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Concept
Feminist geography
Summary
Feminist geography is a sub-discipline of human geography that applies the theories, methods, and critiques of feminism to the study of the human environment, society, and geographical space. Feminist geography emerged in the 1970s, when members of the women's movement called on academia to include women as both producers and subjects of academic work. Feminist geographers aim to incorporate positions of race, class, ability, and sexuality into the study of geography. The discipline has been subject to several controversies.
The geography of women examines the effects geography has on gender inequality and is theoretically influenced by welfare geography and liberal feminism. Feminist geographers emphasize the various gendered constraints put in place by distance and spatial separation (for instance, spatial considerations can play a role in confining women to certain locations or social spheres). In their book Companion to Feminist Geography, Seager and Johnson argue that gender is only a narrow-minded approach to understanding the oppression of women throughout the decades of colonial history. As such, understanding the geography of women requires a critical approach to questions of the dimensions of age, class, ethnicity, orientation and other socio-economic factors. An early objection to the concept of geography of women, however, claimed that gender roles were mainly explained through gender inequality. However, Foord and Gregson argue that the idea of gender roles emerges from a static social theory that narrows the focus to women and portrays women as victims, which gives a narrow reading of distance. Instead, they claim that the concept of the geography of women is able to display how spatial constraint and separation enter into the construction of women's positions. In 2004, theorist Edward Said critiqued the idea of geographical spaces in such a context where actions on gendered practices of representation are fabricated through dominant ideological beliefs.
Official source
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