Thus feminist geographers have began to study issues related to gender, that have not been studied by men, such as, looking at women in the urban spatial structure, women’s employment, women’s access to facilities, women and development. These are focused on the aspects of women’s lives (e.g. marriage, motherhood, work, resources, welfare, authority and body politics). Looking at this point we can say that, feminist geographies (and not geography, as we shall see later) are based on women’s lives as mentioned above but also their experiences.
Despite all the others differences that we can in a human being (e.g. race, social class), feminist geographers have still maintained, gender as their central point of focus. This means that gender is the primary social relation on which experiences are based and identities are constructed. For feminist geographers all the other aspects that help us to build a profile or determine an identity, is derived or is a consequence of gender.
A few years later feminist geographers have questioned the dichotomy space and time, constructed by ideas about how people and space and places interact with each other, and how it is related to gender.
Many feminist geographers have explored the spatiality of capitalism patriarchy, and they have argued that the social relations of capitalist patriarchy consisted of the relations of production (waged work) and reproduction (unwaged, domestic work). To these social relations (e.g. men are expected to undertake waged and women are expected to undertake unwaged), feminist geographers called patriarchy genders. However, as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism was reorganised into factory-based production and home became as a mere space of reproduction. Given these economic and social changes, the process of development within the city, spaces have also begun to be gendered. By this we understand the spaces where industries (or places of work) were not located, also denominated or gendered as feminine.
The idea based on this feminist analysis, about spatiality of social relations means that spaces are both made materially and are maintained or supported beyond the idea of a predefined behaviour and values. Thus feminist geographers have continued to critique the gendering of the opposite categories used to create space and places, determinate as boundaries, defining a type of people linked to certain practices (in bounds), while others are (out of bounds). So feminist geographers have challenged the invisibility of feminine work and spaces to prove that there is geography for women as there is for men. But at the same time concerned to consider the way which gender roles and relations can be part of a complex dynamics of gendered spatiality. By this I mean that from a different world to another one (developed countries vs. third world), different cultures, different societies, different realities, are at the end the reflex of different gender inequalities existent around the globe (e.g. women in South America have different lifestyles from the European women, derived to the different inequalities/realities lived in these two different places).
At this point is important to mention, why the title of the book suggests to a feminist geographies, and not geography. This is due to the inevitably writing of individual feminist geographers, and consequently between feminist geographers themselves, and this is a result of a theoretical and methodological diversity and different interpretations.
Conclusion
The book Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, by Linda McDowell, contributes to geographical thought as it explains the roots of the feminist geographies and the main issues related to it, such as gender, identity, space and place. It introduces us to key concepts (e.g. feminism, sex, gender and patriarchy), and analyses the transformations that have changed the links between people and places, especially during the 1990s.
As it was said in the last paragraph of the essay, the issues mentioned above, aim to confirm not only the existence of a feminist geography but feminist geographies, due to a diversity of approaches/ points of view about vary themes, by feminine geographers over the time and space.
Bibliography
McDowell, L. 1997,Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Polity Press, Cambridge)
Women and Geography Study Group, 1997, Feminist Geographies: Explorations in diversity and difference (Addison Wesley Longman Limited)
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