Feminism and Geography

Geography is a subject which throughout its history has been dominated by men; men have undertaken the heroic explorations which form the mythology of its foundation, men have written most of its texts and, as many feminist geographers have remarked, mena s interests have structured what counts as legitimate geographical knowledge. This book offers a sustained examination of the masculinism of contemporary geographical discourses. Drawing on the work of feminist theories about the intersection of power, knowledge and subjectivity, different aspects of the disciplinea s masculinism are discussed in a series of essays which bring influential approaches in recent geography together with feminist accounts of the space of the everyday, the notion of a sense of place and views of landscape. In the final chapter, the spatial imagery of a variety of feminists is examined in order to argue that the geographical imagination implicit in feminist discussions of the politics of location is one example of a geography which does not deny difference in the name of a universal masculinity.