Progress reports

Geography and gender: the personaland the politicalMona DomoshCollege of Liberal Arts, Florida Atlantic University, 2912 College Avenue, Davie,FL 33314, USA

I Our stories and their stories

I was fortunate enough to have heard bell hooks speak at my university this past year. Atthis point I cant even remember the formal title of her talk, although I do remember itwas on the subject of working towards a multicultural pedagogy (for discussions of similarendeavours in geography, see Jackson and Maddrell, 1996). The thoughts she expressedthat afternoon ranged from the American presidential campaign to the personal politics ofbuying a sofa in New York City. In her brilliant dialogue, these issues fitted together,seemed common-sensical and provided biting critiques of the status quo. For the firsttime in many months, I was inspired as a teacher. It was only when I overheard severalconversations as I walked out of the auditorium and into the car park that I began toexamine why her talk had made so much sense to me. In several of these conversations,people were critical of her talk because it was anecdotal. But that was exactly the pointfor me. bell hooks seamlessly related large-scale political issues to her personal life andpersonal stories e.g., her angst over what to do with, and how to make sense of, her six-digit salary; her dilemma of how to relate to the demands of her abusive brother; and herdrawing on assumptions of class privilege in her mundane dealings with people deliveringher sofa. These stories did two things for me they transformed her from a symbol ofgendered/racialized academic analysis into a full-blooded, vulnerable person, and theyallowed me to think through complex issues by wrapping my mind around a particularevent, with real human consequences. Although mere anecdotes to some, these personalstories helped me to think about the complexities of analysing everyday encounters wheredierent forms of power are enacted. They showed how hegemonic and oppositionalpolitics take place in the most mundane ways, and often at the very same time. And, thestories broke down some of the distances between myself and bell hooks her storieswere, after all, similar to some of mine. No wonder I was impressed I have always foundlittle more interesting than peoples stories, and to hear bell hooks make those storiescome to life and take on political sense, was inspirational indeed.This strategy of weaving the personal and the political by incorporating personal stories

into complex, theoretical arguments, is apparent, in various ways, in recent gender and

*c Arnold 1997 03091325(97)PH143PR

Progress in Human Geography 21,1 (1997) pp. 8187

geography work (Larner, 1995; Lees and Longhurst, 1995; Oberhauser, 1995). One of themost surprising ways is the entry of everyday womens voices into discussions of macro-scale economic transformations. Following Hanson and Pratts (1995) work that inte-grated womens stories into explanations of the impacts of economic processes on labourmarkets and the gender division of labour in Worcester, MA, several recently publishedessays have broadened the scope to include dierent places and times. Victoria Lawson(1995a) incorporated womens stories into her careful examination of the socialadjustments to economic austerity policies in Ecuador, policies that led the garmentindustry to incorporate women into its workforce in dierent, and seemingly margin-alized, ways. These stories showed how gender relations are integral to understandingthese economic processes, and how women are not simply passive victims of industrialrestructuring. Reflecting on this research, Lawson concludes that the in-depth interviewsshe conducted helped to uncover womens subjectivity and agency (Lawson, 1995b:456). The implications are that working from womens lives (1995a: 441) as a researchstrategy can call into question many assumptions about economic restructuring indierent places, and also assumptions about the accommodation of capitalism andpatriarchy. As Lawson (1995a: 44142) concludes:

The stories here are as suggestive of the nonaccommodation of capitalism and patriarchy as of their mutualaccommodation. In some ways, the stories of Elsa, Maruja, and Fannys daughter are powerful testimony to theways in which their ability to raise their families and earn incomes serves to rewrite gender identities.

In a similar vein, as Maureen Hays-Mitchell (1995) shows us, women informal traders inPeru are engaged in political struggles that call into question assumptions about womenspassive roles in traditional Peruvian society. The voices of these women are worthhearing, she argues (1995: 466), because despite the underclass economic and socialpositions from which they speak, their struggles expose the analytical limitations of rigidand hegemonic conceptualizations (for example, power, politics) in non-Westerncontexts and highlight the largely ignored potential of underclass women to redefinepolitical agendas and transform daily life in society at large. Dianne Rocheleau (1995)both listened to womens stories and looked at the maps they had drawn of their everydayecology in her attempt to understand the full range of impacts of sustainable developmentschemes in the Dominican Republic. By both counting and listening to women and men,she was able (1995: 465) to reveal the gendered structure of households and their linkagesto the Federation, the gendered landscape pattern of biodiversity and resource manage-ment, and the significance of both for womens stake in future forestry policy. Thisexciting foray into a feminist political ecology, as evidenced by a recent session at theAAG (1996) and an edited collection (Rocheleau et al., 1996), is a welcome relief from theoften gender-blind work that has characterized much of political ecology (but seeSchroeder, 1993).In a completely dierent context, Doreen Massey (1995) incorporated peoples stories

while exploring another side of work, that of highly skilled and privileged men working inthe high-technology sector in England. Aware, too, that social relations and economicrelations are interconnected in complex ways, Massey tries to draw out how the masculinepoles of classic, western dualisms, such as reason/nonreason, are enacted in the everydaywork lives of men. Her focus (1995: 487) on how these dualisms are lived in daily practicewas meant to show how these conceptual frameworks are reproduced and, at leastpotentially, struggled with and rebelled against in the practice of everyday living.Although the conclusions she draws raise as many questions as they answer about how to

82 Geography and gender: the personal and the political

resist such dualisms in daily practice, her study confirms that only by listening to peoplesexperiences can we begin to unravel the complex, everyday impacts of macroscaleeconomic and social processes.But bell hooks also made clear in her talk that many of her dilemmas were deeply

personal in the sense of struggling over the apparent gap between her own, privilegedstatus, and the world of others that she writes about. This is an issue so central to muchof feminist geography that its implications, raised so resoundingly by the series of essaysin The Professional Geographer (1994), continue to provoke fruitful discussions (Farrowet al., 1995). A consideration of the complex positions within multiple systems of powerfrom which most of us write our stories and listen to others stories has been expandedby Vera Chouinard and Ali Grants analysis of why their particular positions arenowhere near the project (1995). In asking us to consider why and how disabled andlesbian women have been made invisible in radical geography, they are asking us to makeexplicit some of the most personal assumptions about who is the we and who are theothers when we engage in analyses of social problems. By speaking from these twomarginalized positions, they show (1995: 138) that ableism and heterosexism aresignificant sources and structures of oppression that we need to confront the pos-sibility, indeed the likelihood, of our own complicity and oppression of others (1995:138), and that we need to struggle to find ways to understand these processes (1995:138). Although related issues concerning the oppression of heterosexism have been raisedelsewhere (Bell and Valentine, 1995; Valentine, 1995), discussions of ableism are notablyabsent, and the elaborations of those sources of oppression within the context of theacademy provided in this essay are cautious reminders of the complexity of systems ofoppression.

II Our bodies and their bodies

As Vera Chouinard reminds us, all of us someday will be disabled, and we will have torethink what our bodies really mean to us. But while thinking from our bodies may nothave received a great deal of recent attention in feminist geography (but see Longhurst,1995), theorizing from and about the bodies of others has, providing case studies of whatGillian Rose has called the intersection of embodiment and spatiality (1995: 546). Aconcern with how womens bodies have been culturally constructed and deployed assymbols of nations and/or classes is apparent in recent studies (Nash, 1994; Radclie,1996; Tyner, 1996). Of note, however, is the exploration of landscape creation andinterpretation using theoretical frameworks that explicitly address the relationshipbetween spaces and bodies. In a fascinating and complex study of the landscape of theKano Palace in northern Nigeria c. 1500, Heidi Nast (1996) shows how Foucaults idea ofarchaeology can be applied to material as well as discursive realms by exploring the veryspatiality of discourse. In this way, she is able to suggest that material realms such asbodies and places are not transcendent categories removed from the critical, politicalanalysis of discourse, but rather are constructed out of everyday practices that are bothspatial and linguistic. By understanding spatial practices and bodily experiences asmutually constitutive, Nast is able to use spatial evidence to interpret the sexualizedworlds of those people who were excluded from power and therefore who left no writtenrecord. Nast shows how the changing landscape of the Kano Palace corresponds to theshifting relationships between Islam, gender roles, patriarchy and sexual practices. For

Mona Domosh 83

example, she reveals how and why royal women were spatially secluded in the palace,while slave women were not:

That their low status and mobility derived from their bodies not being marked as child-bearers of the patriarch-king, shows not only the degree to which seclusion and ideals of Islamic womanhood were underpinned by femaleclass distinctions, but the degree to which the entire political economy of the new Islamic order prioritized theseed of the patriarch (Nast, 1996: 45).

With a similar emphasis on the body (although not on gender), Lynn Stewart argues thatslaves in Louisiana in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could have indeedproduced their own spaces by virtue of bodily inhabiting plantation space (1995: 237). Bydrawing on Lefebvres insights about how bodies produce space, Stewart demonstrateshow even in conditions of sovereign power, slaves were able to resist the dominant whiteorder, and keep their humanity intact (1995: 241). They did so by producing their ownsocial spaces:

they held their own religious meetings at night in the woods, where they were not bombarded by the white mansinsistence on preaching the morality of obedience; they went on go-slows in the fields; they sang songs and toldtales of their ability to outwit the Man; they were defiant in word and deed; and occasionally they armedthemselves and fought for their freedom against all odds (1995: 241).

Since slaves were able to produce their own spaces through their bodily activity, and sincewomens bodies were culturally coded and often literally marked dierently from mens, itwould certainly be interesting to explore in what ways and for what reasons female andmale slaves created dierent spaces.Clare Lewis and Steve Pile (1996) take such a gendered look at bodies in their

interpretation of the Rio carnival. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, and Stallybrassand White, they analyse the carnival as a site where dichotomous social categories are notjust reversed, but where the purity and distinction of categories . . . are themselvesbrought into question (1996: 26). In this way, they argue that the erotization of the Riocarnival, where womens bodies are uncostumed and have become the ultimate signifier ofthe carnival, serves both to reassert traditional Brazilian codes of femininity, and subvertthose codes. It subverts since the performance of the body that is constantly enacted in thecarnival tends to highlight the performative constitution of gender categories (1996: 27)and hence to make explicit the nonessential nature of gendered bodies. Lewis and Pileargue that by examining the concrete practices of carnivals, bodily performances can beseen as sites of resistance to dominant norms of spatial behaviour.

III Dierent stories and dierent bodies

Most of the stories that bell hooks told us that afternoon related back to her personal andpolitical dilemmas of living through multiple identities of occupying, simultaneously, aprivileged class status, and an often oppressed sexualized and racialized position. Workingthrough the many relationships between these dierent positions has been done eect-ively in the series of studies of women travellers, represented in the collection edited byBlunt and Rose (1994) and, more recently, in published essays by Morin (1995) andMcEwan (1996). In addition, several studies of historical and contemporary retailing havehighlighted how notions of femininity and masculinity underpin middle-class, consumeridentities that shape retailing activities and spaces (Mort, 1995; Blomley, 1996; Domosh,1996; Glennie and Thrift, 1996). What I want to emphasize here are analyses of dierentwomen and their spaces and places that are occurring in other academic contexts. For

84 Geography and gender: the personal and the political

example, by documenting a case study of commuting patterns in Bualo, New York,Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo has shown that there are important dierences betweenEuropean American women and African American women in terms of their commute towork: African American women are more dependent on public transit, and they havelonger commute times than European American women (1995: 41). Her focus onsuburban employment makes clear that economic and spatial restructuring impactsdierent women dierently, and that race is an important component of that dierence.In a related study, Linda Peake (1995) delves into the mutual construction of gender andrace in the lives of working-class women in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Although shefound that these women shared many of the same problems about such issues as child-care, their race shaped many aspects of their waged and unwaged reproductive activities: race has been shown to structure options in relation to occupation, access to trans-portation, and child care provision, as well as formal and informal community networks(1995: 433). Thus, Peake is able to conclude that reproductive labour is not onlygendered, it also is racialized (1995: 433).These gendered and racialized identities are, as bell hooks reminded me in her stories,

fluid and never fixed, although dominant powers structure the terms and extent of thatfluidity. Two very dierent essays make that point powerfully.Countering a perspective on New Zealand culture politics that sets up an opposition

between the hegemonic, European or Pakeha group, and the subordinate Maoris,Lawrence Berg and Robin Kearns (1996) argue that their analysis of the discussions aboutnaming places reveals more fluid cultural allegiances. What they find is that the mode ofnaming places in New Zealand that is most dominant is one that favours a Pakeha,masculine identity (and, Maoris, or women, who so identify are involved in this dominantmode), but that several other, subordinate positions in the debates about naming placesare also present. Such an analysis reveals how powerful the discourse of Pakeha masculin-ity is, since whether adhered to by men or women, Maori or Pakeha, it structures thedebate about place names in New Zealand, and legitimates a masculinist colonialism andcolonial history (1996: 119).The fluidity of identity positions is made clear in France Winddance Twines study of

children of mixed-race parents, who were raised in American suburban communities(1996). She explores the whiteness of the suburbs, and the suburbanness of being white,and shows how and why these girls were raised to think of themselves as white. She also,and intriguingly, reveals how these brown skinned white girls became black once theychanged spaces by moving to the university and joining dierent social networks. Thus,she is able to show that how and why we choose identities has much to do with the storieswe hear and tell ourselves about our bodies, our homes, our places of work and ourschools.By so doing, Twine also draws our attention to the critical importance of understanding

how and why those stories have shaped our image of ourselves and of others. As bell hooks(1992: 6) reminds us, it is only by becoming more fully aware that we begin to see clearly.Feminist geographys emphasis on understanding the politics of places through personalstories, and making sense of our embodied persons and spaces through the political, seemskey to a more clear geography.

Mona Domosh 85

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