Geography and gender: Feminism and a feeling of justice

Abstract

The recent emphasis on emotional geographies has turned critical attention to the connections linking affect and social justice. It is hard to imagine this ‘emotional turn’ in the field without much of the ground having been laid by feminist challenges to epistemology, objectivity, rationality, to the gendering of knowledge and the conceptualization of human embodiment, psychic life, subjectivity, and political agency, all in relation to power so often substantiated around a belief that the public and the private are discrete and oppositional domains necessary for organizing social, economic, and political life. In this report, I address the following questions. How can feminist and emotional geography tighten their connections, fuel their shared passions and generate a synergy of scholarship oriented toward activism and progressive change? How can geographies of feeling broaden the path for justice that feminism endeavors to plow? In doing so, I continue my emphasis on research that grounds theoretical discussion with research conducted in activist projects conducted in the name of social justice. I do so as a matter of my own emotional investments — I firmly believe that scholarship must engage with the ways in which people beyond the academy wrestle with the concepts in their daily lives that scholars contemplate, sharpen, and circulate through academic production. So the debates that we scholars so often have with ourselves over the finer points of theory reveal, in my view, their greater significance when they provide tools useful for people who seek to create kinder and more compassionate worlds. Thus, I highlight the scholarship that creates toolkits out of feminist scholarship, emotional geographies, and research on social justice.

A Storyville Education

“…Women were active in the creation of spatial arrangements as they solicited clients (Dyck, 2005;Wright, 2010). There, women learned the business, established themselves as sex workers, and climbed the red-light hierarchy.…”

“…1895Hell-O, ca. Most revealing is that such educational practices had capitalistic ends to maintain and reproduce (Lefebvre, 1991;Wright, 2010). 1895-1905Blue Book, 1906).…”

Feminist Geographies “Beyond” Gender: de‐Coupling Feminist Research and the Gendered Subject

“…She stresses that the politics of this knowledge production is what aligns different strands of feminist urban research: research must be social justice oriented, and connected to feminist praxis (Parker ). The sometimes implicit linkages between feminist scholarship and social justice struggles are highlighted by scholars such as Wright (: 820), who calls for scholarship that “engage[s] with the ways in which people beyond the academy wrestle with the concepts in their daily lives.” Yet the taken‐for‐granted association between progressive politics and feminist geographical research is in need of further unpacking.…”

‘All the Beautiful Things’: Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian Childhood

“…Indeed, one wonders whether this suspicion of beauty itself stems from a misogynistic attitude toward sensual forms of knowledge (Steiner 2002). Despite the endeavour within feminist geography to valorise marginalized forms of knowledge (Anderson and Smith 2001;Davidson and Milligan 2004;Wood and Smith 2004;Bondi 2005;Tolia-Kelley 2006), and despite recent debates about the function of affect in politics (Lawson 2007;Barnett 2008;Popke 2009;Ruddick 2010;Smith, Timbrell et al 2010;Wright 2010;Roe 2011), the role that beauty might play in creating new political assemblages and subjectivities remains under-theorized.…”