Feminist Geographies “Beyond” Gender: de-Coupling Feminist Research and the Gendered Subject

Abstract

Increasingly feminist geographers are breaking the ties between feminist research and gendered subjects, envisioning feminist scholarship “beyond gender.” How did this trend emerge? This essay traces some of the significant shifts within feminist thinking that allowed the breakdown of such boundaries within feminist scholarship, and uses historical and contemporary examples primarily from feminist geography to illustrate that incomplete, and continually contested, transformation. I suggest that the history of feminist geographers' work to address critical questions about gender, race, and sexuality from outside the discipline has resulted in feminist projects that include, but are not limited to, a focus on gendered subjects. I argue that far from being finished intellectual projects, feminist geographies “beyond gender” represent new avenues for research about knowledge production, difference, and oppression. Who conducts research and what they study matters deeply for the scope and relevance of geographical scholarship as a whole, and contemporary feminist geographies point the way toward work that needs to be done especially around issues of uneven applications of intersectional analysis and the importance of race and postcolonial theory for geography.