ABSTRACT
The subject of this book is feminist geopolitics, a field of inquiry that sheds light on the lives of people across the globe, which aims to produce knowledge that helps people improve the condition of their lives, and which also draws attention to how those conditions are shaped by all manner of political, economic, cultural and environmental factors. This is a very broad brush opening, and one that I offer cautiously. It does not distinguish feminist geopolitics from other critical fields of inquiry by virtue of its objects of analysis, nor does it direct specific lines of research. In other words, the usual criteria by which we can identify the differences between one field of inquiry and another are absent here. The reason for my caution is that this issue of difference is one that feminist scholars have returned to time and again as they work through such thorny philosophical issues as essentialism (that is, difference as a matter of the distinctness and autonomy of objects/events) and transcendentalism (wherein difference emerges from the relations between phenomena), and as they undertake to make a practical difference to people’s lives. Eschewing both an originary moment and a narrow substantive focus, feminist inquiry is arguably an approach that feels for the borders of thought and practice. Such a concern for difference – what it is, how it locates people, ideas and practices, and what it implies about these – problematises at the very outset the question of what is a feminist geopolitics?
