SPATIAL METAPHOR AND THE POLITICS OF EMPOWERMENT: MAPPING A PLACE FOR FEMINISM AND POSTMODERNISM IN GEOGRAPHY? *

Spatial language and constructs are deployed systematically in the writing of many contemporary feminists. Disempowerment is couched in negative spatial terms: as “displacement,” having space denied, or as a negative or non‐space. Empowerment, on the other hand, is written as an appropriation of the spatial: creating new spaces, occupying existing spaces, or revalorizing negatively labeled spaces. Furthermore, the map emerges as a common trope in this writing. Rather than transparently communicating the totality of what exists, however, their maps become rhetorical guides to possible worlds. The spatial provides a textual tool with which many contemporary feminists contest existing power relations. Space is viewed as liberating, empowering, and political. Their use of the spatial contrasts with the apolitical (and, not inconsequentially, gendered) conceptualization of space in some postmodern writing. This divergent deployment of spatial textual devices in the writing of some contemporary feminists and that of some postmodernists opens up another window on the knotty nexus of feminist and postmodern thought in geography.