ABSTRACT
Feminist geographers rely extensively on personal narratives to understand the intersections between gender, space and place, for instance in examining whether the gender of the author, researcher, others discussed in the narrative and reader makes any difference in how the work gets produced and received. Narratives about women's experiences of work, home, family, travel and migration spatially and temporally locate authors and others within their cultural and material circumstances. Feminists have been placed very differently in relation to nationalism according to their colonial and post-colonial positioning. Merchant, in her influential book The Death of Nature, traces the transition, from the sixteenth century on, from nature conceived as an omnipresent mother and living feminine principle, to nature as still female but now a terrain to be subjugated. A number of feminists have used Foucault's conceptualisation of a disciplinary society to study the production of docile female bodies through practices such as dieting, exercise and cosmetic surgery.
