ABSTRACT
And, moreover, whatever the brain might do when the professions were open to it, the body remained? (Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1977, page 10)
In this paper, the consequences of these statements are examined – Smith’s argument that all workers are embodied, and Atwood’s and Woolf ’s recognition that embodiment is gender differentiated – for understanding the ways in which women’s experiences as waged workers differ from
While this article reveals the ways a feminist approach to performance can inform geographies of work, it also represents a productive intersection between cultural and economic geography. The “cultural turn” in economic geography can be thought as consisting of two related lines of inquiry. On the one hand we see a focus on the rising importance of a symbolic economy in which images, meanings, and experiences are increasing central to economic value chains (see Zukin, p. 431). On the other hand, we see new interpretations of economic activities that focus on their discursive, symbolic, and (in the case of McDowell and Court) embodied qualities. Thus, echoing the argument made also by Peter Jackson (p. 413), culture and economy should not represent two mutually exclusive categories of social life. Instead, as McDowell and Court show, economic activities have a deeply cultural dimension, and can be subject to the same kind of cultural analysis that traditionally might have only been contemplated in some far-flung village among “traditional natives.”
