Re-placing gender? Reflections on 15 years ofGender, Place and Culture

Abstract

This article reflects on Gender, Place and Culture (GPC) from 1994 to mid-2008, to highlight some of the key subjects and debates which have been delimited and progressed within its pages. Launched simultaneously with the cultural turn in human geography, GPC proceeded to raise important questions about identity and difference, effectively reflecting but also driving a number of transformative intellectual and political agendas. This reflection will focus on three interrelated sites of such activity: empirical, theoretical and political. Empirically, numerous articles have examined the ways gender is lived, in and across spaces and these have been enlivened by approaches highlighting masculinities, sexualities and embodiment. Theoretically these subjects have been informed by post-colonial and poststructural frameworks, directing discussion towards multiple identities, reflexivity, research practice, performativity, material cultures, positionality and the nature of academic knowledge. In addition, GPC has registered progressive political concerns for justice and equality, though the nature and extent of its political import has been legitimately questioned from without and within the pages of the journal. The resolution of the many dilemmas associated with the ways gender is lived, thought about and practiced has not always been successful in the pages of GPC, and the ongoing reality of Anglo-American dominance, the persistence of women's inequality and the tension between discursive and political activism, remains. However, in re-placing gender over the last 15 years, GPC has been a journal of serious and path-breaking scholarship which has further legitimized the value of feminist geography.

Synthesizing Feminist and Critical Realist Approaches to Housing Studies

“…I suggest that the answer to this is no, endorsing the observations by Carter and New (2004a,b) that realism has an "… open-endedness on the matter of methodology and method …" (15; see also Byrne 2004;Hart, New, and Freeman 2004;Pawson 2004;and Sayer 1992) and in recognition of the wide range of quantitative and qualitative methods endorsed by contemporary feminist standpoint researchers, explicitly identified or otherwise (see Johnson (2008) for a commentary on research published in Gender, Place and Culture and the approaches taken in the journal, Feminist Economics). I also suggest that being categorical that only one set of methods can fit the title of feminist realist is generative of an inappropriately narrow prescription (Madsen and Adriansen (2004) M. Satsangi similar point in relation to critical realism; see also Mäki & Oinas 2004;Olsen 2004).…”

Gender, migration, mobility and transnationalism

“…According to Johnson's (2008, 564 -566) reflections on the overall progress of the journal over its first 15 years, 'the notion of a differentiated masculinity and how it is created, represented, lived and connected to place' has remained a resilient theme in the journal (see also Peake and Valentine's [2003] earlier commentary marking the journal's 10th anniversary), even though 'GPC has been a vital participant rather than a leader in the focus on masculinity in the spatial disciplines'. While we are inclined to agree with the modesty of Johnson's (2008) claims for the journal as a whole, it is also well worth pointing out that migration scholarship in the journal in more recent years has provided a particularly fertile ground for problematising hegemonic constructions of masculinity. On the one hand, migration in a transnational context (for example, the increasing feminisation of migration in south-east Asia where women play the breadwinning role) opens up new space representing newly emergent assemblages of gender, power, economics and cultural ideals that may put pressure on men to perform their masculinities differently, or at least more flexibly (for example, left-behind men who attempt to preserve existing gender regimes while taking on caregiving roles as fathers).…”

“…First, by giving weight to multiplicity, diversity, fluidity and performativity as opposed to stability, stasis and fixity, the post-structuralist framing of 'gender in motion' favoured by the journal's authors positions the journal at the forefront in engaging the new 'mobilities paradigm' in the social sciences. Just as feminist geographers have ridden the crest of the cultural turn in human geography in the 1990s (Johnson 2008), placing 'gender' and 'mobility' at 'the center of constellations of power, the creation of identities and the microgeographies of everyday life' (Cresswell 2011, 551) is likely to pay worthwhile dividends both theoretically and empirically. Second, feminist geographers contributing to the journal (and beyond) have been critical in their approach to deploying transnationalism as an analytical optic, paying far more attention to its blind spots than elsewhere in the discipline.…”

Female subjugation and political resistance: from literati to entrepreneurial masculinity in the globalizing era of postsocialist China

“…This article, through deconstructing the cultural history, cultural groups, individuals, activities, and the places, has demonstrated how people and place are mutually structured and constituted, Gender, Place and Culture 663 and how a relational and dynamic approach can be deployed toward masculinities and femininities ensconced in place and crisscrossed by other dimensions such as class, the state and sexuality. In so doing, the article not only highlights gender as a category that is relational, contested, intersected, place-based and performative, but also underscores that place and culture are imbricated and mutually constituted by social and spatial relationships (see Johnson 2008). While previous researchers have relied on representations of men and masculinities in literary texts and visual materials, my research analysis is based on ethnographic research.…”