Feminist Geographies

Feminism is a political project that asserts the social and political equality of the genders, particularly with regard to the underprivileged status of women in comparison with men. Thus, contrary to much popular opinion, feminism is not concerned simply with women but with gender relations, that is, the webs of masculinity and femininity that shape power, the allocation of resources, and the rhythms of everyday life. Although feminists operate from within a wide spectrum of perspectives, they concur that social reality is gendered, that is, that gender cuts across, intersects, shapes, and is in turn shaped by other lines of social organization such as class, age, ethnicity, sexuality, and geographic location. In denaturalizing gender—in exposing its social origins and power relations—they injected the first non-class-based form of social determination. In this view, to ignore gender and the profound difference it makes is to assume that male lives are the “norm,” a common, if implicit, view embedded in a wide variety of social theories and models. Indeed, for much of the history of geography, women were notable primarily through their conspicuous absence as subjects or producers of geographic knowledge.

At the core of feminist theories lies the notion that gender does not simply consist of the vast differences between males and females in terms of outlook, behavior, speech, movement, and opportunities but that gender differences are all too often constructed around male advantage and female disadvantage. Almost everywhere, today and throughout history, women live in a subordinate social position to men. More often than not, they work more, earn less, enjoy less social autonomy and fewer political rights, and culturally often garner less respect. A core focus of criticism in feminist scholarship is patriarchy, that is, social systems that create male advantage and female disadvantage. Patriarchal social relations penetrate the spheres of both production and reproduction and generally lead to representations of males as strong, rational, and active and females as weak, irrational, and passive. Feminism as a political project seeks not to end gender differences per se (the simplistic stereotype advanced by many conservative antifeminists) but to end the power relations that accompany gender. In this respect, being a feminist is not the same as being feminine; moreover, while many women are not feminists, and subscribe to traditional, sexist gender roles, some men are feminists.