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

8187

Progress reports

Geography and gender: the personal

and the political
Mona Domosh

College of Liberal Arts, Florida Atlantic University, 2912 College Avenue, Davie,
FL 33314, USA

Our stories and their stories

I was fortunate enough to have heard bell hooks speak at my university this past year. At
this point I can't even remember the formal title of her talk, although I do remember it
was on the subject of working towards a multicultural pedagogy (for discussions of similar
endeavours in geography, see Jackson and Maddrell, 1996). The thoughts she expressed
that afternoon ranged from the American presidential campaign to the personal politics of
buying a sofa in New York City. In her brilliant dialogue, these issues tted together,
seemed common-sensical and provided biting critiques of the status quo. For the rst
time in many months, I was inspired as a teacher. It was only when I overheard several
conversations as I walked out of the auditorium and into the car park that I began to
examine 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 point
for me. bell hooks seamlessly related large-scale political issues to her personal life and
personal stories e.g., her angst over what to do with, and how to make sense of, her sixdigit salary; her dilemma of how to relate to the demands of her abusive brother; and her
drawing on assumptions of class privilege in her mundane dealings with people delivering
her sofa. These stories did two things for me they transformed her from a symbol of
gendered/racialized academic analysis into a full-blooded, vulnerable person, and they
allowed me to think through complex issues by wrapping my mind around a particular
event, with real human consequences. Although mere anecdotes to some, these personal
stories helped me to think about the complexities of analysing everyday encounters where
dierent forms of power are enacted. They showed how hegemonic and oppositional
politics take place in the most mundane ways, and often at the very same time. And, the
stories broke down some of the distances between myself and bell hooks her stories
were, after all, similar to some of mine. No wonder I was impressed I have always found
little more interesting than people's stories, and to hear bell hooks make those stories
come 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
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82 Geography and gender: the personal and the political

geography work (Larner, 1995; Lees and Longhurst, 1995; Oberhauser, 1995). One of the
most surprising ways is the entry of everyday women's voices into discussions of macroscale economic transformations. Following Hanson and Pratt's (1995) work that integrated women's stories into explanations of the impacts of economic processes on labour
markets and the gender division of labour in Worcester, MA, several recently published
essays have broadened the scope to include dierent places and times. Victoria Lawson
(1995a) incorporated women's stories into her careful examination of the social
adjustments to economic austerity policies in Ecuador, policies that led the garment
industry to incorporate women into its workforce in dierent, and seemingly marginalized, ways. These stories showed how gender relations are integral to understanding
these economic processes, and how women are not simply passive victims of industrial
restructuring. Reecting on this research, Lawson concludes that the in-depth interviews
she conducted helped to `uncover women's subjectivity and agency' (Lawson, 1995b:
456). The implications are that `working from women's lives' (1995a: 441) as a research
strategy can call into question many assumptions about economic restructuring in
dierent places, and also assumptions about the accommodation of capitalism and
patriarchy. As Lawson (1995a: 44142) concludes:
The stories here are as suggestive of the nonaccommodation of capitalism and patriarchy as of their mutual
accommodation. In some ways, the stories of Elsa, Maruja, and Fanny's daughter are powerful testimony to the
ways 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 in
Peru are engaged in political struggles that call into question assumptions about women's
passive roles in traditional Peruvian society. The voices of these women are worth
hearing, she argues (1995: 466), because despite the underclass economic and social
positions from which they speak, their struggles `expose the analytical limitations of rigid
and hegemonic conceptualizations (for example, ``power'', ``politics'') in non-Western
contexts and highlight the largely ignored potential of underclass women to redene
political agendas and transform daily life in society at large'. Dianne Rocheleau (1995)
both listened to women's stories and looked at the maps they had drawn of their everyday
ecology in her attempt to understand the full range of impacts of sustainable development
schemes 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 linkages
to the Federation, the gendered landscape pattern of biodiversity and resource management, and the signicance of both for women's stake in future forestry policy'. This
exciting foray into a feminist political ecology, as evidenced by a recent session at the
AAG (1996) and an edited collection (Rocheleau et al., 1996), is a welcome relief from the
often gender-blind work that has characterized much of political ecology (but see
Schroeder, 1993).
In a completely dierent context, Doreen Massey (1995) incorporated people's stories
while exploring another side of work, that of highly skilled and privileged men working in
the high-technology sector in England. Aware, too, that social relations and economic
relations are interconnected in complex ways, Massey tries to draw out how the masculine
poles of classic, western dualisms, such as reason/nonreason, are enacted in the everyday
work lives of men. Her focus (1995: 487) on how these dualisms are lived in daily practice
was meant to show how these conceptual frameworks are `reproduced and, at least
potentially, 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

Mona Domosh 83
resist such dualisms in daily practice, her study conrms that only by listening to people's
experiences can we begin to unravel the complex, everyday impacts of macroscale
economic 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, privileged
status, and the world of `others' that she writes about. This is an issue so central to much
of feminist geography that its implications, raised so resoundingly by the series of essays
in The Professional Geographer (1994), continue to provoke fruitful discussions (Farrow
et al., 1995). A consideration of the complex positions within multiple systems of power
from which most of us write our stories and listen to others' stories has been expanded
by Vera Chouinard and Ali Grant's analysis of why their particular positions are
`nowhere near ``the project'' ' (1995). In asking us to consider why and how disabled and
lesbian women have been made invisible in radical geography, they are asking us to make
explicit some of the most personal assumptions about who is the `we' and who are the
`others' when we engage in analyses of social problems. By speaking from these two
marginalized positions, they show (1995: 138) that ableism and heterosexism are
`signicant sources and structures of oppression' that we need to confront `the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of our own complicity and oppression of ``others'' ' (1995:
138), and that we need to struggle `to nd ways to understand these processes' (1995:
138). Although related issues concerning the oppression of heterosexism have been raised
elsewhere (Bell and Valentine, 1995; Valentine, 1995), discussions of ableism are notably
absent, and the elaborations of those sources of oppression within the context of the
academy provided in this essay are cautious reminders of the complexity of systems of
oppression.

II

Our bodies and their bodies

As Vera Chouinard reminds us, all of us someday will be disabled, and we will have to
rethink what our bodies really mean to us. But while thinking from our bodies may not
have 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 what
Gillian Rose has called the `intersection of embodiment and spatiality' (1995: 546). A
concern with how women's bodies have been culturally constructed and deployed as
symbols 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 and
interpretation using theoretical frameworks that explicitly address the relationship
between spaces and bodies. In a fascinating and complex study of the landscape of the
Kano Palace in northern Nigeria c. 1500, Heidi Nast (1996) shows how Foucault's idea of
archaeology can be applied to material as well as discursive realms by exploring the very
spatiality of discourse. In this way, she is able to suggest that material realms such as
bodies and places are not transcendent categories removed from the critical, political
analysis of discourse, but rather are constructed out of everyday practices that are both
spatial and linguistic. By understanding spatial practices and bodily experiences as
mutually constitutive, Nast is able to use spatial evidence to interpret the sexualized
worlds of those people who were excluded from power and therefore who left no written
record. Nast shows how the changing landscape of the Kano Palace corresponds to the
shifting relationships between Islam, gender roles, patriarchy and sexual practices. For

84 Geography and gender: the personal and the political

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 patriarchking, shows not only the degree to which seclusion and ideals of Islamic womanhood were underpinned by female
`class' distinctions, but the degree to which the entire political economy of the new Islamic order prioritized the
`seed' of the patriarch (Nast, 1996: 45).

With a similar emphasis on the body (although not on gender), Lynn Stewart argues that
slaves in Louisiana in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could have indeed
produced their own spaces `by virtue of bodily inhabiting plantation space' (1995: 237). By
drawing on Lefebvre's insights about how bodies produce space, Stewart demonstrates
how even in conditions of sovereign power, slaves were able to resist the dominant white
order, and keep `their humanity intact' (1995: 241). They did so by producing their own
social spaces:
they held their own religious meetings at night in the woods, where they were not bombarded by the white man's
insistence on preaching the morality of obedience; they went on go-slows in the elds; they sang songs and told
tales of their ability to outwit `the Man'; they were deant in word and deed; and occasionally they armed
themselves and fought for their freedom against all odds (1995: 241).

Since slaves were able to produce their own spaces through their bodily activity, and since
women's bodies were culturally coded and often literally marked dierently from men's, it
would certainly be interesting to explore in what ways and for what reasons female and
male 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 Stallybrass
and White, they analyse the carnival as a site where dichotomous social categories are not
just reversed, but `where the purity and distinction of categories . . . are themselves
brought into question' (1996: 26). In this way, they argue that the erotization of the Rio
carnival, where women's bodies are uncostumed and have become the ultimate signier of
the carnival, serves both to reassert traditional Brazilian codes of femininity, and subvert
those codes. It subverts since the performance of the body that is constantly enacted in the
carnival `tends to highlight the performative constitution of gender categories' (1996: 27)
and hence to make explicit the nonessential nature of gendered bodies. Lewis and Pile
argue that by examining the concrete practices of carnivals, bodily performances can be
seen 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 and
political dilemmas of living through multiple identities of occupying, simultaneously, a
privileged class status, and an often oppressed sexualized and racialized position. Working
through the many relationships between these dierent positions has been done eectively in the series of studies of women travellers, represented in the collection edited by
Blunt and Rose (1994) and, more recently, in published essays by Morin (1995) and
McEwan (1996). In addition, several studies of historical and contemporary retailing have
highlighted how notions of femininity and masculinity underpin middle-class, consumer
identities 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 `dierent'
women and their spaces and places that are occurring in other academic contexts. For

Mona Domosh 85
example, by documenting a case study of commuting patterns in Bualo, New York,
Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo has shown that there are important dierences between
European American women and African American women in terms of their commute to
work: `African American women are more dependent on public transit, and they have
longer commute times than European American women' (1995: 41). Her focus on
suburban employment makes clear that economic and spatial restructuring impacts
`dierent' 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 and
`race' in the lives of working-class women in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Although she
found that these women shared many of the same problems about such issues as childcare, 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 transportation, 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 only
gendered, it also is racialized' (1995: 433).
These gendered and racialized identities are, as bell hooks reminded me in her stories,
uid and never xed, although dominant powers structure the terms and extent of that
uidity. 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 about
naming places reveals more uid cultural allegiances. What they nd is that the mode of
naming 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 dominant
mode), but that several other, subordinate positions in the debates about naming places
are also present. Such an analysis reveals how powerful the discourse of Pakeha masculinity is, since whether adhered to by men or women, Maori or Pakeha, it structures the
debate about place names in New Zealand, and legitimates `a masculinist colonialism and
colonial history' (1996: 119).
The uidity of identity positions is made clear in France Winddance Twine's 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 they
changed 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 stories
we hear and tell ourselves about our bodies, our homes, our places of work and our
schools.
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 geography's emphasis on understanding the politics of places through personal
stories, and making sense of our embodied persons and spaces through the political, seems
key to a more `clear' geography.

86 Geography and gender: the personal and the political

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