Feminist & Queer Theory

Question 1

Rose (1993)

Answer 1

• believed preoccupation spatial science with abstract geometries = reflection of rational male urge to impose order on a ‘natural’ world conceived of (by males) as feminine

Question 2

Blunt and Wills (2000)

Answer 2

• as theoretical framework, feminism grounded in ontology and epistemology dedicated to producing knowledge that promotes social change

Question 3

MacLeavy et al (2016) Feminist inclusions economic geog

Answer 3

• reproductive / domestic labour, gender order - need acknowledge increasing participation women in labour and impact flexibilization - econ geog limits econ theory sees women’s interests in opposition to men/capital.
• “Thus, whilst the incorporation of gender as a category of difference in prevailing economic analyses is indicative of the success of feminist scholars in making women empirically visible, continued resistance to gender as an analytical category that pervades meaning systems more generally demonstrates the work still to be done in persuading economic geographers of ‘the breadth, depth and specifically theoretical implications of feminist scholarship’”
• when add women to econ categories see that taken-for-granted econ categories no longer hold same way - new forms work/life in contemporary economy and women important to that
• also need focus in econ geog on other areas difference - identify hidden biases - masculine, middle-class, white, able-bodied - challenge power dynamics geog as white, male discipline - failure econ geog adequately consider race, gender, class, ethnicity, nationality in research
• A feminist epistemological transformation is needed to address the inertia of the Marxist conceptualisation of work (as dominantly wage labour) and encourage reflection on the many different ways in which poorer people are surviving in the contemporary period. In directing us to the multiple social relations and plethora of activities through which working class men and women make their livelihoods

Question 4

Dixon and Jones (2006) Social Construction of Gender

Answer 4

• ‘Social constructivists are interested in the ways in which ‘discourses’ establish distinctions – or differences – between individuals and groups, made and natural objects, types of experience, and aspects of meanings. They argue that none of these are naively given to us as unmediated parts of reality; instead, all are framed through categorizations that enable us to comprehend them’
• Applied to feminism, discursive construction points to gender codings as key elements in establishing difference and policing categories.

Question 5

Cope (2002)

Answer 5

Gender affects societies deeply and in multiple ways that are not always easily identified, separated or categorized. Gender as a set of relationships influences the production of knowledge through many avenues: media, the socialization of children, religious and cultural values, and political and economic processes.

Question 6

de Beauvoir (1949)

Answer 6

“It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.”

Question 7

Feminist Theory is…
Cudd and Andreasen (2005)
Jackson and Jones (1998)
Dixon and Jones (2006)

Answer 7

• Make intellectual sense of, and then to critique, the subordination of women to men
• “Analyse the conditions which shape women’s lives and to explore cultural understandings of what it means to be a woman… Theory for us, is not an abstract intellectual activity divorced from women’s lives, but seeks to explain the conditions under which those lives are lived”
• In turning their attention to gender relations, feminist theorists have shifted their focus from men and women as discrete objects of inquiry, to the structured interconnections that routinely intertwine their life experiences

Question 8

Disch and Hawkesworth (2016)

Answer 8

Difference not as a fact of nature, but a “vector of power”

Question 9

Case Study - Naturalisation Difference

Answer 9

Neanderthals (other human) found Europe - why homosapians lived? - constructed discourse through race - wrote of link australian aboriginals and neanderthals vs homosapiens europe - discovery neanderthals justification oppression australian aboriginals vs homosapiens europe - genocide - as discover more ab neanderthals - diff historical discourse - victims CC + famine = re-identified europeans

Question 10

Witt (1995) on Essentialism

Answer 10

Essentialism is…

• Causal or explanatory power: An entity’s essence is meant to either explain or cause its characteristic behavior.
• The basis of classification into kinds: Essential properties are thought to provide the criteria for classifying entities into kinds.
• The basis for the identity of things: The identity of an object and its persistence through time is secured by its essential properties.
• “Anti-essentialist feminists reject the thesis of gender essentialism in both its forms. They deny that there are any properties that I have necessarily insofar as I am a woman. Or, to use the variant, they reject the existence of a generic Woman; there is no single, shared property or properties that must be satisfied in order to count as a woman”

Question 11

EG - if no single, shared property women, what mean fem politics

Answer 11

Transgender

- anti-trans feminist movement UK - need categories men/women to advocate equality vs open categories

Question 12

Katz (1996) Minor theory

Answer 12

• building revolutionary consciousness based not on essence but rejection mastery and embrace marginality
• pay attention to who speaks and who listens

Question 13

Wright (2010)

Answer 13

• spatial practices gender, sexuality - everyday and global
• dispute F/Q theory loyalty to categories (f to gender, Q to sexuality) - split f/q
• now renewed interest interplay f/q studies - reorient politics knowledge production - collaboration as well as with other theories eg marx important understand world and challenge norms - intersectionality
• no single approach adequate understand politics everyday life, discrimination - need studies start with everyday in research design - focus intersection, assemblage
• need synergy theoretical approaches and look experience ground - blend methods as everyday life blurs theoretical categories

Question 14

Scott (1986) gender- useful category historical analysis

Answer 14

• gender historically linked sex - feminists 80s use gender refer social organisation relationship between sexes
• gender term scholarship transformation - writing women into history, commitment gender, class, race new history - fight make women’s history as important, not just separate tag on field of study - gender used synonym women to mask political feminism, give more natural tone
• feminist historians - explain origins patriarchy, marxist-feminists material explanation gender, capitalism/patriarchy intersect mode production - post-structuralist/object-relations (re)production gendered identity - creation gender identity eg. early psychoanalytic theory - social constructivism, binaries
• C20th gender as analytical category/way talking about systems social/sexual relations
• gender as a field of power, inequality

Question 15

Horkheimer and Adorno (1944)

Answer 15

“Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He (scientist) knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them. In this way their potentiality is turned to his own ends. In the metamorphosis the nature of things, as a substratum of domination, is revealed as always the same. This identity constitutes the unity of nature. It is a presupposition of the magical invocation as little as the unity of the subject”

Question 16

Heidegger (1954)

Answer 16

“Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.”

Question 17

Merchant (1980) Death of Nature, ecofeminist

Answer 17

Nature cast in the female gender, when stripped of activity and rendered passive, could be dominated by science, technology, and capitalist production […] The subjugation of nature as female was thus integral to the scientific method as power over nature.
Advocated against the nature-culture dichotomy.

Question 18

Federici (1988)

Answer 18

• Feminist Marxism: The transition from feudalism to capitalism is a history of enclosures or, as David Harvey calls it, ”accumulation by dispossession.” For capitalism to take hold required not only the dispossession of of land, but also the subjugation of women and the appropriation of women’s labour. The witch trials and burnings across Europe and colonies were, for Federici, foundational to this and part of efforts to domesticate women.
• “Witch-hunts were instrumental to the construction of a patriarchal order in which the bodies of women, their work, and their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the State and transformed into economic resources. […] In the same way that the enclosures expropriated communal lands from the peasantry, witch-hunts expropriated bodies from women, “freeing” them of any obstacle that would hinder their functioning as machines to produce the workforce. The threat of being burned at the stake erected formidable barriers around the bodies of women […]. We can imagine the effect that it had on them to see their neighbors, friends and relatives burn at the stake, and to realize that any attempt at contraception would be perceived as the product of a demonic perversion.”

Question 19

Winter (2003)

Answer 19

“The struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present Western bourgeois conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation, which is defined as the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the “Racism/ Ethnicism complex,” on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards and of what Walter Mignolo identifies as the foundational “colonial difference” on which the world of modernity was to institute itself.”

Question 20

Martin (1999) Egg and sperm

Answer 20

“Why do [scientists] talk about the sperm as if they’re all male and eggs as if they’re all female, although they could make [any gender]” The imagery of eggs as passive and sperm as active, “keeps alive some of the hoariest old stereotypes about weak damsels in distress and their strong male rescuers. That these stereotypes are now being written in at the level of the cell constitutes a powerful move to make them seem so natural as to be beyond alteration.”

Question 21

Harding (2009) standpoint theory

Answer 21

This theory demands recognition that:

(1) Knowledge is socially situated
(2) Subjugated or marginalized groups (whether the proletariat, the post-Colonial, or women) are the most likely to inhabit a critical posture toward the production of knowledge; those at the top of social hierarchies are less likely to see
(3) Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized.
- alternative from enlightenment = to start from human experience - scientific knowledge from lived experience, esp of marginalised

Question 22

Grosz (1992)

Answer 22

“By body I understand a concrete, material, animate organization of flesh, organs, nerves, muscles, and skeletal structure which are given a unity, cohesiveness, and organization only through their psychical and social inscription as the surface and raw materials of an integrated and cohesive totality. The body becomes a hum an body, a body which coincides with the `shape’ and space of a psyche, a body whose epidermic surface bounds a psychical unity, a body which thereby defines the limits of experience and subjectivity, in psychoanalytic terms through the intervention of the (m)other, and ultimately, the Other or Symbolic order (language and rule-governed social order)”

Question 23

Haraway (1988)

Answer 23

Situated Knowledges

Question 24

Rose (1997)

Answer 24

Positionality, Reflexivity

Question 25

de Beauvoir (1956) The Second Sex

Answer 25

• are there women, really - do women exist
• men as universal for human beings vs women defined by limiting criteria - aristotle ‘the female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities’ - genesis eve made from bone adam - other - often othered category is minority but women half population - women always existed and been subordinated - dependency not result historical event like slavery or jewish murder - division sexes biological fact not event human history
• male feels himself a demigod compared women
• males/females differentiated in a species for function reproduction - two types gametes (sperm/egg) not necessarily imply existence two distinct sexes eg hermaphrodites
• philosophy takes division m/f for granted - hegel idea sexuality as medium belonging unconvincing
• previously believed male sperm agency, egg passive - female as passive vs men active from aristotle
• unite in fertilised egg so neither gamete superior
• male body do part vs female body looses autonomy until birth (females may be forced upon) - conflict species vs individual - women enslaved to reproduction
• man not a natural species, a historical idea - women not completed reality, a becoming - in her becoming should be compared to man
• the body of woman is one of the essential elements in her situation in the world but that body is not enough to define her as a women

Question 26

Repo (2013) birth of gender

Answer 26

• Historic birth gender, medical cases gender identity product socialisation rather biology - encouraged parents police adherence binary gender norms
• gender invented in 1950s new sexual apparatus of biopower
• 1955 Money introduces idea person’s psychological sex learned
• foucault sexuality bio politics , governance discipline body
• intersexual case management 50s - sex reassignment surgeries in infants - parental role normalisation - ambiguous genital issues

Question 27

Crenshaw (1991)

Answer 27

Intersectionality

Question 28

Combahee River Collective (1978)

Answer 28

• black feminists committed struggle against racial, sexual, heterosexual, class oppression - intersectional approach
• origins in historical reality afro-american women’s life/death struggles - US pol system, black feminism been invisible
• black feminist linked US women’s movement second wave 60s - linked black liberation
• emerge personal experiences black women and econ/pol position black people
• liberation all oppressed peoples needs destruction capitalist systems, imperialism and patriarchy
• biological determinism dangerous
• hard organise when addressing range oppressions
• racism in white women’s movement major issue
• 1973 formation National Black Feminist Organisation

Question 29

de Beauvoir (1954) The Second Sex - Workshop Notes

Answer 29

• “Are there women [or men] really?”
• Q gender central what means exist world as human and relationship necessity and freedom
• Foundational text western philosophy, sociology, fem theory - centrality gender category social analysis
• Foundational text identification difference sex and gender
• “Are there women really?”: “Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today—this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality […] In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individual whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps that are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist”
• Women as the Other: “The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality—that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the divisions of the sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts […]. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus, it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against it.
  “No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes the One. The Other is pose as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this submission in the case of woman?”
  “Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another”.
  “Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects. Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she —a free and autonomous being like all human creatures —nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego…. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) —who always regards the self as the essential —and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment?”
• Women as a collective “we”: “The parallel drawn by Bebel between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind. And instead of a single historical event it is in both cases a historical development that explains their status as a class and accounts for the membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in virtue of their anomaly and physiology. Throughout history they have always been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change—it was not something that occurred. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts […] Proletarians say “we”; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others.’ But women do not say ‘We,” except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women,’ and women use the same word in referring to themselves”
  “[Women] have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among [other oppressed groups]. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men—fathers or husbands—more firmly than they are to other women. […] The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand in opposed within a primordial Mitsein [a being with, or among-being], and woman has not broken it”
• Hierarchies & Subordination: “The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. It was much easier for M. de Monterlant to think himself a hero when he faced women than when he was obliged to act the man among men”
  “People have tirelessly sought to prove that woman is superior, inferior, or equal to man […] Each argument at once suggests its opposite, and both are often fallacious. If we are to gain understanding, we must get out of these ruts; we must discard the vague notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto corrupted every discussion of the subject and start afresh”
  “But man is defined as a being who is not fixed, who makes himself what he is. As Merleau-Ponty put it, man is not a natural species; he is a historical idea. Woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that she should be compared with man; that is to say her possibilities should be defined”
• Woman’s body: “Woman? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female—this word is sufficient to define her.”
  “Merleau-Ponty notes in the Phenomenologie de la perception that human existence requires us to revise our ideas of necessity and contingence. ‘Existence,’ he says, ‘has not causal, fortuitous qualities, no content that does not contribute to the formation of its aspect; it does not admit the notion of sheer fact, for it is only through existence that the facts are manifested.’ True enough. But it is also true that there are conditions without which the very fact of existence itself would seem to be impossible. To be present in the world implies strictly that there exists a body which is at once a material thing in the world and a point of view toward this world; but nothing requires that this body have this or that particular structure”
  “Woman is of all mammalian females at once the one who is most profoundly alienated (her individuality the prey of outside forces), and the one who most violently resists this alienation; in no other is enslavement of the organism to reproduction more imperious or more unwillingly accepted […]. These biological considerations are extremely important. In the history of woman they play a part of the first rank and constitute an essential element in her situation […]. The body being the instrument of our grasp upon the world, the world is bound to seem a very different thing when apprehended in one manner or another […]. But I deny that they establish for her a fixed and inevitable destiny […]. The body of woman is one of the essential elements in her situation in the world. But that body is not enough to define her as a woman; there is no true living reality except as manifested by the conscious individual through activities and in the bosom of a society. Biology is not enough to give an answer to the question that is before us: why is woman the Other?”
• Sexual Difference: “…sexuality might well appear to be an indispensable function in the most complex forms of life; only the lower organisms could multiply without sexuality, and even here vitality would after a time become exhausted. But today this hypothesis is largely abandoned; research has proved that under suitable conditions asexual multiplication can go on indefinitely without noticeable degeneration […] Biology certainly demonstrates the existence of sexual differentiation, but from the point of view of any end to be attained the science could not infer such differentiation from the structure of the cell, nor from the laws of cellular multiplication, nor from any basic phenomenon. The production of tow types of gametes, the sperm and the egg, does not necessarily imply the existence of two distinct sexes; as a matter of fact, egg and sperm—two highly differentiated types of reproductive cells—may both be produced by the same individual”

Question 30

Butler (1993) Bodies that matter

Answer 30

• Workshop 2 - look at notes if need

Question 31

Ahmed (2006) Queer phenomenology

Answer 31

• Workshop 2 - look at notes if need

Question 32

Hovorka (2015) Feminism and Animals - Intersectionality, performativity, standpoint

Answer 32

• feminism help investigate interspecies relations/lives animals - need fem in animal geog
• well suited take on animal Qs due to analysing body, connecting discursive to material constructions, co-created situatedness, empathetic understanding, expose logical exclusion, attend marginalised groups
• fem need take animals seriously - more-than-human world
• animals uncomfortable subject eg some feel comparisons women/animal risk reinforcing women as lesser beings
• Case study about women and species - Botswana - access certain animals certain opportunities - cattle linked male power, status vs chickens women less status, subsistence, invisible - women gov investment now rewards chickens
• performativity production social identities /experiences - butler 1990 discursive gender/sexual norms not freely chosen but compelled and sanctioned - contextual - animal performativity body world - donkeys in botswana socially constructed by humans
• standpoint avenue recognise animal subjects - 3 central claims standpoint = knowledge socially situated based positionally, marginalised groups are social situated in ways make it more possible aware things/ask Qs than non-marginalised,, research should begin with lives marginalised - incorporate views knowledge

Question 33

Ahmed (2006) Workshop Notes

Answer 33

• how bodies and experiences are shaped in/through space - draws on phenomenology (Heidegger) = study of the appearance of phenomenon. Eg descartes - marked distinction between reality and mind / consciousness - real or external world and how perceive
• Ahmed phenomenologists set out demonstrate how people engage with objects in the world - Ahmed Q what bodies, what kinds things and kinds phenomena intersects with class, gender, sexuality, race
• Concepts: Orientation, objects, matter, lived experience, emotions, space, intimacy, migration, direction, turning, subject, commitment, lines, hope, the personal, domestic labour, attention, temporality, reproduction, queer
• LINES, ORIENTATION, QUEER = DISORIENTATION, DIFF LINE
• BODY + WHAT PAY ATTENTION TO

Question 34

Butler (1993) Workshop Notes

Answer 34

• starts similar to de beauvoir - “is there sexual difference really?” “what does it mean to reference the matter of the body as a framework for thinking about social relations?”
• 1990 gender trouble critiques argument gender is social construction imposed atop body’s biological sex - argues instead binary sex/gender is itself both socially constructed and disciplinary (foucault) - gender is performative - know only in expression and signification
• 2011 “When we say that gender is performed, we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role; we’re acting in some way… To say that gender is performative is a little different … For something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a women … We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or simply something that is true about us. Actually, it is a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time.”
• Bodies that matter clarifies gender trouble ideas - responds critics Q “If gender is performative, what about the materiality of the body?” - relationship discusses matter/signification - draws Foucault ideas norms, governance and discipline - Foucault much writing analysed how governmental power operated in society through institutionalisation of norms or behaviours that were judged to be correct/proper in society - through practice/creation spaces, norms disciplined bodies to certain behaviours, punishment for others. Also draws on Irigaray’s writings on Plato’s texts gender, relation forms and ideals.
• Concepts: the subject, norms, normalisation, intelligibility/disidentification, construction/constructivism, performativity, materialisation, power, nature, sex, the abject, value, agency, law, symbolic orders, receptacle, penetration, displacement, queer

Question 35

Carey et al (2016) Glaciers and gender

Answer 35

• fem glaciology framework env research
• male, exploring, mountaineering stereotype
• bring in marginalised knowledges about glaciers

Question 36

Adams-Hutcheson (2018)

Answer 36

• challenge disaster research male framing
• draws Christchurch earthquake
• need voices victims, marginalised

Question 37

Berg and Longhurst (2003)

Answer 37

Masculinity in geog

Question 38

Coddington (2015)

Answer 38

Beyond gender

• intersectionality
• fem epistemological approach
• de-centre gender - other relations eg violence front

Question 39

Hiemstra and Billo (2017)

Answer 39

• fem epistemology push geog, positionally, reflexivity

Question 40

Sultana (2014)

Answer 40

• gendering CC - more than women victims

- across axis difference analysis CC - m/f issue

Question 41

Summative - epistemology, research, knowledge (can refresh)

Answer 41

• Dixon and Jones (2006)
• England (2006) (1994)
• Rose (1993)
• Harding (2009) STANDPOINT
• Katz (1996) MINOR THEORY
• Berman - being a women in American geog (academy)
• Staeheli and Lawson (1995) - PRAXIS
• hooks (1991) - own experience black undergrad/later researcher
• Monk and Hanson (1982) on not excluding half human in human geog - gender blind theory/ research content
• Farrow et al 1995 / Hong 2016 - participatory research / GIS fem influence

Question 42

Gershon (2019)

Answer 42

Carson’s critics called her a witch

Question 43

Compton (2020)

Answer 43

My life got easier after top surgery (academic)

Question 44

Fox-Keller (1987)

Answer 44

Gender science system

- female and scientist identities in conflict - have to give up one to be other

Question 45

Whitson (2017) SUBJECTIVITY - V useful

Answer 45

• emotional reactions research, dreams/desires, how researcher wants see themselves
• personal research direct sales consultants - why interested privileged women - own need research ‘right’ thing or not associate with these type women everything don’t want to be almost means inequality/story do not get told