The Gender of Geography

Karen Morin

Geography Department
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
kmorin@unlinfo.unl.edu

 

 

Rose, Gillian. Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 205 pages. $44.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

 

Geography is a notoriously male-dominated field. To cite just one recent statistic, a 1993 profile of the Association of American Geographers (the largest professional organization in the discipline) showed that only 18.6 percent of the membership who were employed by colleges and universities were women. Evidence has shown that, in addition, a disproportionately large number of the 18.6 percent probably hold less influential temporary, part-time, and/or lower paid positions within departments. As Gillian Rose asserts in Feminism and Geography, women’s under-representation in geography departments (and its byproduct, academic publishing) points to some serious problems. Not only does it mean that most geographic research is about men and men’s activities, but more fundamentally, it produces a bias in what passes for geographic knowledge itself. The subject of her book is how one type of human geography, “masculinist,” has been constituted and defined as geography in male-dominated academia, and how feminist perspectives can respond to it.

 

This book brings academic geography up to date with current feminist theory, something geography badly needed. Indeed, this is the only book-length work of its kind (at least in English). Whereas geographic studies of women’s work, women’s status in less developed countries, women’s relationship to imperialism, and women and the land have broadly taken off within the field, few attempts have been made to discuss feminist geography theory, at length, within the context of the history of geographic thought. More characteristic are widely-cited works such as R.J. Johnston’s Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography Since 1945 (4th ed., 1991), which devotes only three pages to feminism. Though Rose brings together some of the substantive works in feminist geography, her primary concern is with the way geographers think and produce work, and she therefore focuses more on the “gender of geography” than the “geography of gender.”

 

A lot is packed into this small volume (200 pages, including notes). Rose argues that as a masculinist discipline, geography is stuck in dualistic thinking and in producing grand theories that claim to speak for everyone but that actually speak only for white, bourgeois, heterosexual males. Though masculinism effectively excludes women as researchers and as research subjects, Rose says that it is not “a conscious plot” by males (p. 10), and that both men and women are caught in it. And indeed, Rose finds herself caught in it. She attempts to create a more personal geography, locating herself through her whiteness, her lower-middle class upbringing, her “seduction” by the university. (She is now a lecturer at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.) But she’s not all that successful at maintaining this personalism. Recognizing this, she admits how “extraordinarily difficult [it was] to break away . . . from the unmarked tone of so much geographical writing,” admonishing her own “complicity with geography” (p. 15). At the same time, Rose consistently tries to avoid overarching theories, which she believes are antithetical to feminism, and spends a good deal of text positioning authors of both masculinist and feminist writing.

 

Rose’s primary task is to mark the territory of masculinist thinking in geography. She demonstrates how just as there are many feminisms, so also there are many masculinisms, with boundaries that are not fixed and clear but permeable and unstable, and each invoked for particular purposes. Overall Rose discusses geographic thought at three scales: the scale of “places” (of humanistic geography), the scale of “landscapes” (of cultural geography), and the scale of individual “spaces” (of social and economic geography). She discusses the degree to which each associated branch of geography is embedded in masculinist thinking and/or holds promise for more feminist interpretations.

 

Humanist geography, which would seem to share feminism’s goal of recovering the places of individual and everyday experience, turns out to have constituted “place” itself as feminine. Rose asserts that humanists talk about places as homes, in strictly idealized and feminized terms associated with women–as nurturing places, free of conflicts. Rose argues that “home” may not be a place universally sought after, and may in fact be more like a prison for some women. The important point is that home’s significance varies from person to person and from social group to social group. Home may indeed signify refuge for some African American women, for instance, not as idealized Mother but as an escape from racism.

 

It is at the scale of landscape that Rose finds masculinism’s most apparent contradictions, particularly because the study of landscape often rests on “geography’s most embedded dualism”–nature/culture. Rose explains how images of the female side, nature, invoke something to be heroically conquered through fieldwork, but also something to be revered and respected. Masculinism, apparently, genders landscapes in whatever way seems most convenient for the purpose at hand, for example, by associating frontier lands with the female, a virgin awaiting penetration by male explorers, but at the same time signifying women as culture carriers, bringing “civilization” to those “savage” frontiers. Both culture and nature are gendered, but as Rose points out, one side is masculine and the other side is always the masculine idea of the feminine. Thus it is dangerous to empower the feminine side of the dualism, as radical feminists attempt to do. Instead, feminists need to destabilize the dualism itself, creating new categories to analyze how women relate to landscapes. As Rose notes, Monk and Norwood’s edited volume The Desert is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art (1987) provides an excellent model for such work. This collection demonstrates how Hispanic, Native, and Anglo women’s images of the American Southwest are quite unlike males’, yet also quite different from each others’. Women writers, photographers, and artists envisioned the desert land not in terms of its material resources to be exploited, a land awaiting metaphorical rape, but as a strong woman, unable to be conquered. The women artists’ imagery is sexual, not in terms of domination or suppression but in terms of uniting with the productive and reproductive energy of the earth.

 

In masculinism, space itself appears ungendered, a seemingly open path to anywhere. But Rose argues that some spaces offer particular constraints to women, and may in fact mean horror and violence to women, such as when we walk through the city at night. She writes about space as oppressive:

 

I have to tell my own fears of attack in terms of space: when I’ve felt threatened, space suffocatingly surrounds me with an opacity that robs me of my right to be there . . . space almost becomes like an enemy itself. (143)

 

Masculinism also forces women to sense their own embodiment. Whereas men’s bodies are transparent to masculinism, women are conditioned to be aware of their bodies, as objects in space, taking up space right along with other objects. Ultimately women are doubly affected by masculinism, then, because we move through space that has been gendered by a dominant ideology, with gendered bodies.

 

Though it is wrought with contradictions of its own, Rose cites socialist feminism’s theorizing of the domestic sphere in terms of economic life as “undoubtedly one of the major achievements of feminist geography” (p. 121). The contradictions arise when trying to account for the diversity of women’s experiences in production alongside their (seemingly) shared experiences in reproduction. On the reproductive side, feminist work has emphasized women’s spatial limitations as they try to combine domestic and waged work. Women, so the thesis goes, work closer to home to be nearer to childcare and schools, and are thus locked into female-segregated, part-time, and/or lower waged occupations, especially in the suburbs. This model turns out to be appropriate mainly for white, middle-class mothers, however. Rose asserts that when emphasis has been shifted to production, feminism has made greater strides. Research by feminist geographers such as Linda McDowell stresses difference in women’s work, particularly by social class and geographic region, where gender relations are unevenly developed because capitalism itself is.

 

The book’s conclusion left me a bit hanging, but that may be because Rose is more interested in exposing the limitations of masculinist geography and surveying current feminist responses to it, than in laying out a more positive future trajectory for the discipline. Rose succeeds admirably in marking the contested areas, and has shown how masculinism cannot represent the gendering of places, landscapes, or spaces. Self-representation is key to women’s advancement in geography, she says, as is recognizing our multiple axes of identity, and practicing “strategic mobility” by moving between the center of academic geography and its margin to ultimately subvert that center.

 

The book’s structure–which has it in effect beginning in the middle, then looking backward (chs. 1-4) into masculinist geography, and then moving forward (chs. 5-7) into feminist geography–is wonderfully appropriate to its argument. Yet it is also in the structure that the book reveals its most glaring flaws. Perhaps it was edited too heavily, perhaps not heavily enough. But readers will find themselves constantly reminded of what’s just been said, or previously been said in another chapter, or about to be said, so that instead of a gradual unfolding of themes, the discussion unfolds in short, awkward bursts. Moreover, the dense text is difficult to plow through at times, and Rose’s heavy reliance on academic jargon threatens to place her among the many feminists whose work is inaccessible to the very population of geographers that most needs to read it. Occasional misspellings don’t help matters, and the book’s three illustrations are merely adequately reproduced.

 

But who’s complaining? In comparison to the enormous project Rose has undertaken, these deficiencies can be overlooked. This book should be required reading for graduate seminars dealing with the history of geographic thought, and will be indispensable for feminist geographers and other social scientists grappling with feminist epistemology and who need the discussion wrapped up in a single volume.