ABSTRACT
In recent years I have given an annual lecture on feminist geography to the introductory human geography graduate seminar. The story that I tell is this: in the 1970s feminist geographers began a critique of the sexism and masculinism, both institutional and intellectual, of the discipline. Monk and Hanson (1982) described the varied ways that geographers ignored the everyday lives of women, from their choice of research topics to their analyses of empirical evidence. Other feminists envisioned rebuilding the city to better accommodate women (MacKenzie, 1989). The objectives of feminist geographers were clear: to make space for women, in the concrete, everyday practices of the university and beyond, and in the knowledges that we produce about these worlds. By the 1990s, the organising objectives were more diffuse. It became less clear how or even whether women could or should be united across differences of sexuality, race and class. Bell and Valentine (1995), for example, recommended that feminist geography and geographies of sexuality be ‘divorced’, or at least temporarily separated to assess whether they could co-inhabit the same intellectual space. My lecture, nevertheless, ends with the assertion that feminist geography can accommodate all of these differences because it is now about the geographical production of difference, not just gender difference, but a range of other marginalising differences as well (e.g. sexuality and race).
