Feminist Geography

For this Library research paper, I decided to focus on a topic of relevance to human geography which is related to the concept of gender, Feminist Geography.

Professor Linda McDowell, teaching at Oxford University, defines feminist geography as "A field that examines the extent to which women and men experience spaces and places differently and how these differences themselves are part of the social construction of gender as well as that of place".

It thus means that men and women, depending on their gender, experience different spatial experiences while they're being categorized as "male" or "female. Researches have been made by Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt to see if a distinction existed between the travel behavior of men and women in North America: Results show that when it comes to commuting patterns, men are more likely to take long trips at the beginning and end of the day while women are more likely to take multiple shorts trips during the day.

Those researches have proven that differences exist between the way women and men experience spaces and places. Geographers are now interested in knowing why those differences appear, as well as how come such differences are still existing in our society. Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt didn't think that the commuting differences they discovered were an intrinsic difference between men and women but that those differences were a phenomenon that have been triggered by economic and social demands, women taking care of their children while men were working in the paid labor force. Feminist geographers have also been interested in comparing women's lives in different cultures and different places and came to realize that gender analyses need to be done depending on the place, the class but also the ethnicity.

Applying methods and theories of feminist thinking help geographers understanding how the cultural processes interact with the environment. They focus on the fact that local cultural and physical realities define or are defined by constructed gender roles and gender identities. It is argued by some feminist geographers that the gender of the researcher may influence the result of the research itself and Longhurst even characterize feminist geographical scholarship as concerned with "the problematic, shifting and ambiguous relationships between selves and others, men and women, centres and margins, and colonizers and colonized" (Longhurst, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24).

The traditional approach of geography limits the research to culture and nature; it has in fact a masculine bias and as a result women's perspectives of things are devalued and concealed. This devaluation is reflected as a result through unequal and unjust policies. Feminist geographers study the same topics as regular geographers but with a focus on gender divisions. They