Abstract
While feminism has a long history with international relations and has made significant contributions to our understandings of war, its use of geography to do so has been relatively slow to develop. This chapter will look at this issue, and ask why it has been so difficult to develop the field of feminist geopolitics. It will argue that feminist geopolitics has indeed emerged, but not a single feminist geopolitics; it might be better expressed that there are multiple feminist approaches to geopolitics. However, most of these approaches agree that the function of a feminist geopolitics is a normative one, and that the frameworks should be based on ‘peopling.’
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Notes
- 1.
Another good example is Koch (2011) who looks at gender and the romanticisation of war: by looking at the binary of men as ‘protectors’ and women as ‘dependants,’ she is able to look at the use of militarisation in the nation-building process in Uzbekistan.
- 2.
See King (2016) for discussion of how women in the military are divided by men into two groups: sluts and bitches.
- 3.
Her inclusion of Max Headroom (otherwise all too absent from academic discourse) and his disembodied nature is also welcome, a trick missed by much cyberpunk, such as the various incarnations of Ghost in the Machine.
- 4.
For Hyndman (2004), early feminist geography was unsatisfying for two main reasons: a bias in terms of sources (‘Anglo-North American’); a singular focus on socialism. However, feminist geography later sees a cultural turn which ‘shifted more attention to spatialized processes of radicalization and racism’ (Hyndman 2004, 308).
- 5.
Staeheli (2001) sees the distinction between political geography and geopolitics in this way: ‘I see political geography as encompassing much more than geopolitics… the reduction of political geography to geopolitics is one reason there appears to be little room for feminist approaches within the sub-discipline’ (Staeheli 2001, 187).
- 6.
Especially slow in east Asia: see Chiang and Liu (2011).
- 7.
- 8.
As Mackenzie (1999) points out, ‘[f]eminist geography, like feminism as a whole, is not “only” about women’ (Mackenzie 1999, 419). Hyndman (2000) argues that this tradition has long held as geography expanded beyond ‘a “geography of women” or “gender and geography” to a thoroughly feminist geography’ (Hyndman 2000).
- 9.
- 10.
Staeheli and Kofman (2004) point out that political geography has ‘emphasized trends and changes at an aggregate level, rather than with respect to an individual or a specific territory. Empirical research within political geography often is based on information from the latter, but that information is quickly abstracted to provide an argument at a higher level of generalization’ (Staeheli and Kofman 2004, 4). This is one area in which political geography has certainly taken on board Staeheli’s criticism. Over the last decade, there has been a considerable movement towards disaggregation in political geography (see Chap. 6). It has long been recognised that geography needed to pay close attention to its units of analysis (see Openshaw (1984)); over the past few years, geography as a discipline has made enormous advances in this regard, and the rate of change continues to accelerate.
- 11.
Staeheli and Kofman (2004) argues that the discipline of political geography itself is masculinist: ‘[i]t yields a kind of knowledge that is claimed to be universal (or at least all-encompassing) and impartial. Feminist political geographers, however, challenge the masculinism of political geography by reworking its basic concepts and the practices involved in knowledge creation’ (Staeheli and Kofman 2004, 5).
- 12.
On this notion of peopling, Hyndman (2007) looks to Maria Ruzicka, who was an activist who helped push a bill through the US Congress for compensation for Afghan and Iraqi victims of the war. She and her driver were killed on the way to the airport in Baghdad in April 2005. ‘Ruzicka’s efforts were an expression of feminist geopolitics to the extent that they destabilized dominant geopolitical discourse by peopling it and by mobilizing the USA that invaded Iraq in the name of national security to provide some material security for the injured civilians and the families of those killed in that very invasion’ (Hyndman 2007, 43).” See also Ó Tuathail (1996) on Maggie O’Kane and the anti-geopolitical eye, plus Fluri (2009) for an analysis of the geopolitics of violence from below, using the case of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).
- 13.
- 14.
For more on feminist geography and positionality/reflexivity/situatedness, see (Rose 1997).
- 15.
For more on this, see Stevens (1973).
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Pickering, S. (2017). Feminist Approaches to Geopolitics: Beyond the Geopolitics of Gender. In: Understanding Geography and War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52217-7_3
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