Feminist scholars have traditionally emphasized the importance of incorporating "the everyday'' worlds of women into the historically masculinist theoretical and empirical foundations of the social sciences. Such emphases have commonly resulted in smaller-scale research projects and more interactive kinds of research methods and methodologies. Feminist geographers have uniquely contributed to the body of feminist scholarship through drawing out the importance of place in everyday constructions of gender and, more recently, sexuality. Critical field-based research has therefore from the beginning been the mainstay of subdisciplinary research. L k e the discipline as a whole, however, little explicit attention has been given in publications or pedagogically to the politics of fieldwork (including how a "field" is defined and the politics involved in choosing and working in a particular "field") or the politics of representation (which includes considerations of the partiality of knowledge and how and to whom we represent our work, ourselves and others in various kinds of texts). These "Opening Remarks" show how these issues are addressed in the papers that follow and how feminist geography has much to contribute to critical analyses of global and multinational processes, including patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.
This paper explores the potential for certain gay white men to benefit from postindustrial sectors that depend structurally and implicitly upon white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. The paper maps out how gay white patriarchies coexist with, and in some cases displace, heteronormative patriarchies, shoring up pre-existing racialized and politically and economically conservative processes of profit-accumulation. Former cultural investments in a fatherhood defined by biological procreation are accordingly dislodged by investments in fatherhoods abstracted from procreation, which circulate in a variety of commodity forms. Motherhood is geographically and socially sidelined, procreation becoming a service and commodity form purchasable from impoverished places within or outside nations. The white oedipal Family romance is geopolitically reconstituted, with the proprietary reach of patriarchy irrupting out of the confines of the biologically homebound and racist triad of mother-father-son and into extrafamilial, and often transnationalized, domains of racialized and class-transected procreational purchase.Sister, sister where did we go wrong? Tell me what the fuck we're doing here Why are all the boys acting strange? We've got to show them we're worse than queer (Lyrics from Bikini Kill's song "Suck My Left One") Procreational Economies and Biological FatherhoodFreud defined the prototypical nuclear or oedipal family in terms of three elements: a father, a mother, and a child, normatively cast as a son-all implicitly white. The nuclear family ideal and form were not restricted to the household, per se, but were invested in, and mirrored throughout, many material and imaginary-symbolic levels of industrial society (see Figure 1 ;Nast 1998;Nast 2000;Nast and Kobayashi 1996). Many businesses and companies of the 19th and early 20th centuries depended upon images and practices of the white father-led nuclear family to subordinate and legitimate the presence and position of white, male, filialized labor. Investors, corporate heads, and financiers were cast as father figures, kind men who took the interests of childlike laboring sons to heart. Similarly, the prototypical scientist assumed paternal attributes, a disembodied "brain" wed to industry, a connection satirically depicted in Chaplin's (1936) filmic critique of industrial
This paper argues that modern constructions of "race" are inherent in specifically modern constructions of heterosexuality and that both of them inform the normative familial quadrad: Mother, Father, Son, and the Repressed (Bestial). These mythic familial categories constitute the basis of the "oedipal" family and are instrumentally interconnected. Here the oedipal triad of Mother-Son-Father is ideationally encoded as white, the repressed bestial being "colored"-typically "black." I argue racism's immanence to oedipal familial constructions by spatially reworking Fredric Jameson's notion of the political unconscious. In so doing, I develop ways for thinking through how the psyche can be understood as a structured and libidinized spatial effect , a repository of colonial violences of body and place, unspoken and hence repressed ("unconscious"). I propose the term racist-oedipalization (after Deleuze and Guattari's oedipalization) to connote the processual ways in which racist thinking and practices are integral to white oedipal family structures and norms. In so doing, I explore how racist-oedipal configurations have worked variably, in the interests of contemporary and past colonialisms, to great embodied geographical effect. The paper begins by theoretically linking blackness to incestuousness and colonization to productions of the psychical "unconscious." The core of the paper threads the theory through particular racialized geographies in the U.S. These include, on the one hand, southern plantation slave and post-Reconstruction settings, and, on the other hand, urban segregationary practices impelled by the University of Chicago, culminating in their racialized plans for urban renewal in the 1950s. Key Words: family, racist-oedipal hysteria, slavery, unconscious, urban renewal, white supremacy. his paper draws upon the work of Hayden White (1972) and others to argue that the psyche, within which the psychoanalytic "unconscious" reposes, emerged as an embodied spatial effect unevenly across place and time in tandem with European colonialisms across the world. Unlike White, however, this paper concentrates on how the psyche was shaped through colonial sociospatial violence, desire, and repression. The psyche was, in this sense, an interiorized repository within which the violent acts and desires of colonization were secreted or made legitimately secret and unspeakable. The "truth" of colonial devastations was spatially displaced or repressed in two ways. First, the memories and actions associated with colonial violences were incorporated into the body-space of the "psyche," an "unconscious" domain outside language. Accordingly, the sequestering and torture of colonized bodies and the burning down of cities and towns was simply asserted, with the particularities of the violence as violence in various sociospatial ways being ignored, suppressed, or elided. Second, certain "unconscious" colonial violences were sexualized, the colonized used "unconsciously" and collectively as a libidinous foil against which the whi...
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