Geography Department - Macalester College

This course is intended to familiarize the student with the various topics, interests and debates within feminist geography. Over the course of the semester we will investigate how gender relations shape different spaces and places. We will also look at how we 'read' power relations by exploring the symbolic and material construction of spaces/places. Specifically the class will ask: how do gender, race, class, and sexual orientation intersect to produce differing experiences of particular places? We will approach these questions from a variety of scales, including the body, home, state, and environment. This class stresses the importance of these geographic questions to our everyday lives. The course begins by asking what feminism has to do with geography; we then discuss the tools used by feminist geographers before we explore a series of sites expanding out from the body from the local to the global.

Readings:

Spaces for Reminisim in Geography (Staehlei, Martin)

Presidential Address: Geography and Feminism: Worlds in Collision? (Hanson)

Mapping Race and Gender in the Academy: The Experiences of Women of Colour Faculty and Graduate Students in Britain, the US and Canada (Mahtani)

Displays of Everyday Relations between gender and the visibility of domestic work in the modern Finnish kitchen from the 1930s to the 1950s (Saarikangas)

Female Masculinity (Halberstam)

Looking at Landscape: The Uneasy Pleasures of Power

(Re)negotiating the 'Heterosexual Street' (Valentine)

Housing and American Life

The Hoover in the Garden (Miller)

The Meaning of Home Workplaces for Women (Ahrentzen)

As the World Turns (Hanson)

For Whom Shall We Write? (Pulsipher)

Researching Visual Materials

Paradoxical Space: Geography, Men, and Duppy Feminism (Butz and Berg)

Toward a More Fully Reflexive Feminist Geography (Kawabata)