Gender Flashcards
What is gender?
Gender is a practice of citation, constructed within a social, temporal context.
What sort of culturally and historically specific sets of relations does gender emerge from?
Ideas about the social and cultural roles of ‘men’ and ‘women’
What should ‘men’ and ‘women’ look, dress, walk and talk like?
Discourses about family, class, labour: who should do what kind of work? In what way should the family organize itself? What spaces should ‘respectable’ women occupy?
The boundaries of gender are socially policed and produced through historical and cultural circumstances
Gender and performativity?
Gender is manufactured through stylised embodied acts.
We cite certain ideas about what gender should be through performativity.
What about sex?
Sex is socially and culturally produced. A certain set of sexual characteristics are assigned as male and others as female. Plus, intersex people exist.
Complicates binary categories of sexual orientation: ‘gay’, ‘straight’ and ‘bisexual’.
Intersectionality?
Gender is relational, has to be considered alongside race/class, etc - intersection of identities.
Such subjectivities don’t just pre-exist and and then intersect, they are mutually constituted.
Gender genealogy in human geography?
1960s – 1980s: Gender in Marxist Geography
1980s – 1990s: Cultural Turn and Poststructuralist Feminism
1970s – Present: Interventions of Black Feminist Geographers
Contemporary Post/Decolonial perspectives on Gender
How is gender a geographical question?
Through how social and economic structures and spaces map onto the articulation of gender difference.
By problematising the Home.
How gender as social difference shapes experiences of space geographies of risk, danger, safety.
How space is marked by and produces gender –> gender as inherently spatial.
How is the body implicated?
The body as scale How is it brought to bear on questions about home, community, nation and international politics?
The body as territory -> Smith (2012), bodies both are, and make territory –> gendering processes as key to this territorializing of the body. Fluri on women in Afghanistan and the War on Terror -> gendered bodies as the metaphorical and material ground on which civilizational hierarchy is articulated.
Biopolitics and geography questions of reproduction and demography.
What does gender contribute to geography?
Unsettling ‘transparent space’ gendered space as an experience of vulnerability
Questioning geography’s ‘god-view’ of the world: situated knowledges (Donna Haraway)
Bringing the body into geographical research
Explain black/decolonial feminist critiques of gender geography.
Histories of imperialism and the category of ‘woman’ (assumed to be white, middle class)
Race and the feminist movement solidarity across racial lines and critiques of imperial feminisms
What about sexuality?
The production of space as the implicit reproduction of heterosexual power -> closet as material and metaphor.
Sexual Citizenship -> Belonging in geopolitical configurations such as nation-states, as well as at home, in social/religious/educational communities. What kinds of desire belong to different types of spaces.
LGBTQ Bodies and their occupation of spaces as liberating.
What is queer theory?
Not just the study of LGBTQ+ identified persons though it can include that.
Queering as Epistemic Intervention that promotes fluidity, speaks for non-conforming/fluid identities.
Unsettles identity as fixed, pre-discursive: focuses on subjectivity as disciplinary.
Locates ‘LGBTQ’ identities within Euro-American ‘gay liberation’ paradigms.
