Geography 415: Gender and Geography

Western feminists have long been concerned with the spatial politics of difference. As a point of entry to discussion of place space and gender this course will explore the diverse ways in which feminists have seen space as central both to masculine power and feminist resistance. In particular we will explore arguments from feminists of color and from poststructuralists which have influenced current discussion about maps and power in historical and contemporary contexts. Although the study of gender has only been included within geographic discourse in the last decade there has been a significant amount of research focusing on the intersection of gender and socio-spatial praxes in the last couple of years. For this reason, this course will focus on six themes which have received a notable degree of attention within geography and other social sciences in recent years

I. Introduction

Until the 1970s women remained invisible in the analyses of social space: human geography was indeed just that (hu)man. Recently feminist geography began to challenge the implicit masculinity of the subject of geography, this unit will examine the evolution of the feminist challenge.

II. Gendering Space

Throughout history and across cultures, architectural and geographic spatial arrangement have reinforced status difference between women and men. Women and men are spatially segregated in ways that reduce women's access to knowledge and thereby reinforce women's lower status relative to men's. The first part of this unit will examine how gendered spaces separate women from knowledge used by men to produce and reproduce power and privilege. In the second part of this unit we will examine the naturalized assumptions about gender and gendered responsibilities, that are literally built into the form of western cities.

III. Gendering Work

In this section of the course we will examine the spatial distinction between public workplaces and the private sphere of the home. As part of this examination we will examine how the relationship of women's work with no pay or low pay and lack of status and power.

IV. Gender, Place and Nationalism

This unit will have a two pronged mission: First to examine how as a result of nationalism countries take on a feminine character, i.e "the motherland" and secondly we will examine how a nationalist ideology has a tendency to appear as homogenous but there are by contrast a variety of discourses vying in the construction of a nationalist identity. This unit will concentrate on the gendered discourses intersecting with that of a supposedly monolithic ideology. Illustrative of this phenomenon is how women have often been treated more as symbols than as active participants by nationalist movements organized to end colonialism and racism.

V. The Nature of Hate

In every section of this course we will explore how individuals have been essentialized in terms of Race, Gender and Sexuality. However in this section of the course we will examine a growing body of research on racism and the construction of whiteness. Focusing on only the victims of racism, academics have failed to explore the way race shapes the lives of white people, often viewing the experiences of whites as raceless and therefore the norm. It has been argued by studying the white supremacist movement as an articulation of a white, male identity contributes not only to our understanding of the white supremacist movement, but also to the larger process of the construction of racialized identities. Since the movement defines whiteness in highly gendered terms, such a study also sheds light on the interconnectedness of race and gender. VI. Gender and the Body This section of the course will focus on the feminist viewpoint that knowledge is embodied, engendered and embedded in the material context of place and space. In this last section of the course we will not only examine the spaces built for us, or by us, we will examine other types of spaces: the bodies we inhabit, the interrelation between birth and reassigned genders and sexuality, cultural space; and spaces created by specific communities-based around location, race, sexuality, age or religion.