Anne Bitsch

People often tell me that there are greater differences in the world than those between men and women. While that is true, in profound ways, gender intersects with systems of power, including economic relations, racialization and ethnicity as noted by Lynn Staeheli & Patricia Martin (2000). That is why feminism has evolved during the last couple of centuries, not only as a social movement for change of unequal power relations between men and women or as a political ideology, but also a body of philosophy and research about these gender relations. Because systems of power are framed at particular places and spaces, feminism has also made interventions in geography.

In this paper I have shown how feminist empiricism, standpoint theory and post-modernist feminism have engaged with political geography. There has been a move from mainstreaming women’s experiences into the general research and improving research techniques (empiricism) towards a rejection of the ontologies and epistemologies of the mainstream altogether (standpoint theory). Post-modernist feminism differs from the former in discarding the idea that women as a group have “common interests”, because multiple axes of oppression (race, class, sexuality etc) are at play simultaneously (Peet 1998).

I have addressed the question of class, which is the concern of Kevin Cox (2005) who regrets that feminism have tied up with critical geography and cultural studies, rather than radical political geography. The reason for doing so can be found in the feminist opposition to binaries. Genevieve Lloyd (1984) and Donna Haraway (1988) show that politico-normative hierarchies, reinforcing those unequal power relations that feminists will overcome, follow binaries. Because radical political geography claim that class and relations of production is super-ordinate to other systems of power (Stokke 1999), they trade off the possibility to treat gender as equally important or use feminism as a mode of analysis.
In my paper I have argued that it is possible to keep track of the material and the fragmented at the same time. A focus on stable mechanisms in history (where class and relations of production are some) and how they intersect with other systems of power, including those of gender and race, is a possible path to follow. Arguing that though post-modernist feminists are right in their assertion that power is negotiated along a multiplicity of political scales, it is important for political geographers to show how scales are linked and interdependent.

My suggestion is that the scales of the body/household and the nation state can be bridged through regulation theory. Perhaps it is possible to pave the way for a happy marriage between political geography and feminism through an examination of the states relationship with capitalism on the one side, and the construction of gender relations on the other.

Read the paper here: Towards a Happy Marriage Between Feminism and Political Geography?