytically the informal economy at the intersection of production and reproduction and indicated that it had a concrete form in community childcare and health networks, housing developments, which integrated living space with a range of childcare, counselling and educational services, and in networks of women earning money at home. Feminist geographers had documented that this was not a retreat from the economy, but an alteration and extension of the domestic workplace to incorporate economic activities. Women's space now encompassed not only resources for private family life, but also resources for providing public services and for waged work. These studies had indicated that attempts to develop strategies had been constrained by obsolete environments in the divided city and that women had tried to overcome their problems and meet their new needs by developing new forms and uses of space. As ever, feminist activity was both confounded by 'women's space' and impelled to create more adequate spaces. (Peet & Thrift, 1989, p. 42) At the most general level, the feminists' reconceptualisation of the terms 'human' and 'environment' can be extended to the study of restructuring. Feminist geographers have shown that economic restructuring is a dialectical process, involving the actions of corporate forces at a global and national scale interacting with the responses of individuals at a local scale. We require more feminist-informed studies of global, systemic changes, which recognise the necessary androgyny of humans. We also require studies of how these people, women and men, are responding to restructuring. People are both resisting the disappearance of jobs and services and developing survival strategies in an informal economy. These two forms of response are interrelated, and our empirical examination must take account of how public resistance interacts with new forms of work in the home, new household and community networks, the renovation and redefinition of women's space, and the creation of new places. All of these responses are important and it appears that all of them may be tending to merge productive and reproductive activities and spaces. Our empirical studies could monitor the ways in which restructuring is producing the rudiments of a new urban form centred on the sites where production and reproduction interact. (Kofman, et al, 2004, p. 14) The work of feminist geographers has indicated, however, that restructuring gender activities is a central component of this. Women's patterns of activity have been geographically extended and the concept feminists have developed to study these activities are being expanded to cover urban as well as environmental analysis as a whole. Feminist work also indicates that change in gender relations has been fundamental in bringing about these alterations in urban form. Over the past three decades, significant elements of urban change have been the outcomes of the strategies of dual-income families and female-headed single-parent families. This new demographic and geographic structure and the attendant changes in resource use have contributed to new modes of subsistence involving the use of a variety of resources, which are both public and private. It has also altered women's space, the home and community. Just as it is not possible fully to understand the development, temporary success, and subsequent alteration of a city divided into separate industrial commercial and residential areas without understanding gender as a parameter, so it is impossible to comprehend, or even to see clearly, current changes without recognising that they result from and extend gender roles. (Friedman, 1998, p. 21) But feminism is more than an analysis, and it does more than provide us with new empirical insights and new theoretical vision. Feminism is also inextricably and irreducibly a politics of change, including environmental change. It works in prefigurative ways, creating the basis of new social relations on a day-to-day basis. The content is fundamental and deeply embedded in everyday life in sexuality, biological reproduction, relations to children and other adults, use of resources in the immediate environment, self-definitions. Change comes incrementally, as we live out and reproduce new patterns. As a consequence, the effectiveness of feminism is often invisible, at the same time it is often irreversible. It is, above all, played out in and through the process of incrementally changing our social environment. (Pacione, 1999, p. 32) The research agenda suggested above, with its emphasis on the newly visible resistance and survival strategies women and men are creating to combat the divided city, will be carried out in a highly charged political context, focused around the definition of gender. Feminist proposals, in contrast, advocate breaking down gender and environmental separations, unifying public and private domains, work and home life. This is not just a vision of future possibilities; it is recognition of continuous processes. References & Bibliography Boyle Paul & Halfacree Keith, (1999) Migration and Gender in the Developed World: Routledge: London. Castells, M, 1983. The city and the grassroots: a cross-cultural theory of urban social movements. London: Edward Arnold. Friedman, Susan Stanford, (1998) Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter: Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. Kofman Eleonore, Staeheli A, Lynn & Peake J. Linda, (2004) Mapping Women, Mapping Politics: Feminism and Political Geography: Routledge: New York. Matrix 1984. Making space: women and the man-made environment. London: Pluto Press. McDowell, L. (1993) Space, place and gender relations: Part I. Feminist empiricism and the geography of social relations, Progress in Human Geography 17:157-79 Monk, J. & S. Hanson 1982. On not excluding half of the human in human geography. Professional Geographer34, 11-23 Peet Richard & Thrift Nigel, (1989) New Models in Geography: The Political-Economy Perspective. Volume: 2: Unwin Hyman: London. Pacione Michael, (1999) Applied Geography: Principles and Practice An Introduction to Useful Research in Physical, Environmental and Human Geography: Routledge: London. Proctor D. James & Smith M., David, (1999) Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain: Routledge: London. Rowbotham, S., L. Segal & H. Wainwright 1979. Beyond the fragments: feminism and the making of socialism. London: Merlin Press. 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