Rose, Gillian (1962–)

Gillian Rose has long encouraged geographers to contemplate the gendered construction of geographical knowledge. Her research ranges from analyzing the cultural politics of landscape to exploring notions of the performative and visual methodologies. She is perhaps best known for her 1993 book, Feminism and Geography. Through an explicit critique of geography's masculinist leanings, Rose reveals that geographers have constructed geography in ways that legitimize masculine forms of geographical knowledge at the expense of feminist ones. Rose has also intervened in key debates about feminist geographical methodologies, drawing on insights from Judith Butler to critique assumptions in feminists’ use of reflexivity as a way to construct geographical knowledges. Referring to the ways in which gendered sameness and difference are constituted through geographical traditions, in “Tradition and Paternity” Rose (1995c) emphasizes that “given th[e] persistent erasure of women, the construction of geographical traditions might … be described as the construction of geography's paternal lines of descent” (p. 414). She insists that

Rose draws on feminist discourses on the maternal body, or woman as mother, to subvert masculinist structures of knowledge in geography. Her work has been strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, and this has largely shaped her understanding and theorization of space. The sophistication of Rose's arguments, especially her continual [Page 2485]questioning of the epistemology and ontology of the discipline, suggests that the notion of an “explicit sexualisation of knowledges” (Grosz, 1993, p. 188) must be taken seriously by geographers.

Rose's 2001 book, Visual Methodologies, examines methods in visual culture approaches, from discourse analysis techniques to the study of audiences. Drawing on her interest in psychoanalytical theory, Rose argues that sexual difference is articulated through visual practice. This book offers a comprehensive study in methods to examine visual culture, from discourse analysis techniques to the study of audiences. Examining how we interpret images and how these processes are laden with power and cultural meaning, Rose provides a critical visual methodology, where she examines the visual in terms of cultural significance, social practices, and complex power relations. Drawing again on her understanding of psychoanalytical theory, Rose persuasively discusses the ways in which sexual difference is articulated through visual practice. Rose's argument about critical visual methodologies has already been effectively extended into the arena of geographic information system imaging and has proven an important contribution in geography and representation.

Rose's work in the late 2000s began to examine the ways in which visuality is experienced in urban environments, contributing to a sensuously embedded geography of vision. In developing a new urban aesthetics, Rose insists on the importance of a self-reflexive understanding of the researchers’ position on fieldwork, thus echoing a similar but not identical commitment toward reflexivity as her work in the 1990s demonstrated. Her 2009 article “Who Cares for Which Dead and How?” draws on the notion of necropolitics as a theoretical jumping-off point for the analysis of the British press coverage of the 2005 London bombing. Rose shows that newspaper coverage of the attacks was gendered and racialized, forcing the reader to consider the complex relationship between caring, necropolitics, and its accompanying visualities and spatialities.

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