The development of feminist geography in Europe and North America

Abstract

This paper reviews the theoretical development of feminist geography in Europe and North America, and discusses some issues with which feminist geography is concerned at present. As feminists have blamed male hegemony, which has dominated scholarship, for excluding of women from the production of knowledge, so feminist geographers have led the debate on the exclusion of women from the production of geographical knowledge. Monk and Hanson, in their 1982 paper, titled 'On not excluding half of the human in human geography', began the discussion of the exclusive production of geographical knowledge by men. The second section explains the historical and social context of feminist geography and how it has developed, dividing the process generally into two stages : (1) From the mid-1970's to the late 1980's : In the mid-1970's, feminist geography, which emerged as a criticism of excluding women as objects of study, began to focus on such women, who are situated unequally in both public and private spheres, and then attempted to describe and map the situation of women in detail. Throughout the 1980's, influenced by Marxism and social feminism, feminist scholarship aimed to do away with sex discrimination and female exploitation by working against both capitalism and the patriarchy which promote sexual inequality. (2) From the end of the 1980's to the present: Feminist geographers placed women into the production of geographical knowledge, restoring the positive value of "femininity". They began with examinations of difference and diversity among women and with discussions on the construction of gender and identity. Then feminist geograhers started to take an interest not only in sexual difference but also in race, religion, and class as causes of social inequality. Besides discussing how gender was constructed through spatial images, representation, meanings and environment, which are freed from real boundaries, women geographers began to investigate the influence of postcolonialism and the anti-Western tradition which it founded. To claim knowledge is the most important issue for feminist geography in recent years. When time and space change, social relations are reconstructed. So the construction of a partial or situated knowledge is often necessary. The third section, referring to Harvey (1989), who examines the relation between postmodernism and feminism, and including the critical view of Deutshe (1991) and Massey (1991), points out that post modernism fails to notice an important aspect of discourse - the differences and diversity of feminism - and that it cannot emerge from the shell of authority which places men at the center. The fourth section, in the context of postfordism, discusses the reconstruction of male and female labor forces into what McDowell (1991) called a "new gender order" in the labor market. The concluding section lists three issues with which feminist geography is concerned holds today: the interdependence of feminism and geography, feminist geography and masculinity, and skepticism about theorizing in feminist geography.