ABSTRACT
An apologist for traditional fieldwork might well dismiss my initial outline of a critique by arguing that the metaphorization of the field as feminine proves nothing. In the first section of the chapter I seek to address such criticisms by connecting my discussion with some of the more general debates currently circulating about spatial metaphors. In particular, I draw on writing by Cindi Katz (1993) and Neil Smith, who argue that spatial metaphors become politically problematic when they introduce a fixed and fixing notion of absolute space.2 Masculinist geographical imaginations of the field as a feminized, separate and containable space, work with, or so I will argue, just such a de-historicized conception of absolute space. It is also a conception which, to recall the argument of the French geographers interviewing Foucault, owes a great deal to the strategic geo-politics of the military. It evokes the battlefield; and, just as military conceptualizations of space are connected directly with the violence of war, so too do masculinist formulations of the field of fieldwork have quite literal implications.
