Feminist Transformations of

Political Geography

Eleonore Kofman

INTRODUCTION

A vibrant and burgeoning contribution by femi- nist scholars to political geography (Brown and
Staeheli, 2003; Staeheli et al., 2004;1 Sharp,

2003a, 2003b), two successive presentations at the Political Geography lecture of the Association of
American Geographers in 2003 (Marston, 2004) and 2004 (Smith, 2005b) by geographers strongly
influenced by feminism, and the inclusion of a section on state/nation in a recent Companion to
Feminist Geography (Nelson and Saeger, 2005), all these developments would seem to augur well for
closer intellectual interaction between femi- nist and political geographies. Among other things they
seem to have begun to lay the basis of a closer engagement between the two fields. Yet this is in
contrast to a more pessimistic evaluation of their interaction that emerged from a review of feminist
and political geography journals and a survey of feminist scholars. Staeheli (2001) found that feminist
political geography continued to be marginal in both feminist geography and political geography taken
separately, and that the differ- ences in the ways in which the two sub-disciplines are perceived and
practised are daunting. Further- more, this situation prevailed after over a decade during which
feminist geographers had made sub- stantial, but largely unacknowledged, contributions in arguing for
the significance of gender relations in shaping political activity and in rethinking the notion and
boundaries of the political.

As Peter Taylor (2000) had commented, ‘the sub-discipline has still to meet the challenge of feminist
geography whose concerns for power in

place and space from a gender perspective have only appeared intermittently in contemporary polit-
ical geography’. Whilst this is a step forward from its total absence in the research agenda set out in
the first issue of the journal Political Geography Quarterly in 1982, one might want to ask why feminist
analyses continue to be so marginal com- pared to their influence in other areas of geography (Kofman,
1994; Staeheli, 2001). In response to Stanley Waterman’s (1998) analysis of the contents of the journal,
and the degree to which it reflects the sub-discipline, Janet Kodras (1999: 387) notes that ‘it is not
typically the place to find theoreti- cal leaps in feminism, anti-racism and sexuality and other facets of
political identity’. More tren- chantly, Michael Dear’ commented that there is a lack of theoretical
interrogation and ‘one would be hard-pressed to know from the pages of the journal, exactly what
political geographers think about feminist theory, postcolonialism …’. This failure to engage with
feminist theorizations is not confined to journals such as Political Geography, Space and Polity and
Geopolitics. Key texts at best briefly mention feminism without asking what it actually has contributed
(Agnew, 2002) or treat it as a social movement but not a mode of analysis (Painter, 1995). In other
instances, gender is located in a specific site such as the household2 (Taylor and Flint, 2000), a
formulation that reproduces the private/public divide, and what a feminist political geography has
striven to disrupt. In some cases, gender relations are taken into account before retreating to business
as usual, as has happened in much critical geopolitics (O’ Tuathail, 1996a,

1996b).

Furthermore, since the 1980s feminists have focused on developments that are only now being
addressed more comprehensively in political geography. These include the meaning of the polit- ical,
a term few political geographers have exam- ined critically (Kofman, 1994: 430; Agnew, 2002:

20). This is beginning to change with the recent questioning of what the political (Dikeç, 2005) means,
how space is central to the negotiation of rights, privileges, and obligations (Isin, 2002; Drummond and
Peake 2005) and the various dis- cussions of how the political is used by political geographers (Agnew,
2003; Cox and Low, 2003). But prior to this, it was feminists who had been at the forefront in
challenging the concept of the political and its constitution in different sites, spaces and scales, and
especially the demarcation between the public and private that underpins so much political theory.
Likewise it is as a result of feminist influence that recent concern with scale has emphasised smaller
units such as the body, household and localities and the role of consump- tion and reproduction
(Staeheli, 1994; Marston,

2000; Hyndman, 2001; England, 2003) rather than a preoccupation with production and global and
scalar hierarchies (Taylor, 1982; Brenner, 2001).

Feminists have also been concerned with epis- temological issues (Staeheli and Kofman, 2004) and, in
particular, the role of situated knowledges and standpoints (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 2001). This is in
contrast to disembodied views from nowhere usually presented as universal visions in much of political
geography. An interest in research methods (Sharp, 2004) and in how political prac- tices are enacted
has also characterized feminist political geography. However, as a result of the slowness with which
these feminist insights have been absorbed into political geography, many fem- inist geographers have
looked elsewhere for an understanding into the relationship between space and politics. Indeed, in
the survey conducted by Lynn Staeheli (2001), a number of the respondents considered that feminist
theory and feminist politi- cal writings (Martin, 2004), such as those of Judith Butler (1990), Butler and
Scott (1992), Nancy Fraser (1989), Carol Pateman (1988) and Iris Marion Young (1990), were a more
useful way into political geography than the writings of mainstream political geographers. Hence
Hyndman’s (2004:

308) comment that the intersections between fem- inist and political geographies are relatively few.

The discussion about the relationship between feminism and political geography is relatively recent,
but this is at least an advance on the exclusion of women from the creation of polit- ical geography as
knowledge and practice until the 1970s and the marginalization of feminist perspectives until the
1990s. As a subject domi- nated by its founding fathers, women nevertheless played a part in the
production and presentation of
knowledge, for example in their role as editors of geographical journals. Though usually not speci-
fically identified as political geographers, some of them wrote on political topics. A clearer interest in
the political domain by feminist geographers can be traced to the emergence of the new radical
geography of the 1970s, yet here too their contri- bution has not been considered an integral element
of it (Taylor, 2003). Hence in this chapter I start by casting a backward look at the earlier exclu- sion of
women and outlining some of the initial feminist critiques of political geography. Second, I turn to the
emergence and development of gen- dered agendas in the 1990s and explore some of the reasons for
the continuing masculinity of political geography. I proffer some answers to the contin- uing reluctance
to acknowledge the relevance of feminist perspectives and their potential for offer- ing new ways of
approaching political geographies. Finally, I suggest some areas where feminist and political
geographers have much to say to each other, though they often do not recognize it.

FOUNDING FATHERS AND EXCLUSION FROM THE POLITICAL

The emergence of political geography as a dis- cipline came under the aegis of those we know as the
founding ‘fathers’ and was hegemonically masculine (Connell, 1987: 183). This is in the sense that it
was based on a ‘strong and dominant masculinity constructed in relation to subordi- nated
masculinities and women’. The creation of geographical knowledge was conducted without women,
who were officially excluded from orga- nized and funded explorations and from the new institutional
bodies (Domosh, 1991), especially from metropolitan geographical societies such as the Royal
Geographical Society (until 1913) and the Association of American Geographers. They therefore had
to set up their own organisations, such as the Washington-based Society of Women Geographers in
1925, to enable them to undertake fieldwork (Rossler, 1996).

Though thinly represented at the pinnacle as intellectuals of statecraft, women were clearly involved
in the production and reproduction of political geography as a set of power-imbued social practices.
Feminist scholars of international poli- tics have demonstrated the role of the support cast and those
who have enabled the key processes behind the scenes to occur – the migrant work- ers, the nurses,
the military administrators and the sex workers (Enloe, 1989). So too do we have to consider the
handmaidens3 whose bodies are usually consigned to the zones of non-belonging (Sylvester, 1998)
but who ensure the smooth run- ning of the corridors of power. This alternative

analysis leaves us, however, with a polarized sce- nario in the production of political geography,
omitting the middle echelons of professionals and administrators in which women have been promi-
nent for some time. As with other professional hierarchies, women often ran the bureaucratic
apparatuses as its administrators. In the US, a number of them worked in government agen- cies
that are normally associated with statecraft, security, and foreign policy, such as the CIA, the Office
of Strategic Services (OSS), and the State Department. For example, Sophia Saucer- man was for years
at the US Department of State and Betty Didcoct Burrill was Head of the Latin American section at the
CIA (Monk, 2003).4 Lois Olson started during the Second World War at the OSS in London, Washington,
and Paris and, when the CIA was founded in 1947, served as its Chief Geographical Editor until her
retirement in 1962. They, and many others, were involved in the compilation of politically pertinent
facts, and in the production and presentation of knowl- edge about places and peoples in the world
(Thrift,

2000).

Some women did act as editors of journals and therefore made decisions about how geo- graphical
knowledge was presented and repro- duced (Monk, 2003). Gladys Wrigley, for example, was the
editor of the Geographical Review (from

1915 to 1949) in the US and worked closely with Isaiah Bowman, the Director of the Ameri- can
Geographical Society, and probably the most prominent of all American political geographers (Smith,
2003). In the UK, too, women were admit- ted to non-metropolitan geographical societies, and were
prominent in the Scottish geographical world. Marion Newbigin became assistant editor of the Scottish
Geographical Magazine from 1902 and then editor until her death in 1934. She had an enormous
influence on the journal and also wrote numerous articles and books (Maddrell, 1997) and was
followed by Harriet Wanklyn, who wrote a widely acknowledged biography of Friedrich Ratzel in
1961 and was a specialist at Cambridge University on Eastern Europe (1941, 1954). We need therefore
to broaden our understanding of knowledge creation beyond the great male thinkers to the
institutional sites and networks in which that knowledge has been and continues to be produced.5

It took a number of decades before the his- tory of geography, geopolitics, and imperialism would be
brought under critical scrutiny in the

1970s (Hudson, 1977). At the same time, the role of women and patriarchal relations in geography
began to receive attention. In the 1970s, Antipode, the journal of radical geography, had published a
wide range of articles on topics that today would be recognised as political geography: the state,
anarchist movements in Spain, nineteenth-century

anarchist geographers – Kropotkin and Reclus – American socialism and women. Even before women’s
groups in geography were established in the UK and North America, a special issue of Antipode in 1974
addressed the issue of women (Kofman, 2005). Hayford (1974) focused on the shift of political power
under capitalism from the household to the state and the consequent loss of power for women.
Helms (1974) wrote on the marginalization of older women. In gen- eral, much early feminist writing,
especially in the UK, stemmed from socialist feminists who were active in social and urban geography
study groups, which gave them support in the setting up of a Women and Geography Study Group
in 1982.

In contrast, political geography, which also established its institutional credentials in 1982, through the
formation of the Political Geography Study Group in the UK, the launch of Political Geography
Quarterly (jointly edited in the UK and US), and the setting up of the World Political Map Working Party
(International Geographical Union), was very masculine in its outlook and composi- tion. Political
Geography Quarterly, later to be known simply as Political Geography, drew up a research agenda in
which the only woman cited was Cynthia Cockburn (1977). This was for her book on the Local State.
Intellectually the blindness to gendered dimensions of political issues meant that for a small number
of feminist geographers, their feminist and political research interests within the discipline were kept
separate.6 Some of the reasons for the lack of engagement at this time were probably the emphasis
on traditional topics and approaches, the perceived masculinity of the sub-discipline and the lack of
interest in what pol- itics meant. There were, nonetheless, some critical voices for whom the amalgam
of the old and the new in political geography consisted of ‘capricious eclecticism’ and presented a
‘profoundly traditional and anti-theoretical view of the social process’ (Dear, 1982).

The failure to address sexist bias in the research agenda drew a sharp comment from Drake and Horton
(1983). They pointed out how knowledge was a social creation that has produced, in the case of
political geography, a male interpretation of the organization of political space and one that often
projects the assumption that women are ‘passive and do not possess political identity’. For them,

‘political geography would be far richer as a dis- cipline if it addressed the issue of male bias in all its
aspects and ramifications’. The one area in which there was some engagement between femi- nist and
political perspectives was in urban political geography. Here, feminist inquiries into the politi- cal asked
what would happen to our understanding of urban politics if it was assumed that women were as
interested in and as competent to exercise

political power as men. It was argued that gender relations in urban political geography were invisi-
ble because of our initial conceptualization of terms such as collective consumption (Peake, 1986) and
that we had to challenge the notion that politics is exclusively undertaken as a public activity within
the state arena. Political discourse could be under- stood as the search for new identities, and identity
is shaped by what we can do and how others act towards us. Hence masculinity and femininity are
constituted through the meanings we ascribe to these identities and how these meanings are forged
through struggles.

EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF GENDERED AGENDAS

The first comprehensive attempt to gender the agenda took a few years to emerge. In 1990, Kofman
and Peake sought to expose the vanish- ing acts and tricks of the trade (Thiele, 1986) common in
political theory and political geogra- phy. In doing this, they turned to developments in feminist
political science (political participation, elections) and political theory – work that, among other things,
challenged the dichotomy of the pub- lic and private. This distinction, it was argued, had formed the
basis of the social and political con- tract underpinning political life, on the one hand, denying
rationality to women, and thus the right to participate in the public sphere, and on the other, relegating
their bodies to the private sphere (Pateman, 1988). One of the key objectives of this exploratory
agenda was to demonstrate how gen- der relations and issues could be incorporated into mainstream
political geography – the local and national state, urban politics, and service provision, and
international politics and conflicts – as well as opening up new areas, such as gay involvement in urban
land markets (Knopp, 1990), the participa- tion of Australian aboriginal women (Gayle, 1990), and the
intersection of race, class, and gender in Brazilian women’s lives (Alves Calio, 1990). The starting point
was to interrogate the meaning of the political so as to uncouple it from particular institutions and
places. In this way it could be con- trasted with mainstream political geography, which continued to
avoid the study of what constitutes the political and lacked normative theories, a cri- tique that was
also made by some minority voices (Logan, 1978; Dear, 1982, 1999; Howell, 1994).

In the following decade, feminists did not generally engage with topics on the mainstream agenda.
Electoral geography had traditionally been a major theme, but there continue to be few femi- nist
studies (but see Webster, 2000; Secor, 2004; Cupple and Larios, 2005). Much more surpris- ingly,
interest in the state, the prime topic of

the 1980s, has ebbed and flowed (Mountz, 2004). Feminists had for long challenged the gender-
neutral character of the state (Kofman and Peake,

1990; Chouinard, 2004: 229), but it was not until the 1980s that radical feminists, such as Cather- ine
MacKinnon (1989), argued that the state was systemically male in its interests and formally through
its judicial procedures. Feminist geogra- phers drew primarily from Marxist and socialist feminist
perspectives, conceptualising the state within the wider dynamics of a capitalist society and as a
terrain of struggle over class and gender inequalities (Chouinard and Fincher, 1987).

The most sophisticated and wide-ranging anal- ysis of the state as a gendered institution and
constellation of practices was developed by Connell (1990), who emphasised the state as pro- cess
rather than thing and the necessity of an insti- tutional analysis that makes regulation possible. The
state, as the central organizing power of gen- der relations, has a specific gender regime, which can be
defined ‘as the historically produced state of play in gender relations within an institution which can
be analyzed by taking a structural inventory’. The three key components involved a gender divi- sion
of labour, a structure of power and a structure of cathexis or the gender patterning of emotional
attachments. Though the interests that interact with the state are not fixed, the state is involved in the
overall patterning of the gender order.

However, at more or less the same time, post-structuralist and postmodernist critiques were
arguing against theorising the state (Kofman, 1993; Chouniard, 2004), contending that we should
rather be concerned with mechanisms of power and the diverse and local sites of women’s oppression.
The state was not monolithic and homogeneous but was fragmented, contradictory, and inconsis- tent.
Pringle and Watson (1992), for example, viewed the state as disconnected and erratic, a site where
interests are constantly changing, con- structed historically, and manifested in the mean- ings arrived
at through discursive practices and strategies. Despite these critiques, some scholars felt that the state
should not be rejected altogether because it highlighted ‘particular linkages, con- nections, and
intensifications’ and it does appear to act through individual institutions and as over- all entity (Cooper,
1993: 258–9). It remains the most organized institution in society (Knuttila and Kubik, 2000) and is a
site of co-ordination and the playing out of diverse and often opposing strate- gies, with which
feminists interact in different ways and with varying outcomes (Chappell, 2000). Similarly, Jessop
(2001) has recently applied his strategic relational analysis of the state to the ‘man- ner in which the
state transforms, maintains, and reproduces modes of domination (or institution- ally and discursively
materialised, asymmetrically structured power relations) between men and
women’. The state itself is seen as an ensemble of power centres that offers unequal chances to
different forces within and outside the state to act for different political purposes. There is no single
form of masculinity and femininity, whilst gen- der regimes intersect with class, nation, ethnicity, and
‘race’.

Yet despite these more considered reflections on gender regimes, sexuality and governance, femi- nist
geographers did not pursue theorizations of the state. To some extent this was partly due to the shift
of attention to the differential effects of state regulation, changing welfare regimes and the disci-
plining of subjects (Cope, 1997). Thus the absence of new thinking on state theorization more gener-
ally led Janet Kodras (1999) to conclude at the end of the 1990s that there was a dearth of cutting-
edge theoretical treatments of the state.

In the past few years, interest has been revived among political and feminist geographers in the state
(Flint, 2003), its multiple axes of differentia- tion (Chouinard, 2004) and ‘the role of patriarchy,
difference and identity within state processes and structures, including how government institutions
and practices are produced and contested in con- crete ways’ (Desbiens et al., 2004). Many of the
papers published in the special issue of Political Geography entitled ‘Reconceptualising the state from
the margins of political geography’, focused on the power of the state. This included ethno- graphic
studies of the mundane practices of bureau- cracies (Mountz, 2004), which reflects a concern for the
statization of everyday life or the prosaic state (Painter, 2005), and the interpenetration of different
spheres of the state, civil society, and the family. In particular, the state reveals its mascu- line practices
in its relationship to the reproductive arena (Connell, 1995), which is devalued compared to productive
activities.

Nonetheless, despite the waning of direct inter- est in the state in the 1990s, engagement with it did
not entirely disappear; it was present more obliquely through studies of gendered citizenship and
inequalities of access to economic and social resources and political participation (Walby, 1994). Until
more recently, citizenship has been identified with membership of a national community and its
attendant rights and obligations. There is a long- standing critique of the constitution of the Western
model of citizenship. This is based on the pre- sumed independence of the individual embodying male
norms and attributes (Pateman, 1989). This would include the worker acting as the breadwinner for
his dependants and in possession of his body, as well as the soldier prepared to sacrifice him- self for
his country (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Though gender divisions in relation to the different dimen- sions of
citizenship are now less pronounced, as women have entered formal employment, the mil- itary and
the public sphere, these differences have

certainly not disappeared. And within the broader literature on inequalities and citizenship, feminist
geographers have tended to focus on empowering women and spaces of citizenship at the local level
(Staeheli and Cope, 1994; Fincher and Panelli,

2001) with some studies of the national construc- tion of citizenship (Marston, 1990) and the variable
geometry of citizenship in Europe (Kofman, 1995). Although most studies have focused on Western
states with strong welfare provision, a few stud- ies have looked at citizenship practices in Third World
states such as McEwan (2000) on South Africa, Nelson (2004) on Mexico and Peake and Trotz (1999)
on Guyana.

An underlying theme of feminist studies of citi- zenship is the distinction and relationship between
public and private spaces and how different activ- ities are associated with distinct types of space
(Staeheli, 1996; Fincher, 2004). In the past decade, thinking about the relationship between the pri-
vate and the public has moved from conceiving it as a continuum to conceptualising it as the mutual
constitution of a multiplicity of spaces whose use depends on context (Fincher, 2004). Staeheli (1996)
has argued that the spaces used in politics are constructed according to ideas of both publicity and
privacy. Moreover, both terms have multiple meanings. One of the common meanings of the public,
derived from Habermas (1989), is a space accessible to all, where citizens can discuss their common
affairs. In reality, different interpre- tations and ways of using public spaces circulate to include what
Nancy Fraser (1990) has termed subaltern counter-publics in which members of marginalized social
groups can articulate interests and strategies. ‘Private’, on the other hand, usu- ally connotes a space,
often associated with the home and the domestic, in which particular, rather than general, interests
are addressed, the irrational and emotional expressed, and from which outsiders can be excluded.

Drawing on Staeheli, Anderson and Jacobs (1999) provided a concrete instance of the per- meability
of different types of spaces by showing how women activists in the 1970s constituted a movement to
fight against the demolition by the state and big developers of areas of inner Sydney. The women
residents occupied a counter or alter- native public sphere rather than being situated in the privacy of
their homes. Into this public arena, they brought feelings and emotions associated with women and
domesticity, such as care, which also may be expressed in public and by public agen- cies (Fincher,
2004: 53). The strategic planning of actions in the public sphere may also of course take place in the
proverbial kitchen (Staeheli, 1996). Hence neither public nor private spaces can be reduced to specified
types of actions and emo- tional responses. Furthermore, the significance of each spatial term varies
across social locations

and identities, demanding the recognition of the limits of universalizing geographies (Pratt, 2004). So
whilst the private may be viewed suspiciously by white middle-class women as depoliticizing their
actions, for many black women privacy may represent a positive claim (Williams, 1991).

Discussions about the multiple meanings and spaces of public and private are contributing to a broader
debate about the relationship of the differ- ent spheres of the state, market, and civil society, which
cannot be as clearly demarcated as a lot of research seems to have assumed (Fincher, 2004; Painter,
2005). These sentiments strongly echo those of Susan Smith (2005a: 1–2) in her coun- sel to consider
the ‘persistent divide between states which manage politics, markets which perform the economy,
and caring communities whose work is anchored in the spaces of the home’. In an era when the
principle of competitive individualism that is associated with the market is being increas- ingly
transferred to the operation of the state as part of welfare reforms and state restructuring, we may
well want to transfer notions of care, applied primarily to personal relations, to the impersonal world
of social policy as well as the market.
Staeheli and Brown (2003) have also argued that critiques of neo-liberal welfare reform do not
question the liberal political subject – atomized, rational and the bearer of rights in a pre-political zone,
or the kind of person who exemplifies bour- geois masculinity (Hooper, 1999). They contend that a
feminist ethics of care highlights the com- plex web of social relationships that bind people together
in space and time and construct politi- cal subjects. Smith, Staeheli, and Brown all draw upon the
extension to non-familial spheres of an ethics and politics of care that has been advo- cated by feminist
political theorists (Tronto, 1993; Sevenhuijsen, 1998, 2000) and by social policy scholars (Daly and
Lewis, 2000).7 Care of course looms large in the everyday lives of women and its geographies are
generating complex care-giving relationships (Conradson, 2003).

Fisher and Tronto (1990: 40) define care as

‘species activities that include everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so
that we can live in it as well as possible. The world includes our bodies, ourselves and our envi-
ronment’. Care as a concrete activity and moral orientation challenges the idea of the indepen- dent
citizen who denies the support received from the caring work of others, or treats dependants as
inferior. Care work is carried out not only in the confines of the home and through intimate rela- tions
but also through intermediate institutions of civil society and the state. However, developing care
based on mutual obligations would demand a transformation of gender relations and policies that
would bring about greater equality between men and women (McDowell, 2004).

Yet at present, care of the self and others has become progressively commodified and global- ized,
resulting in complex global chains of care that can be defined as ‘a series of personal links between
people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring’ (Hochschild, 2000). Within a pro-
foundly unequal global economy, shortages in wel- fare sectors and unmet demand in wealthy
countries in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia draw in large numbers of female migrants to
under- take primarily lesser skilled work, not just in the household but also in state, private and non-
profit- making institutions (Yeates, 2004). This represents the globalisation of social reproduction.
There is not of course a homogeneous incorporation of Third World women but rather a complicated
and dynamic hierarchy shaped by social class, ethnic- ity, and ‘race’ (Andall, 2003). And though the
Third World migrant provides devalued forms of work in the First World, she also transfers emotional
labour, a topic that has received increasing attention in geography (Davidson and Milligan, 2004).

International migration has become a new area for political geography that has been heavily
invested by feminist geographers (Hyndman, 2000; Nagel, 2002; Kofman, 2004; Raghuram, 2004),
including the role of the state in the management of female mobility (Mountz, 2004; Silvey, 2004;
Walton-Roberts, 2004). State policies contribute to the creation of stratified rights that differen- tiate
female migrants according to skills, race, and position of the country within the global eco- nomic and
geopolitical order, as well as regulating domestic labour (England, 2003; Huang and Yeoh,

2003). Gender, race, age and other social divisions intersect, rather than pile up in a series of dis- parate
identities (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992; Yuval-Davis et al., 2005).

In contrast to international migration, the field of critical geopolitics has not generated a substan- tial
body of feminist work within it as might have been expected (Dowler and Sharp 2001). Critical
geopolitics has sought to ‘understand and ques- tion the relationship between, on the one hand,
power, and on the other, discourses about the spa- tiality of international politics, particularly those
developed by intellectuals of statecraft’, a group which encompasses the ‘community of bureau- crats,
leaders, foreign policy experts and advisors who comment upon, influence and conduct the activities
of statecraft’ (O’ Tuathail and Agnew,

1992: 193). The first essay on a gendered criti- cal geopolitics emanated from one of its leading
practitioners, Simon Dalby (1994). He saw such a geopolitics as exploring other forms of political
communities, and which recognised that insecurity could arise from forms of violence other than those
implied by territorial sovereignty, such as those associated with patriarchy. One of the key issues was
therefore to understand the various forms of

insecurities in the new world order and the different constraints facing women in different places.

However, by the end of the 1990s, the promise of this initial agenda had not resulted in a fruit- ful
dialogue between feminist work and critical geopolitics but had stopped short at the point of
critique. The fascination of critical geopolitics with texts was paralleled by a lack of attention to
everyday events (Thrift, 2000). Its strength in deconstructing classifications and categories was not
matched by reconstruction or alternative sce- narios for changes. It is a story of the big men who script
the world in a way that displaces others who are concerned with its production. Thus, rather than
challenging the masculinist tradition of geopolitics, the effect of critical geopolitics is to perpetuate it
(Sharp, 2000: 363). As noted previously, there is scant consideration of the array of people, cleri- cal
and professional, many of them female, who compile and synthesize data to reinforce political and
spatial imaginaries. Only those at the apex of knowledge production enter into the hallowed domain
of geopolitical imaginations. There are also few voices of resistance included in dominant geopolitical
practices. Where they are, as in the inclusion of Maggie O’Kane’s reportage on Bosnia (O’ Tuathail,
1996b), it seems to re-inscribe the classic binary of the rational and calculating male theoretician and
his universal gaze, contrasted with the emotional female in contact with the messiness of people’s
lives at the local scale.

Hyndman (2001, 2004), however, has recently suggested ways of advancing critical geopolitics in
conjunction with feminist theory to provide a more embodied vision and an agenda based on human
rather than state security. The term ‘human security’ was, in fact, introduced by the UN in

1992 to draw attention to insecurity within states and to disaggregate the notion. For Hyndman, this
move would involve shifting scales of analysis away from the preoccupation with the nation-state
whilst transposing approaches normally reserved for lower scales, such as the private/public divide, to
a transnational scale. Other feminist scholars too have pursued a more embodied and human dimen-
sion for gendered geopolitics. Smith (2001: 231) seeks to refigure geopolitics in the context of post-
Communist transition and to repopulate geopolit- ical landscapes ‘from deterritorialized spatialities of
globalisation to the embodied geography of gen- dered subjects’. For Secor (2001), too, geopolitical
knowledge is not only produced at the global scale but encompasses every level from the neighbour-
hood to global considerations of nationalism and modernity, or what she calls the counter-geography
of those who are uncounted.

Some critical geopolitics has focused on social movements, turning attention away from elites and
states to those who challenge state-centred notions of power and the colonization of the
political by the state (Routledge, 1996: 509). Here resistance strategies encompass a multiplicity of
possibilities and movements in which gender plays a key role. Many studies have examined the con-
ditions of how and why women get involved and participate (Radcliffe and Westwood, 1993;
Fairhurst et al., 2004). Nevertheless, and though participating massively in grassroots movements,
their roles have often been circumscribed, as in the US civil rights movements or the South African
national liberation struggle.

An understanding of embodied geopolitics, and participation in social and political movements would
benefit from ethnographic studies. These could also help to counteract the depoliticizing effects of
institutional abstractions, such as the state. Use of the latter, for example, tends to marginalize the
agency prevalent in the work- ings of state bureaucracies (Mountz, 2004). On the contrary, feminists
have preferred methods that start from women’s lives and their social loca- tion (Secor, 2004), hence
opting for qualitative methods. Feminist methodology has stressed the voices of the subjects of its
research as a starting point of research rather than relying exclusively on the view of the expert (Moss,
2002), though the relationship of the researcher and the researched may certainly be problematic
(Kobayashi, 2005). It should not be assumed that all subjects are powerless; indeed, many of those
being studied may belong to the elite (Commode and Hughes,

1999). Yet we should bear in mind that political geography has not, unlike other sub-disciplines,
reflected on the methodologies it has used or con- sidered them of importance (Sharp, 2004). As Sallie
Marston (2003: 635) notes, if political geogra- phers paid more attention to matters of agency, the
everyday and the micro level of social life, our students (and ourselves) would have to be as adept at
ethnography as they are at geopolitical analysis.

TOWARDS CLOSER ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN FEMINIST AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHERS

Though critical geopolitics did not initially bring about a closer engagement between feminist and
political geography scholars, a number of devel- opments, some of them external to the disci- pline,
have pushed gender analyses more to the fore. In this section I outline some of the areas in which a
number of theoretical concerns and political developments are beginning to bring about a closer
encounter between feminist and political geographies. These encompass empire- building and
imperialism and the interplay of cul- tural and economic dimensions in the display of

hegemonic power; the gendered basis of empire and nation-building, including the significance of
masculinities; the gendered analysis of the security state and the intersection between geopolitics and
domestic politics in the ‘war against terror’; and lastly, interest in the body in the literature on scale
and as a site of resistance and oppression.

As empire and imperialism have come back into intellectual fashion at the beginning of the twenty-
first century, so has America’s supremacy been portrayed as imperialism (Harvey, 2003; Arrighi,

2005). In the 1990s, American power was discussed more in terms of ‘hegemony’ (Arrighi, 2005: 23).
Hegemonic powers are not just hegemonic through coercion but through their ability to convince
others of the desirability of a political system, forms of consumption, and socio-cultural practices. An
understanding of the quotidian image of modernity represented by the prevailing hegemonic power
has been approached separately from Taylor’s (1999) world systems approach and Domosh’s (2005)
fem- inist analysis. For Taylor, hegemons have been in the forefront of the creation of modern practices
in the household. The Dutch invented the mod- ern house and through the private/public distinction
developed the notion of domesticity celebrated in Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. Here
women were surrounded by homely objects, whilst carrying out household tasks within a contained
space. The shift to British hegemony from the late eighteenth century brought about increasing com-
fort as well as the separation of work and home in the Victorian era. For the working class, and for the
man who was increasingly the breadwin- ner, the home was supposed to be his haven, while for the
woman it remained a place of work. As Mona Domosh has emphasised, however, and as became
increasingly apparent in the late nineteenth century, American hegemony introduced a con- sumer
modernity within a suburban location based on the dynamic and productivity of its industry. American
products, such as McCormick harvesters and Singer sewing machines (Domosh, 2005), rep- resented
the nation commercially through images of the patriarchal white family, with the male in his proper
productive role and the female in her domes- tic reproductive sphere. These products were part of an
American national identity and civilization that underpinned and legitimated American impe- rialism
at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, both political and fem- inist
geographers have deepened our understanding of the cultural and social dimensions of hegemonic
power, especially the historical underpinning of American hegemony.

Feminist studies in the 1990s also drew atten- tion to the involvement of women and men in empire
(McClintock, 1995; Stasiulis and Yuval- Davis, 1995) and nation-building (Mayer, 2000) and their
gendered representations. At the same

time throughout the 1990s, the significance of masculinities generated growing interest (Connell,

1995). With the current militarization of society, especially that of the United States in its renewed
imperial expansion and punitive expeditions, these two concerns have combined in the attention cur-
rently being given to the play of cultures of mas- culinities (Enloe, 1993; Kimmel, 1996). Hannah (2005),
for example, highlights the historical ori- gins of American manhood in the dream of the self-made
man and the frontier myth in the mak- ing of the nation. As in the Western film, the hero confronts
the enemy in a showdown that fol- lows a ritual of direct confrontation, escalation and climax.
However, in the case of the ‘ter- rorist’ this scenario has been short-circuited so that manhood and
virility cannot be realized. The inability to avenge in ‘normal’ manly ways leads to revenge based on a
‘savage war’ of ‘infinite justice’ in which punishment is inflicted dispropor- tionately (Ratner and Ray,
2004) and upon those who happen to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Punishment is meted out on the sequestered body, while a strategy of contain- ment is deployed
towards other groups depicted as threats to state sovereignty and national identity, such as asylum-
seekers (Hyndman, 2005).
Young (2003) argues that while feminists have generally emphasised the dominating and preda- tory
male subject, there is another side of masculin- ity that has come to the fore. This is that of the male
in his role of head and protector of the house- hold, which is needed to ‘make a home, a haven’,
whether it be against immigrants or terrorists. In the post-September 11 (2001) era and the reinforce-
ment of the security state, the world is presented in Manichean terms as in the way in which George
Bush stated categorically (20 September 2001) that in the ‘war against terrorism’, ‘if you are not with
us, you are against us’ (cited in Hyndman,

2005: 569). In this, the leader creates himself as a virtuous male who protects his citizens against aliens
– whether they be fearsome outsiders or alien insiders – in exchange for obedience. This, in turn,
justifies the abrogation of certain rights and the creation of a state of exception (Agamben,

2000). At the same time, certain outsiders, such as Afghani women, became convenient pawns in the
‘war against terror’ (Young, 2003; Hyndman,

2005), hence putting the ‘woman question’ onto the world stage. The knight in shining armour was to
charge, or rather fly, to their defence and liberate them from oppression by their menfolk.

The model of the male head of family is also commonly present in many of those nationalist and far-
right discourses predicated upon the traditional family of male breadwinner and housewife. The
(national) male is portrayed as the heroic defender of the nation and protector of women against
exter- nal violation (Sharp, 2000) or from foreign men

within the nation (Kofman, 1997). Women, on the other hand, as the cultural and biological reproduc-
ers of the nation, play a symbolic but subordinate role (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989). Accordingly,
many nations are portrayed as female. In the Irish case, the nation is the passive feminine, violated,
avenged, or inseminated, but with little space for her own needs or desires (Johnson, 1995). But as
Kearns (2004: 443) highlights, these symbols are frequently ambivalent, whilst real women partici-
pated in revolutionary struggles and fought against their exclusion from public spaces and citizenship
rights (Ryan and Ward, 2004). Especially in times of political transition, conflict and war, women may
indeed assume more public roles. At the same time, in situations of violent conflict, women’s bodies
may be raped (in order) to undermine the virility of men and their ability to protect the reproducers
of the nation and its honour (Mayer, 2004).

Whilst feminists have been at the forefront of putting bodies on the map (Longhurst, 2005) and
recognising that it is ‘central to an understand- ing of gender relations at every spatial scale’
(McDowell, 1999), it is surprising that it is only recently that a corporeal geography has come to the
fore in political geography (Mountz, 2003, 2004; Hyndman, 2004). As with critical geopolitics, there is
at the same time a growing critique of the ten- dency in much of the work on the body to abstract the
subject from ‘personal, lived history, as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness’
(Nelson, 1999). Bodies are after all both the sites of oppression and resistance. They are used to assert
power over, and to control, weaken, and demean the enemy. The war on terror has, as noted above,
led to the incarceration of bodies and their surveillance. This has primarily been directed towards
visible Muslim male bodies. The oppressed too seek to deploy their bodies as resistance, as in the most
extreme case of suicide bombers, a tactic recently adopted by Palestinian and Chechen women or with
asylum-seekers who partially destroy and muti- late their bodies to draw attention to their cause.
These are instances of the bodily, global politics and the geopolitical interpenetrating each other
(Hannah, 2005).

CONCLUSION

After almost two decades of feminist work in political geography, there still seems to exist two parallel
political geographies. This is not to sug- gest two homogeneous schools; and indeed some (Brown and
Staeheli, 2003) emphasize the dis- parateness of feminist political geography. What it does indicate is
a lack of sustained engagement and very different views of what feminist perspec- tives might
contribute. For feminists have not only

demonstrated the significance of gender relations in the constitution of political geography and
challenged taken-for-granted concepts, but have opened up new ways of approaching topics, as I have
highlighted in this chapter. In many instances, they have sought to transcend dichotomies and dualisms
and suggest ways of connecting disparate spheres and processes. Mainstream political geog- raphy
has generally not acknowledged the exten- sive insights feminist political geographers bring to the field
as a whole and simply, at best, tacks on women or gender differences. Discussing the meaning of the
political, considerations of norma- tive aspects of political concepts and an awareness that political
geography needs to be more theoreti- cal may, though not necessarily, bring feminist and political
geographers closer together.

There are, nevertheless, some indications that the previous lack of engagement is slowly break- ing
down. Some political geographers, such as Michael Brown and Matthew Sparke (2004), are now
collaborating with feminist geographers and appreciating the transformatory potential of femi- nist
contributions. At the same time, a number of feminist geographers are publishing in mainstream
political geography journals and situating them- selves within the field. They are seeking to bring the
margins into the centre, as the editors of the special issue of Political Geography on ‘Recon-
ceptualising the State’ affirm. It is important that we once again seriously engage with the state
without treating it as a homogeneous entity con- fronting fixed and pre-constituted interest groups,
whilst recognising that one of its key functions is to co-ordinate disparate activities and engender a
sense of belonging and togetherness, whether it be fictional or real. In the face of globalizing processes
the state is ‘managing, shaping, regulating and supporting complex and often contradictory cir- cuits
of capital and people’ (Mitchell et al., 2003). Economic and political insecurity and uncertainty are also
propelling the state to provide protection and greater certainty for its citizens. We have seen this in its
reinforcement of border controls and security measures, the reassertion of national iden- tity, and the
globalisation of social reproduction. All of these aspects have a gender dimension in the interaction of
state, society, and space to which feminist perspectives have much to contribute.

Closer engagement too may accelerate with the recently renewed visibility of social geography and an
interest in social justice and ethics. The dom- inance of cultural geography and the impact of the
cultural turn (Sayer, 1998) unfortunately led to the relegation of the social, which either became the
junior partner of cultural geography or disap- peared altogether.8 As the social returns, some of the
boundaries within geography are also becom- ing more permeable, thus facilitating conversa- tions
between a range of perspectives, including

those derived from feminist standpoints. Care, the politics of reproduction and welfare; modernities
and hegemonic powers; politics of gendered bor- ders and migrations; femininities, masculinities and
national identities; the meaning of (in)security and racialization of populations and citizenship, are just
some of the areas in which hopefully this dialogue will continue and will help to break down the
silences between feminist and political geographies.

NOTES

1 The book was awarded the Julian Minghi prize in 2005 for outstanding research by the Associa-
tion of American Geographers Political Geography Speciality Group.

2 At the same time others have belittled the attempt by feminists to incorporate the household within
a wider series of scales (see Brenner, 2001; Marston and Smith, 2001).

3 A term borrowed from Margaret Attwood’s fictional handmaids from Gilead in her novel The
Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985.

4 Thanks to the research of Jan Monk for the infor- mation on women geographers in the US and
to Avril Maddrell for the UK without whom this section could not have been written.

5 Though Wrigley and Newbigin were not primar- ily political geographers, they did write articles
on the military campaigns against Germany’s African colonies (Wrigley, 1918) and the Balkans
(Newbigin,

1915a, 1915b). In particular, Newbigin (1917) noted the lack of attention paid to women in
analyses of forced migration and naturalisation in her paper on ‘Race and nationality’ and recog-
nised the political nature of women’s actions, raising the issue of the private/public dichotomy
(Mad- drell, 1997: 39).

6 This certainly applied to me. I was one of the founding members of the Women and Geography
Study Group and a co-author of the first text on Gender and Geography (Women and Geography
Study Group, 1984). Whilst I participated in political geography events in the 1980s and wrote on
region- alism and nationalism, I only brought the two areas together through an article on women in
the French Revolution, followed by the special issue of Polit- ical Geography Quarterly edited with
Linda Peake in 1990.

7 This perspective also complements a renewed inter- est in social justice, ethics (Harvey, 1996;
Smith,

2000) and more recently the moral economy

(Sayer, 2004).

8 During the 1990s social geography disappeared from reports in Progress in Human Geography
until it was reinstated in 1999.

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