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FEMINISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND GEOGRAPHY: SPACE FOR WOMEN?
Author(s) -
BONDI LIZ
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8330.1990.tb00204.x
Subject(s) - postmodernism , feminism , cultural geography , space (punctuation) , sociology , gender studies , human geography , social science , art , philosophy , literature , linguistics
According to its proponents, postmodernism seeks to recover that which existing cultural forms, social theories and epistemologies have excluded. ‘Space‘ is numbered among those exclusions and geographers have noted that postmodernism appears to sensitise diverse traditions in social thought to geographical difference (Gregory., 1989). The reality behind that appearance is disputed, hence responses to postmodernism that vary from the enthusiastic (Cooke, 1989) through guarded excitement (Graham, 1988) to hostility (Harvey, 1987) shading into derision (Lovering, 1989). But what is notable is that the same issues and perspectives remain marginal: women, ethnic minorities and collected ’others’ get tagged along as categories to be ‘recovered’, with or without the benefit of postmodernism. The possibility that we might be ‘in there’ already, that alternative perspectives on the dichotomy between ‘self ‘ and ‘other’ already exist, goes unnoticed (cf. Morris, 1988, pp. 11-16). In particular, the transformative potential of feminism is simply ignored; it remains outside ‘the project’ of radical geography as well as mainstream geography (Christopherson, 1989), as continued silence about the vigorous debate between feminism and postmodernism testifies. This paper challenges such silence. In the first section I outline geographical discussions of postmodernism arguing that, whether critical or celebratory, these are characterised by a premature foreclosure of key issues raised, or at least highlighted, by postmodernism. Thus, postmodernism is debated, or in some cases assimilated, within existing theoretical frameworks in ways that resist any fundamental challenge to existing ‘radical’ geography. Secondly, I consider how feminists might respond to these discussions of postmodernism, and in so doing comment on the significance of postmodernism for feminist geography. In this section my comments focus on the gender coding of knowledge and on the question of difference.