Feminisms in Geography

In this innovative reader, Pamela Moss and Karen Falconer Al-Hindi present a unique, reflective approach to what feminist geography is and who feminist geographers are. Their carefully crafted textbook invigorates feminist debates about space, place, and knowledges with a fine balance among teaching chapters, reprints, and original essays. Offering an anthology that actually questions the very purpose of an anthology, the editors create and then negotiate a tension between reinforcing and destabilizing scholarly authority. They challenge the idea that there is one set of works that acts as the vision, interpretation, voice, and feel of feminist geography while both reproducing key previously published works and including fresh essays from a number of feminist geographers in a single volume. The first chapter frames feminism, geography, and knowledge as a mélange of ideas, principles, and practices. Each of the three major sections of the volume begins with an introductory essay that places individual contributions into the overarching argument about the construction of feminist geography. Each introduction is then followed by a combination of reprints and original essays that contribute both to understanding how feminist geographical knowledge is constructed differently in different places and to showing what feminist geographers do wherever they are. The final chapter extends the anti-anthology arguments and raises questions that feminisms in geographies have yet to address. Students and scholars will find both the approach and the discussion essential for a full and nuanced understanding of feminist geography.Contributions by: Sybille Bauriedl, Kath Browne, Joos Droogleever Fortuijn, Kim England, Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, Anne-Françoise Gilbert, Melissa R. Gilbert, Ellen Hansen, Susan Hanson, Audrey Kobayashi, Clare Madge, Michele Masucci, Janice Monk, Pamela Moss, Ann M. Oberhauser, Linda Peake, Geraldine Pratt, Parvati Raghuram, Bernadette Stiell, Amy Trauger, Dina Vaiou, The Sangtin Writers: Anupamlata, Ramsheela, Reshma Ansari, Vibha Bajpayee, Shashi Vaish, Shashibala, Surbala, Richa Singh, and Richa Nagar

Feminisms in Geography is a strong and useful anti-anthology advancing and deepening the impact of feminist scholars on the geographies of knowledge while respectfully acknowledging that theirs is one rhizome among many. . . . The volume should resonate with many scholars who have entered their disciplines sideways, tried to survive by zigzagging through the new subtle but nevertheless deadly minefields of what Mary Daly calls malestream (also known as mainstream) academia while clinging to their commitments to mentoring, teaching, praxis, and relevance in a corporatist knowledge machine which mostly values what can be directly harvested and marketed., Pamela Moss and Karen Falconer Al-Hindi have done an exceptional job of creating an anti-anthology of feminisms and feminist geographies. Fully aware of both the ironies and the paradoxes inherent in any attempts to contest the orthodoxies of feminist geographies in a single volume, the editors and their contributors have nonetheless produced a work that provides readers with a variety of epistemological, theoretical, and linguistic maps to negotiate the complex terrains of a range of feminist geographies. In doing so, they have contributed significantly to the important conversation about the diversity, complexity, variety, sophistication, and multiplicity of feminist geographies. This book will be an important reference work for students and seasoned researchers in feminist geography., This challenging anti-anthology invites the reader to revisit and rethink familiar feminist arguments—as well as encounter new ways of thinking—in an attempt to destabilize what the editors fear might be a developing feminist hegemony in the Western academy. It is a wonderful contribution to the growing, contested, unconfined, and messy corpus of feminist geographical scholarship.

Pamela Moss is professor and associate dean in the faculty of human and social development at the University of Victoria. Karen Falconer Al-Hindi is associate professor of geography and women’s studies and director of women’s studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.