4 – Feminist geopolitics and everyday life

Question 1

Name two geographers that originated feminist geopolitics.

Answer 1

(Rose, 1993)
(Haraway, 1988)

Question 2

Explore the idea of geography relying on masculinist rationality.

Answer 2

(Rose, 1993) - argued that geography relies on masculinist rationality as most renowned geographers were men, and she believed that one cannot separate themselves from their own body, values and emotions, meaning every geographer’s work has their own context behind it

Question 3

Explore the idea of feminist objectivity within geography/geopolitics.

Answer 3

(Haraway, 1988) - argued for the accommodation of situated knowledges from feminist perspectives

Question 4

How has feminist scholarship challenged critical geopolitics?

Answer 4

It has critiqued the wider masculinist traits of the geographical discipline and has illuminated the centrality of activists, NGOs and civil society groups as agents within the circulation of geopolitical knowledge

Question 5

How does feminist geopolitics act as a ‘third space’?

Answer 5

(Hyndman, 2006) - suggests that feminist geopolitics can be a third space beyond the militarism of stating either/or - allows for element of subjectivity as it ‘seeks embodied ways of seeing’

Question 6

How did the embodied nature of feminist geopolitics allow for exploration into the intersectionality between race and sex?

Answer 6

(Noxolo, 2007) - noted how Katherine McKittrick’s 2006 book Demonic Grounds explores the objectification/commoditisation of black bodies in relation to white bodies, and how the body and the block extend racial-sexual meanings beyond the auction to the global slave economy

Question 7

Define ‘anti-geopolitical’ perspectives.

Answer 7

Perspectives emerging from grassroots or everyday life

Question 8

Describe an example of ‘anti-geopolitical’ persepctives.

Answer 8

(Lawreniuk, 2020) - explored the struggle of garment workers in neoliberal Cambodia, and the effects of authoritarianism from the workers’ perspective

Question 9

Describe the idea of intimate geopolitics.

Answer 9

Intimate geopolitics refers to work that has extended feminist geopolitics’ focus on the body to the role of reproductive health in shaping territorial claims and the role of bodies in everyday life

Question 10

Give an example of intimate geopolitics.

Answer 10

(Smith, 2012) - looked at how reproductive health campaigns seek to limit certain forms of reproduction in various Indian states - links women’s bodies to territorality and community, thus exemplifies geopolitics of bodies