Introduction

Feminism exists to critically and self-reflexively examine regimes of power at work in everyday life. Through
attention to social differences, such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, ability, and sexuality, feminist geography
highlights the significance of difference in shaping experiences of space and place. Feminist geography emerged in
the 1980s as a move within geography that took two primary directions. First, to open the discipline up to more
female geographers, through more equitable hiring processes and attempts to shift oppressive departmental cultures.
Second, feminist geography encouraged geographers to develop scholarship that was mindful of gender and that
included studies of women and womens concerns. Since feminisms early forays into geography, attention to
gender has evolved into an emphasis on social difference more broadly construed. Feminist geographers have
emphasized the significance of embodiment, emotion, and spaces of intimacy through geographic research. Today
the term feminist within geography means different things. First, that one simply does geography with a feminist
lens, approaching subject matter that falls under the headings of any of the more traditional subdisciplines, including
geographies of the political, economic, social, or environmental. Second, feminist geographical approaches often
involve more participatory and inclusive methods in both research and publication. Third, feminist geographies are
often rooted in social justice concerns, mindful of the capacity for scholarship to call attention to the ways affected
communities are negatively impacted by oppressive forces at work in the world. Lastly, feminist geographers are
concerned with how greater regimes of power, such as governmental and corporate entities, and problematic social
norms, are experienced and negotiated in peoples everyday lives.

General Overviews
Many of the early overviews of feminist geography were further attempts to legitimize feminism within the
discipline, often arguing for the relevance of such studies and attempting to speak broadly to human geographers
about the value of incorporating feminism into geographic scholarship, and of supporting feminist scholars (who
were also most often female). Massey 1994; Jones, et al. 1997; McDowell and Sharp 1997; and McDowell 1999 are
all examples of these earlier collections that worked to highlight scholarship under a broad heading of feminist
geography. While early collections were oriented broadly around feminism as a common thread, feminist
geography has continued to evolve and diversify, and today it is much more difficult to simply group things together
as feminist. Consequently, more recent edited collections tend to be oriented around a focal point within feminist
geography, such as embodiment, feminist geopolitics, or sexuality studies.

Jones, John Paul, Heidi J. Nast, and Susan M. Roberts, eds. Thresholds in Feminist Geography. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.
This edited collection attempts to show the state of feminist geography by looking to its thresholds: the
pasts, presents, and futures of feminism in geography. The book includes contemporary scholarship by
feminist geographers and also addresses prevalent issues facing the subdiscipline.

Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

A collection of essays written by Massey addressing the ways that social relations inform experiences of
space and place, including her understanding of space-time as a framework for conceptualizing the
intersectionality and inherent multiplicity within any given space.

McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Cambridge, UK:
Polity, 1999.
This book examines the gendered dynamics and importance of the local, challenging widespread emphasis
within geographic scholarship on the primacy of the global and processes of globalization.

McDowell, Linda, and Joanne P. Sharp, eds. Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings. New York:
John Wiley, 1997.
Several of the essays in this edited collection are by scholars prominent in the initial movement of
feminism within geography, as well as feminists from outside geography, such as Elizabeth Grosz and
Judith Butler. An initial section dedicated to the relationship of gender to geographic scholarship is
followed by sections emphasizing the practice of feminist geography through considerations of the
environment, the body, everyday space, work, and politics.

Nelson, Lise, and Joni Seager, eds. A Companion to Feminist Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
This edited volume brings together various key scholars of feminist geography, with essays focused on a
variety of geographys subdisciplines, including economic geography, urban geography, geographies of
embodiment, political ecology, and political geography.

Women and Geography Study Group of the Royal Geographic Society. Feminist Geographies:
Explorations in Diversity and Difference. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 1997.
Written collaboratively with multiple authors for each chapter, this book aims to reflect both the
contemporary state of feminist geography and to show the evolution of the field. This work is designed to
be a pedagogical tool targeting undergraduate geographers. As such, it is peppered with excerpts from
important works by feminist geographers, as well as activities and points for discussion designed to
enhance students understandings of the scholarly practice of feminist geography.

Journals
Feminist scholarship may be published in any journal of geography; however, there are a few that explicitly support
feminist research. Gender, Place and Culture is by far the journal most closely associated with feminist geography.
Antipode and ACME, both considered journals of radical and critical geography, state explicitly that they aim to
publish feminist scholarship. The lack of more journals dedicated to publishing feminist scholarship may well be
due to a lingering stigma within the discipline regarding feminism and feminist approaches.

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. 2002.

Unlike most peer-reviewed journals of geography, ACME is on open-access, online publication that is free
for authors as well as readers. ACME focuses on the publication of critical scholarship rooted in radical
perspectives, including Marxist, feminist, anticolonial, and queer viewpoints. The journals first issue was
up in 2002, and since then publications in ACME have been accessed by a wide audience from within and
outside of academia, due to the open-access forum.

Antipode. 1969.

Antipode is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to providing a radical analysis of spatial phenomena. The
journal was started in 1969, and since then it has focused on publishing articles from Marxist, anarchist,
feminist, and queer perspectives. The journal covers a mix of theoretical and editorial pieces, while also
publishing substantial empirical work.

Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. 1994.

Gender, Place and Culture started in 1994 with the goal of making feminist scholarship more visible within
geography, while simultaneously providing a way for those outside the discipline with interests in women
and gender studies to access feminist geographies. Today, it is geographys flagship journal for peerreviewed scholarship concerned with gender and feminist research in geography.

Historiography
Much attention has been paid to the historiography of feminism in geography, largely because the entrance of
feminist geography to the field contributed to a profoundly different outlook regarding the types of research and
theoretical approaches that were considered valid. The earliest discussions of the place of feminism in geography
often took on the form of critiques of the unchecked masculinism within the discipline, such as in Monk and Hanson
1982; Zelinsky, et al. 1982; Domosh 1991; and Rose 1993. Many more recent histories, such as Johnson 2008 and
Johnson 2012, have focused on developments within feminist geography since the 1980s, while others look to
geographys more distant past, arguing that the presence of women in the discipline contributed significantly to the
development of geography throughout the 20th century, though their presence and achievements were often
unacknowledged by the male majority, as discussed in Maddrell 2009, Monk 2004, and Monk 2006.

Domosh, Mona. Toward a Feminist Historiography of Geography. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 16.1 (1991): 95104.
Challenging prevalent images of an archetypal masculine explorer, Domosh shows how women contributed
to the development of the discipline of geography by looking to the stories of female Victorian explorers.

Johnson, Louise C. Re-placing Gender? Reflections on 15 Years of Gender, Place and Culture. Gender
Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 15.6 (2008): 561574.
In this article, Johnson looks to the history of Gender, Place and Culture, to discuss the ways empirics,
theory, and politics have been explored in feminist geography.

Johnson, Louise C. Feminist Geography 30 Years onThey Came, They Saw But Did They Conquer?
Geographical Research 50.4 (2012): 345355.
This article looks to the evolution of Australian feminist geography and the ways that the discipline shifted
in the 1980s and 1990s. Johnson considers the contemporary mainstreaming of feminist geography in light
of the earlier struggles of feminists, ultimately concluding that gender inequality still exists in Australian
geography, as well as elsewhere.

Maddrell, Avril. Complex Locations: Womens Geographical Work in the UK, 18501970. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009.
This book covers the ways women were involved in the development of geography, specifically focusing
on the particular contexts within which women were able to participate in geographic work from the second
half of the 19th century through the 1970s. Maddrell explores the presence of women in British
geographical societies, travelers accounts, geographic education, and academia.

Monk, Janice. Women, Gender, and the Histories of American Geography. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 94.1 (2004): 122.
Monk demonstrates that the United States did have female geographers prior to the dawn of feminist
geography in the 1980s. However, she finds them in professional geographic careers, rather than doing the
academic research typically touted as central to the historiography of the discipline.

Monk, Janice. Changing Expectations and Institutions: American Women Geographers in the 1970s.
Geographical Review 96.2 (2006): 259277.
By looking to the 1970s, Monk shows tensions between, on the one hand, the wider feminist movement
and, on the other, the daunting practical challenges facing women in geography at the time.

Monk, Janice, and Susan Hanson. On Not Excluding Half of the Human in Human Geography. The
Professional Geographer 34.1 (1982): 1123.
This article is of immense significance for the history of feminist geography, as it was one of the earliest
pieces to clearly demonstrate that the discipline of geography not only lacked female geographers, but also
that their absence correlated to the disciplines inability to generate scholarship about womens experience.

Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Polity,
1993.
This foundational text was hugely significant to the development of an explicitly feminist geography. Rose
shows the depth of masculinism in the discipline, and the pervasive nature of the universal (and always
implicitly male) subject. She discusses the social climate of geography departments as well as the nature of
geographic research.

Zelinsky, Wilbur, Janice Monk, and Susan Hanson. Women and Geography: a Review and Prospectus.
Progress in Human Geography 6.3 (1982): 317366.
In this historic paper, the authors survey geographic scholarship dealing with women, as well as the
contemporary place of women in geography departments in North America. Relying on quantitative data,
the authors provide specific information about the numbers of female geographers in relation to males in
academic departments, and the ways these numbers translate into the production of scholarly work.

Gender
Gender is perhaps the most obvious focus for feminist geographers, though it has been approached in myriad ways.
In general, considerations of gender serve to enhance any topic under study, by providing depth to the very different
ways that ones gendered identity contributes to experiences of space and place. Throughout the history of feminism
in geography, studies of gender have evolved a great deal. In earlier periods, such as the 1980s and early 1990s, the
mere acknowledgment of the presence of women constituted a radical shift. Today, geographies of gender include
studies of masculinities and trans geographies, as seen in Doan 2010 and Nash 2010, as well as works that explore
femininity, such as Valentine 1989 and Ehrkamp 2012. It is now commonplace to find studies of gender within all
dimensions of human geography, and some of the most exciting developments today occur within subdisciplines
that were very masuclinist in the past, such as in political, economic, and health geographies. As Brown 2012 shows,
there is much overlap between studies of gender and sexuality, and while recent years have seen considerable
growth in these fields, there remain persistent silences indicative of a disciplinary anxiety about particularly
gendered or sexualized topics.

Brown, Michael. Gender and Sexuality I: Intersectional Anxieties. Progress in Human Geography 36.4
(2012): 541550.
In this progress report, Brown considers the ways geographic research has approached intersectionality
within research addressing gender and sexuality. Beyond positively assessing work that has been produced
here, he also considers the ways that silences within scholarship reveal anxieties about particularly
gendered and sexualized topics.

Doan, Petra L. The Tyranny of Gendered SpacesReflections from Beyond the Gender Dichotomy.
Gender, Place and Culture 17.5 (2010): 635654.
Written from the autobiographical standpoint of being a transsexual person, Doan discusses the tyranny
perpetuated by societies with rigidly binarized gender norms and suggests that a degree of liberation can be
found in living a non-binarized life.

Ehrkamp, Patricia. Ive Had It with Them! Younger Migrant Womens Spatial Practices of Conformity
and Resistance. Gender, Place and Culture 20.1 (2012): 1936.
Ehrkamp discusses the ways that young Turkish migrant women negotiate everyday life in Germany. She
shows that common tropes portraying young Turkish women as the victims of violent men are inadequate
for grasping the complex ways these migrant women maneuver through the spaces of their daily lives.

Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Catherine J. Nash. Mobile Places, Relational Spaces: Conceptualizing
Change in Sydneys LGBTQ Neighborhoods. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34.4
(2014): 622641.
Geographic research has tended to emphasize the ways that sexual and gender minorities contribute either
to place-making, on the one hand, or mobilities, on the other. In contrast, Murray and Nash argue that both
of these intersecting and always ongoing processes are important for studies of LGBTQ neighborhoods.
Specifically, they explore the politics of mobility within LGBTQ neighborhoods in Sydney, Australia.

Nash, Catherine J. Trans Geographies, Embodiment and Experience. Gender, Place and Culture 17.5
(2010): 579595.
Nash situates scholarship about transgendered people amid other geographies of sexualities. She considers
the ways that trans scholarship intersects with issues raised through feminist and queer research in
geography by looking to such concepts as subjectivity, performativity, experience, embodiment, and the
social construction of queer spaces.

Valentine, Gill. The Geography of Womens Fear. Area 21.4 (1989): 385390.
This hugely significant piece is an example of both an early empirical study of gender as well as of
emotional geography. Valentine shows that womens perceptions of male violence in urban space often do
not necessarily align with the actual potential of being attacked. Nonetheless, as she shows, the fear of the
threat of violence is no less real, and it shapes the ways that women move about the city.

Sexuality
Studies of gender have organically given way to geographic research that considers sexuality. As seen in Bell and
Valentine 1995, studies of gender and sexuality began to shift in the 1990s, as geographic scholarship approached
such topics as homosexuality, queerness, and transsexuality along with studies of gendered identity. More recently,
Baily and Shabazz 2014, McIlwaine and Datta 2007, and Livermon 2014 have explored the intersections of race and

sexuality, while Ekers 2013 considers the ways that homosociality often interacts with a complex and masculinized
heterosexuality.

Baily, Marlon M., and Rashad Shabazz. Editorial: Gender and Sexual Geographies of Blackness: Antiblack Heterotopias. Gender, Place and Culture 21.3 (2014): 316321.
In this introduction to a two-part themed issue addressing geographies of blackness, Baily and Shabazz
theorize about the extreme marginality of black sexualities. Building upon Foucaults notion of heterotopia,
the authors argue that we can better understand the ways that race, gender, and sexuality intersect through
considering an anti-black heterotopia.

Bell, David, and Gill Valentine, eds. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge,
1995.
This edited collection, one of the earliest to include studies of homosexuality in geography, brings together
scholarship dealing with identity, space and place, and sites of resistance. Taken together the works in this
book all speak to the interplay between space, sexuality, and resistance, and highlight the presence of longstanding homosexual practices in a wide range of empirical contexts.

Ekers, Michael. Pounding Dirt All Day: Labor, Sexuality and Gender in the British Columbia
Reforestation Sector. Gender, Place and Culture 20.7 (2013): 876895.
Based on research with tree planters in British Columbia, as well as firsthand experience working as a
planter himself, Ekers considers the paradoxical nature of normative heterosexuality within a context of
extreme homosociality.

Livermon, Xavier. Soweto Nights: Making Black Queer Space in Post-apartheid South Africa. Gender,
Place and Culture 21.4 (2014): 508525.
Livermon looks to queer nightlife in Soweto to explore the making of black queer space in South Africa.
He discusses the ways that queerness is negotiated amid the already racialized spaces of South African
society. He emphasizes that, through parties in South African townships, black queers are reappropriating
urban spaces to create fleeting moments of possibility.

McIlwaine, Cathy, and Kavita Datta. Engangered Youth? Youth, Gender and Sexualities in Urban
Botswana. Gender, Place and Culture 11.4 (2007): 483512.
Through this article, McIlwaine and Datta show that urban youth in Botswana have been constructed
through development discourse as hypersexualized beings, due to the pressures of combating HIV/AIDS
and teenage pregnancy. As the authors argue, however, young people in urban Botswana are often more
aware of risks and sexually sophisticated than development agencies and government bodies believe them
to be.

Difference
Studies of social difference form the core of feminist geography, asking the same fundamental question of various
spaces and contexts: How is this place experienced differently by different people? Originally rooted in
considerations of gender, studies of difference have evolved to include scholarship about various socially ascribed
aspects of identity. Gilmore 2002, McKittrick 2006, and Pulido 2002 all confront geographies of race, for example,
while Colls 2012 addresses the ways different bodies experience spatial phenomena, and Mott and Roberts 2014
consider the various ways bodies are interpellated within urban space. Considerations of social difference are crucial
to an understanding of space that incorporates the multiple ways that experience is nuanced by identity, and by the

interpellation of the subject by society according to ones status in hierarchies of race, class, ability, age, gender, or
sexuality.

Colls, Rachel. Feminism, Bodily Difference and Non-Representational Geographies. Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 37.3 (2012): 430445.
In this article, Colls seeks to find points of affinity between feminist and nonrepresentational geographies.
She looks to Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, and Luce Irigary to show how their understandings of sexual
difference and embodiment could work with nonrepresentational geographies, a branch of geography that
has been heavily critiqued by feminist geographers for its tendency to universalize and distance itself from
emotion.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography. The
Professional Geographer 54.1 (2002): 1524.
Gilmore examines tendencies within geographic scholarship on race, concluding that the discipline is in
need of research emphasizing the territoriality of power, and the ways this manifests through racism and
racist practices. In particular, she focuses on the relationship between racism and capitalism.

McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
In this book, McKittrick brings black studies together with geography to consider the connections between
geographies of domination and black womens geographies. By looking to the history and legacy of
slavery, as well as more contemporary processes of racist domination in North America, she shows how
black women negotiate their identities and their connections to space and place.

Mott, Carrie, and Susan M. Roberts. Not Everyone Has (the) Balls: Urban Exploration and the Persistence
of Masculinist Geography. Antipode 46.1 (2014): 229245.
Mott and Roberts critique both scholarly and popular portrayals of the recreational practice of urban
exploration. They argue that urban explorers, both within and outside of academia, replicate the archetypal
image of a universalized male exploring subject who is implicitly male, heteronormative, able-bodied, and
white, despite claims that urban exploration constitutes a radical reappropriation of urban space.

Pulido, Laura. Reflections on a White Discipline. The Professional Geographer 54.1 (2002): 4250.
Pulido uses an approach that is partially autobiographical in this essay, reflecting on her own challenging
experiences as a Chicana in geography. She considers the ways that geographys engagement with
racialized phenomena has been problematically impacted by the whiteness of the discipline.

Sharp, Joanne. Geography and Gender: What Belongs to Feminist Geography? Emotion, Power and
Change. Progress in Human Geography 33.1 (2009): 7480.
Through this progress report, Sharp discusses the relationship between feminist and cultural geographies,
concluding that their differences lie in feminisms emphasis upon emotion and political action.

Silvey, Rachel. Power, Difference and Mobility: Feminist Advances in Migration Studies. Progress in
Human Geography 28.4 (2004): 490506.

In this article, Silvey provides an overview of feminist geographies of migration, in particular those that
consider the politics of scale, mobility, and identity. She emphasizes that migration is an embodied
experience of space and place that, consequently, holds much potential for feminist geographers.

Bodies and Embodiment

An appreciation for the importance of bodies and embodiment is one of the most significant contributions of
feminist geography. We are embodied beings, and our participation in the world around us occurs through our
bodies. As such, it matters how the body is implicated in socio-spatial phenomena, and considerations of how bodies
are differently interpellated is an important aspect of individual identities. Nast and Pile 1998 and Butler and Parr
1999, two edited collections, are perhaps the earliest works to bring together embodiment and spatial phenomena.
Additionally, scholarship has considered the theoretical dimensions of embodiment through reviews of relevant
literature, as in Longhurst 2001, Price 2010, Simonsen 2013, and Longhurst and Johnston 2014. A recent turn within
embodiment literature finds work emerging that addresses fatness and obesity, to consider the ways differently sized
bodies are implicated in social space, such as in Longhurst 2005, Guthman 2011, Guthman 2014, and Colls and
Evans 2013. Guthman, in particular has written about the dynamics of race and class at play in obesity politics, and
how fatness relates to environmental toxicity. In addition, there are many empirical studies addressing embodiment
through research, such as England 2006, Lane 2014, and Waitt 2014.

Butler, Ruth, and Hester Parr, eds. Mind and Body Spaces: New Geographies of Illness, Impairment, and
Disability. London: Routledge, 1999.
This edited collection of essays covers geographies of mental and physical health, and (dis)ability studies.
The volume contains essays that address theoretical conceptions of ability and health, as well as empirical
research.

Colls, Rachel, and Bethan Evans. Making Space for Fat Bodies? A Critical Account of the Obesogenic
Environment. Progress in Human Geography (Online First, 30 August 2013).
Colls and Evans situate geographic studies of fatness within the larger context of obesogenic environments,
the social environment that problematizes fat bodies. Specifically, they highlight the fact that some
scholarly approaches treat the obese body as fundamentally diseased, while others challenge the notion that
significant linkages can be found between overall health and body size. Available online by subscription.

England, Marcia. Breached Bodies and Home Invasions: Horrific Representations of the Feminized Body
and Home. Gender, Place and Culture 13.4 (2006): 353363.
England approaches gendered conceptions of home and the feminized female body though the horror film
genre. By doing so, she shows the ways that horror films serve as representations of idealized social norms
about home and female bodies.

Guthman, Julie. Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011.
Guthman considers issues of privilege and marginalization within alternative food movements. She argues
that, while alternative food movements do counter some the problems with large-scale, industrialized
agriculture, they do so in a way that is inaccessible to people in poverty. She questions some of the
prevailing wisdom of obesity and alternative food movements, incorporating research on the ways that
obesity is connected to environmental toxins and poverty.

Guthman, Julie. Doing Justice to Bodies? Reflections of Food Justice, Race, and Biology. Antipode 46.5
(2014): 11531171.

In this article, Guthman looks to race and obesity within food justice movements. She considers how we
might more effectively discuss the ways differently racialized bodies connect to fatness, highlighting the
difficulty inherent in such conversations due to oppressive legacies of scientific racism.

Lane, Rebecca. Healthy Discretion? Breastfeeding and the Mutual Maintenance of Motherhood and Public
Space. Gender, Place and Culture 21.2 (2014): 195210.
Lane considers debates that arose in the aftermath of an incident in 2007, where a nursing mother was
asked to cover herself up in a Kentucky restaurant. She situates this incident amid discourses of good
mothering practices, which are often bound up in the understanding that breast milk is better than formula.

Longhurst, Robyn. Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2001.

In this short book, Longhurst examines geographys treatment of research on bodies. She discusses the
ways that the discipline itself is subject to an uncertain discursive embodiment, and how this disciplinary
uncertainty connects to research on actually existing material bodies, including their leakages, messiness,
and confusing arenas of interiority and exteriority. Further, she shows how masculinist knowledge
production has resulted in an absence of scholarship that deals directly with the material body in
geography.

Longhurst, Robyn. Fat Bodies: Developing Geographical Research Agendas. Progress in Human
Geography 29.3 (2005): 247259.
Through this progress report, Longhurst builds on existing scholarship dealing with embodiment, to include
the ways that fatness plays a part in subjectivity. She examines discourses surrounding fatness within both
geography and popular culture, concluding by suggesting ways that geographers could incorporate fatness
into studies of embodiment.

Longhurst, Robyn, and Linda Johnston. Bodies, Gender, Place and Culture: 21 Years On. Gender, Place
and Culture 21.3 (2014): 267278.
In this useful progress report, Longhurst and Johnston discuss developments in embodiment research
published in Gender, Place and Culture. They consider ways that research on the body connects to an
overall displacement of masculinism within the discipline as a whole.

Nast, Heidi J., and Steve Pile, eds. Places through the Body. London: Routledge, 1998. 322 p.
This edited volume was one of the earliest works explicitly dealing with embodiment to emerge from
geography. Nast and Pile gather together multidisciplinary scholarship that considers the body in multiple
ways, including the materiality and spatiality of bodies, sexualities, notions of urban embodiment, the
(un)embodied Internet, and the linkages between bodies, emotion, and memory.

Price, Patricia L. Race and Ethnicity II: Skin and Other Intimacies. Progress in Human Geography 37.4
(2010): 578586.
Here, Price suggests that geographers should consider the embodiment of race through the materiality of
racialized bodies skin, noting that considerations of skin contribute to more intimate understandings of
processes of racialization.

Simonsen, Kirsten. In Quest of a New Humanism: Embodiment, Experience and Phenomenology as

Critical Geography. Progress in Human Geography 37.1 (2013): 1026.

Building from a re-reading of phenomenology, Simonsen considers the ways in which bodies are lived and
experienced through social life. She argues that, through phenomenology, we might mitigate some of the
challenges presented by posthumanism.

Waitt, Gordon. Bodies that Sweat: The Affective Responses of Young Women in Wollongong, New
South Wales, Australia. Gender, Place and Culture 21.6 (2014): 666682.
Waitt looks to sweat as a way to provide understandings of subjectivity and space. Based on empirical
research carried out with young women in New South Wales, Waitt discusses the ways that sweatiness
connects to feelings of self-disgust and social marginalization, while at the same time acting paradoxically
as an attractor.

Economies
Through economic geographies, we seek to understand the interplay among economic phenomena, space, and place.
By bringing feminism into such studies, geographers are better able to consider the ways that social difference plays
a part in economic processes. In recent years, feminism has been increasingly present in some of geographys classic
subdisciplines, such as in political and cultural geography. However, economic geography could certainly benefit
from increased attention to the value of feminism and feminist approaches. Gibson-Graham 1996 contributed
groundbreaking work through their attempts to bring a more feminist analysis into economic geography, and by
working to reconcile some of the long-standing tensions between feminism and Marxism. Similarly, Roberts 2004 is
an essay by one of the first feminist geographers to argue that gender is important to studies of economic processes,
speaking specifically to a burgeoning literature on globalization that occupied geographers in the late 1990s and
early 2000s. Today we find more empirical work merging feminism with economic geographies, such as McDowell
2009, Maclean 2013, and Pollard 2013. As Fickey and Hanrahan 2014 point out, there is still much room for growth
within economic geographies in terms of the ways scholarship considers the role of gender and social difference
amid relations of power.

Fickey, Amanda, and Kelsey B. Hanrahan. Moving beyond Neverland: Reflecting upon the State of the
Diverse Economies Research Program and the Study of Alternative Economic Spaces. ACME 13.2 (2014):
394403.
Fickey and Hanrahan argue that there is a need for increased attention to alternative economic practices and
additional self-reflection within literatures addressing diverse economies. Specifically, they consider the
significance of gender amid relations of power, as well as the importance of geographic and historical
context for understanding economic processes.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.
Gibson-Graham attempt to reconcile long-standing tensions between feminism and Marxism in geography,
settling upon one point of commonality between themthat capitalism is inherently flawed and should be
replaced by a more just economic system.

Maclean, Kate. Gender, Risk and Micro-financial Subjectivities. Antipode 45.2 (2013): 455473.
This article provides an analysis of gendered paradoxes within neoliberal microfinance. Based on research
on microfinance lending in Bolivia, Maclean considers the ways that risk and responsibility are gendered
by lending agencies, and how those understandings are negotiated by women who participate in
microfinancing programs.

McDowell, Linda. Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities. Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
In this book, McDowell explores exactly which kinds of embodied subject positions do the work of service
economies in the West. Focusing on the social division of labor, she considers how ethnicity, class, gender,
age, weight, and appearance are all implicated in employment in service industries.

Pollard, Jane. Gendering Capital: Financial Crisis, Financialization and (an Agenda for) Economic
Geography. Progress in Human Geography 37.3 (2013): 403423.
Writing in light of financial crises that began in 2008, Pollard suggests that economic theories could benefit
from incorporating some of the work of feminist geographies. She examines the ways that economic
discourses are themselves gendered, and how this manifests in portrayals of the crisis.

Roberts, Susan M. Gendered Globalizations. In Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives
on Political Geography. Edited by Lynn A. Staeheli, Eleonore Kofman, Linda J. Peake, 127140. New
York: Routledge, 2004.
Roberts discusses the gendered dynamics of globalization, writing against dominant masculinist trends that
disregard the significance of gender in globalization literature. By connecting the absence of considerations
of gender to feminine/masculine binaries such as local/global, Roberts argues that these and other binary
paradigms work to privilege a white, masculinist, heteronormative, and Western understanding of
globalization and its effects.

The Political
Political geography was initially slower to embrace feminism than many of geographys subdisciplines, as Brown
and Staeheli 2003 and Sharp 2007 show. However, it is also where we find many of the most exciting and
innovative feminist approaches to geographic research. In the 1980s and early 1990s, to do political geography
through a feminist lens meant that one considered gendered difference through research by including or focusing
exclusively on women in the research population. However, more complex understandings of feminist research
methods began to resonate in political geography as well as within other subdisciplines in the 1990s, and scholarship
began to reflect more intimate scales and everyday experiences, such as in Secor 2001, and as shown through many
of the essays included in Staeheli, et al. 2004. Today, feminist political geography approaches phenomena related to
nation-state processes by considering intimate, personal, and local scales within the context of everyday interactions.
As Hyndman 2004 explains, feminist geopolitics explores the ways that larger, often global, processes are
experienced and embodied in everyday life, such in Fluri 2011, Casolo and Doshi 2013, Choi 2014, and Secor 2007.
Further, within feminist geopolitics we find much focus on the ways that geopolitical processes are intimately
experienced through an expressly emotional geopolitics that seeks to understand how state violence, warfare, and
various other forms of geopolitical wrangling are embodied in everyday life, as shown in Pain and Smith 2008, Pain
and Staeheli 2014, and Smith 2011.

Brown, Michael, and Lynn A. Staeheli. Are We There Yet? Feminist Political Geographies. Gender,
Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 247255.
Brown and Staeheli trace the relationship between feminist and political geographies, focusing specifically
on scholarship appearing in Gender, Place and Culture in the decade prior to 2003. They suggest that
feminist political geographies fall into three categorical approaches: those emphasizing distributional
issues, those exploring antagonistic relationships, and those that examine the constitutive nature of politics.

Casolo, Jennifer, and Sapana Doshi. Domesticated Disposessions? Towards a Transnational Feminist
Geopolitics of Development. Geopolitics 18.4 (2013): 800834.

Casolo and Doshi bring together two very different studies of development, looking to microcredit loans in
rural Guatemala and slum resettlement in Mumbai. Through this article, Casolo and Doshi look to the ways
poor women participate in larger processes of development, within the context of relations of power and
difference.

Choi, Eunyoung. North Korean Womens Narratives of Migration: Challenging Hegemonic Discourses of
Trafficking and Geopolitics. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104.2 (2014): 271279.
Choi discusses migrant women from North Korea who live in China without authorization. Through her
research, Choi argues that international pressures to curb North Korean human trafficking, often rooted in
Western notions of human rights, have led to increasingly oppressive conditions for unauthorized migrant
women living in China.

Dixon, Deborah P., and Sallie A. Marston. Introduction: Feminist Engagements with Geopolitics.
Gender, Place and Culture 18.4 (2011): 445453.
Dixon and Marston introduce a themed issue of Gender, Place and Culture dedicated to the topic of
feminist geopolitics. They discuss how the articles in the collection approach the geopolitical through
relations of power, to show the embodied and personal nature of geopolitical subjectivities.

Dowler, Lorraine. Gender, Militarization and Sovereignty. Geography Compass 6.8 (2012): 490499.
Dowler brings a feminist approach to geopolitical studies of militarization. Through considering the ways
the female body is implicated in processes of militarization and warfare, as well as everyday spaces through
which militarization is made apparent, Dowler presents a productive argument in favor of a more feminist
geopolitics.

Fluri, Jennifer. Armored Peacocks and Proxy Bodies: Gender Geopolitics In Aid/Development Spaces in
Afghanistan. Gender, Place and Culture 18.4 (2011): 519536.
Fluri looks to the ways particular bodies are implicated in spaces of aid and development in Afghanistan.
Specifically, she explores the embodied interactions of international workers with leisure practices in
Kabul.

Hyndman, Jennifer. Mind the Gap: Bridging Feminist and Political Geography through Geopolitics.
Political Geography 23.3 (2004): 307323.
Hyndman argues that a feminist geopolitics is necessary, to facilitate an embodied view of geopolitical and
statist phenomena. She shows the linkages between feminism, political geography, and an explicitly
feminist approach to the geopolitical.

Pain, Rachel, and Susan Smith, eds. Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot, UK, and
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Through this edited collection, Pain and Smith gather essays about the politics of fear. Essays in this
volume cover a wide range of international contexts and explore fears related to rural livelihoods, health,
childhood, immigration, racism, and crime.

Pain, Rachel, and Lynn Staeheli. Introduction: Intimacy-Geopolitics and Violence. Area 46.4 (2014):
344360.

Pain and Staeheli introduce a series of short essays oriented around the intersection of intimacy and the
geopolitical. This intimacy-geopolitics reveals the interplay between the personal, bodily, and sensual, and
larger geopolitical phenomena.

Secor, Anna J. Toward a Feminist Counter-geopolitics: Gender, Space and Islamist Politics in Istanbul.
Space and Polity 5.3 (2001): 191211.
Secor advocates here for a feminist spatialization to the geopolitics of Islam and Islamist politics. She
considers specifically the ways that women in Turkey experience actions of the Islamist Party, as well as
the ways Turkish women act politically.

Secor, Anna J. An Unrecognizable Condition Has Arrived: Law, Violence, and the State of Exception.
In Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence. Edited by Derek Gregory and Allan Pred,
3753. New York: Routledge, 2007.
In this essay, Secor roots her analysis of violence in Turkey within Agambens state of exception. She
focuses specifically on the Kurdish region of southeastern Turkey, an area simultaneously excepted from
the law while it was also interiorized within the Turkish state in the 1990s and early 2000s through the
dynamics of the state of exception.

Sharp, Joanne. Geography and Gender: Finding Feminist Political Geographies. Progress in Human
Geography 31.3 (2007): 381387.
Sharp argues here that the broad subdiscipline of political geography has remained woefully ignorant of
feminist approaches, and that, of all geographys subdisciplines, it is the least influenced by feminism. She
discusses the ways that feminist political geography emphasizes the significance of power relations, and
explores empirical works in feminist political geography.

Smith, Sara. She Says Herself, I Have No Future: Love, Fate and Territory in Leh District, India.
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 18.4 (2011): 455476.
In this piece, Smith looks to the geopolitical climate of a region of Jammu and Kashmir in India, the Leh
District. She discusses the ways that love and desire are negotiated by women in the Leh District, in the
context of an area where interreligious marriage is intensely fraught.

Staeheli, Lynn A., Eleonore Kofman, and Linda Peake, eds. Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist
Perspectives on Political Geography. New York: Routledge, 2004.
This edited volume works to highlight feminist political geography, and to challenge prevalent views from
within political geography that feminism is irrelevant for the subdiscipline. Through a combination of
theoretical and empirical essays, the book covers a wide range of topics from within feminist political
geography.

Williams, Jill, and Vanessa Massaro. Feminist Geopolitics: Unpacking (In)Security, Animating Social
Change. Geopolitics 18.4 (2013): 751758.
Here, Williams and Massaro introduce a special issue of Geopolitics focusing on feminist geopolitics of
securitization. They show that the feminist emphasis on lived, everyday realities and embodied
methodologies has much to offer understandings of larger scale analyses of securitization practices.
Williams and Massaro provide helpful background into the practice of feminist scholarship on the
geopolitical.

Histories
Historical geography is an approach to the ways spatial phenomena were lived and understood by people in the past,
most often through archival research. Within feminist historical geography, we find considerations of how to
approach the historical as a feminist, critiques of masculinist norms within historical geography, as well as feminist
empirical approaches. Domosh 1997, Rose and Ogborn 1998, and Domosh and Morin 2003 assess the state of
historical geography, and argue that a need exists for a feminist approach to historical geography that takes into
account the significance of difference and intimate scales. Morin and Berg 1999 encourage historical geographers to
develop understandings of how various oppressive forces, such as those of imperialism or colonialism, impact our
ability to do historical work. Feminist critiques of historical geography have fallen off in recent years, and today
there is more emphasis on simply doing the work of feminist historical geography. Empirical studies, such as de
Leeuw 2012 and Moore 2013, present feminist historical geography as a way to uncover subaltern voices from the
past, and to highlight the ways that women and other underrepresented populations negotiated structures of power.

Cameron, Laura J. Participation, Archival Activism and Learning to Learn. Journal of Historical
Geography 46.1 (2014): 99101.
Cameron makes a call for a more participatory and activist-centered historical geography, arguing that, for
graduate students in particular, historical geographers are poised to contribute meaningfully to indigenous
communities through archival research.

de Leeuw, Sarah. Alice through the Looking Glass: Emotion, Personal Connection, and Reading Colonials
Archives along the Grain. Journal of Historical Geography 38.3 (2012): 273281.
In this article, de Leeuw discusses the legacy of Alice Ravenhill, a colonial settler in British Columbia who
was an important, though often forgotten, figure in Canadian discourses about indigenous peoples in the
mid-20th century. De Leeuw builds on work attempting to develop understandings of subaltern identities in
historical geographies, as well as emotional geographical work.

Domosh, Mona. With Stout Boots and a Stout Heart: Historical Methodology and Feminist Geography.
In Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology Representation. Edited by John Paul Jones,
Heidi J. Nast, and Susan M. Roberts, 225240. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
Domosh considers dynamics of masculinism at play in historical geographies, and focuses on archetypes of
the exploring subject as someone who is typically constructed as implicitly white, male, heteronormative,
and able-bodied.

Domosh, Mona, and Karen M. Morin. Travels with Feminist Historical Geography. Gender Place and
Culture 10.3 (2003): 257264.
In this article, Domosh and Morin discuss the relationship between feminist and historical geography to
show the potential for historical geography to benefit from a feminist approach. They argue that feminists
emphasis on different experiences of space and place offer much to historical geographys consideration of
temporal change.

Moore, Francesca. Governmentality and the Maternal Body: Infant Mortality in Early Twentieth-Century
Lancashire. Journal of Historical Geography 39.1 (2013): 5468.
This empirical piece explores the governance of women in Lancashire at the turn of the 20th century,
through their status as mothers responsible for infant mortality or survival. Using Foucaults notion of
governmentality, Moore shows the importance of understanding the very different ways that
governmentalism plays out in the lives of men and women.

Morin, Karen M., and Lawrence D. Berg. Emplacing Current Trends in Feminist Historical Geography.
Gender, Place and Culture 6.4 (1999): 311320.
This article is an assessment of developments within feminist historical geography in the previous decade.
Morin and Berg discuss the role that understandings of colonialism, imperialism, and cultural politics play
in the practice of Anglophone historical geography.

Rose, Gillian, and Miles Ogborn. Feminism and Historical Geography. Journal of Historical Geography
14.4 (1998): 405409.
This piece argues for increased awareness of feminist approaches among historical geographers, and
discusses the deeper political ramifications inherent in the exclusion of women as the subjects of historical
geographical work.

Emotional Geographies
In recent years, there has been an emotional turn in geography as feminist geographers, often building on research
emerging from the humanities, have begun to highlight the significance of the emotional dimensions of lived
experiences of space and place. As Anderson and Smith 2001 argue, the ways geographic research is gendered have
led to a phenomenon where scholarship addressing the significance of the emotional is frequently disregarded in
favor of more masculinist approaches. Emotional geographies are often found through other subdisciplines, and the
emotional has become particularly relevant in feminist geopolitical studies. However, there is also scholarship that
takes the emotional dimension as the foundation of scholarship. Davidson, et al. 2005, an edited collection, brings
together theoretical and empirical approaches to emotion. Pain 2009 argues the need for an expressly emotional
geopolitics that considers the lived and felt dimensions of statist phenomena. In that same vein, Wright 2010 and
Marshall 2013 consider the ways that an emotional geopolitics can be used to better understand experiences of
trauma, and to approach the possibilities for social justice amid violence circumstances.

Anderson, Kay, and Susan J. Smith. Editorial: Emotional Geographies. Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 26.1 (2001): 710.
In one of the earliest articles to address the significance of the emotional for wider geographic scholarship,
Anderson and Smith demonstrate that emotion has taken a backseat in geographies seeking to be more
relevant to public policy debates, largely due to the gendered nature of research addressing emotion.

Davidson, Joyce, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, eds. Emotional Geographies. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2005.
This edited volume works to explore the socio-spatial dimensions of emotion. The book is organized
around three major themes: the location of emotion, the relationality of emotion, and representations of
emotion. Throughout each of these three sections are theoretical and empirical pieces on topics such as the
emotionality of research, aging, grief, touch, and ecology.

Marshall, D. J. All the Beautiful Things: Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian Childhood.
Space and Polity 17.1 (2013): 5373.
In this article, Marshall considers the relationship between trauma and childhood in a West Bank refugee
camp. Through Rancires politics of aesthetics, Marshall argues that children create spaces of everyday
beauty that serve to interrupt discourses of trauma as discursively constructed by humanitarian and
development organizations.

Pain, Rachel. Globalized Fear? Towards an Emotional Geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography 33.4
(2009): 466486.
In this article, Pain considers the ways a metanarrative of fear has been mobilized in discourses of national
security, through both popular and academic sources. She argues that this understanding of fear does not
adequately address the ways that fear is experienced in everyday life, through more intimate scales.

Wright, Melissa W. Geography and Gender: Feminism and a Feeling of Justice. Progress in Human
Geography 34.6 (2010): 818827.
Wright explores the relationship between emotion, affect, and political action. In this progress report, she
focuses specifically on scholarship coming from the vantage points of feminist and emotional geographies,
as well as research related to social justice.

Research Methods
As the 1980s and early 1990s brought novel feminist approaches to geography through critical reflection upon the
kinds of research that constituted legitimate geography, feminist geographers were also considering the ways that
ethical feminist work should be carried out. Feminist research methods often include approaches that aim toward
participation from research subjects and increased inclusivity in both research and publishing, as seen in McDowell
1992, Sharp 2005, Pratt 2010, and Nagar 2013. In addition to more inclusive and participatory approaches, feminist
research is quite often self-reflective, and ones own positionality amid relations of power informs how research is
carried out, as well as how scholarship is eventually written up and presented. Such considerations of power and
positionality can be seen in Hyams 2004, Secor 2010, and Faria and Mollett 2014.

Bracken, Louise, and Emma Mawdsley. Muddy Glee: Rounding Out the Picture of Women and Physical
Geography Fieldwork. Area 36.3 (2004): 280286.
Here, Bracken and Mawdsley explore feminist aspects of fieldwork in physical geography, in response to
widespread critiques that physical geography is primarily a masculinist field. By doing so, the authors
contribute the views of female physical geographers to debates circulating in human geography.

Faria, Caroline, and Sharlene Mollett. Critical Feminist Reflexivity and the Politics of Whiteness in the
Field. Gender, Place and Culture (27 May 2014).
Building on Kobayashis earlier work on the politics of race in fieldwork, Faria and Mollett consider the
emotional aspect of self-reflection through research. Through considering their own fieldwork experiences
in Sudan and Honduras, the authors show that whiteness engenders contradictory feelings among research
participantsincluding awe, suspicion, disdain, or trust. Available online by subscription or purchase.

Hyams, Melissa. Hearing Girls Silences: Thoughts on the Politics and Practices of a Feminist Method of
Group Discussion. Gender, Place and Culture 11.1 (2004): 105119.
In this article, Hyams considers dynamics of power inherent in social science research. She challenges the
understanding that group discussions with research participants are a way to mitigate challenging power
dynamics, showing that such a method does not allow for the revelations that silence from research
participants can provide.

McDowell, Linda. Doing Gender: Feminism, Feminists and Research Methods in Human Geography.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geography 17.4 (1992): 399416.

McDowell offers an introduction to practical and theoretical concerns for geographers who want to explore
feminist topics and methodologies through their research.

Moss, Pamela, ed. Feminist Geography in Practice: Research and Methods. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
This edited volume brings together essays from a variety of feminist geographers, who each address a
different element of the practical aspects of feminist methodologies.

Nagar, Richa. Storytelling and Co-authorship in Feminist Alliance Work: Reflections from a Journey.
Gender, Place and Culture 20.1 (2013): 118.
Nagar draws on sixteen years of research conducted with activists in India, and reflects upon her
experiences co-authoring stories with her research subjects, as well as with other US-based academics.
Through her discussion of co-authorship, she considers processes of labor, risks, possibilities, and
assumptions that take place through such work.

Pratt, Geraldine. Collaboration as Feminist Strategy. Gender, Place and Culture 17.1 (2010): 4348.
This article approaches the topic of collaboration, as a specifically feminist approach to doing the work of
geography. Pratt reflects on her experience working collaboratively with Susan Hanson, as well as the
research assistants who contributed to their scholarship along the way.

Secor, Anna J. Social Surveys, Interviews, and Focus Groups. In Research Methods in Geography.
Edited by Basil Gomez and John Paul Jones, 194205. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
This essay is a chapter in an edited volume about various geographical research methods. Secor discusses
the talking methodsinterviews, focus groups, and surveysmethods through which participants are
somehow able to represent themselves and their beliefs about a given situation. The chapter includes focus
boxes where key information is made very accessible and easy to find.

Sharp, Joanne. Geography and Gender: Feminist Methodologies in Collaboration and in the Field.
Progress in Human Geography 29.3 (2005): 304309.
Sharp discusses methodological approaches within feminist geography and the ways that feminist
methodologies have evolved as feminist geography has become more accepted and widespread. She
suggests that we might deepen our commitment to critical feminism within geographical research through
collaboration with research subjects throughout the research process.

Pedagogies
Considerations of pedagogy in geography have benefitted considerably from feminist approaches that encourage
heightened awareness of social difference and embodied experience, both in terms of the topics under study in
geography courses, as well as in how we understand students experiences of the classroom itself as a site that
replicates problematic power dynamics. While not a geographer, bell hooks has been hugely influential to feminist
and other critical pedagogies in geography (see hooks 1994). Literatures of feminist pedagogies in geography
include reflective pieces, through which scholars consider what it means to teach as a feminist, as in Longhurst
2011, as well as in work presenting examples of feminist pedagogical approaches, such as Fluri and Trauger 2011
and Tang 2013.

Fluri, Jennifer L., and Amy Trauger. The Corporeal Marker Project (CMP): Teaching About Bodily
Difference, Identity and Place Through Experience. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 35.4
(2011): 551563.

Fluri and Trauger discuss an exercise designed to give students a temporary experience of marginality.
They show how the Corporeal Marker Project is a way to teach about everyday experiences of difference,
while at the same time ensuring that students approach the exercise with much critical and sensitive
reflection about their positionality and the significance of Othering oneself.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Here, hooks brings feminism and antiracism together with Freires critical pedagogy to discuss the potential
for classrooms to be spaces of radical transformation and growth. She shares her insights and strategies for
radical classroom pedagogies, arguing that the experience of pleasure in the classroom, for teachers and
students, is an act of political resistance.

Longhurst, Robyn. Teaching Gender Geography in Aotearoa New Zealand. International Research in
geographical and Environmental Education 20.3 (2011): 179183.
Focusing on the place of feminism in geographic education in New Zealand, Longhurst shows that while
some departments do offer studies of feminist geography, there is much room for growth. She argues that
institutions with more substantial histories of radical scholarship tend to be more welcoming to feminist
academics.

Tang, Wen-hui Anna. Constructing and Practicing Feminist Pedagogy in Taiwan Using a Field Study of
the Twenty-Five Ladies Tomb. Gender, Place and Culture 20.6 (2013): 811826.
Tang discusses the site of a tomb commemorating a 1973 shipwreck in Taiwan that resulted in the deaths of
twenty-five unmarried young women. Tang describes her efforts to integrate a participatory pedagogical
approach into a gender studies course, through which she has students visit the tomb while learning about
its history.