ABSTRACT
New feminist work in geography has (at least) two disciplinary discourses within which it participates: geography and feminist theory. This chapter offers an overview of feminist theory concentrating on those aspects that have been particularly relevant to work in the social sciences. And feminist theory in turn needs to be understood in its relationship to a larger historical context of academic enquiry, in order to reveal something about both its past and future. Needless to say, in taking an incoherent amalgam of diverse work and artificially producing a coherent historical narrative called ‘feminist theory’ I have necessarily left more things out than I can cover. I have decided to focus more on ideas than on specific people, on critiques of reason and methodology more than on substantive explanatory theories, and on Anglo-American theory more than any other. So what follows is decidedly only a part of the story.
