Building on a trans-disciplinary, feminist project that foregrounds the bodies of those at the ‘sharp end’ of various forms of international activity, such as immigration, development and warfare, the chapters included in this book cover a variety of sites, concerns, and hopes. These range from the fraught geopolitics of marriage and birth in Ladakh, India, to the fate of detained migrant children in the U.S., and from the human rights abuses of women and children in Uzbekistan to the body politics of aid workers in Afghanistan. The collective aim is to expose the force relations that operate through and upon those bodies, such that particular subjectivities are enhanced, constrained, and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited, and often abandoned. Oriented around issues of security, population, territory, and nationalism, these chapters expose the proliferating bodies of geopolitics, not simply as the bearers of socially demarcated borders and boundaries, but as vulnerable corporealities, seeking to negotiate and transform the geopolitics they both animate and inhabit. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography.

What can unfold from an engagement of feminist issues, concerns and practices with the geopolitical? How does feminism allow for a reconfiguration of how these two elements, the geo- and the -political, are understood and related? What kinds of objects can be located and put into motion? What kinds of relations can be drawn between these? What kinds of practice become valued? And, what is glossed or rendered absent in the process? In this thought-provoking and original contribution, Deborah P. Dixon cautions against the exhaustion of feminist geopolitics as a critique of both a classical and a critical geopolitics, and points instead to how feminist imaginaries of Self, Other and Earth allow for all manner of work to be undertaken. Importantly, one of the things they provide for is a reservoir of concerns, thoughts and practices that can be reappropriated to flesh out what a feminist geopolitics can be. While providing a much-needed, sustained interjection that draws out achievements to date, the book thus gestures forward to productive lines of inquiry and method. Grounded via a series of globally diverse case studies that traverse time as well as space, Feminist Geopolitics feels for the borders of geopolitical thought and practice by navigating four complex and corporeally-aware objects of analysis, namely flesh, bone, touch and abhorrence.

When women took to the streets during the mass protests of the Arab Spring, the subject of feminism in the Middle East and North Africa returned to the international spotlight. In the subsequent years, countless commentators treated the region’s gender inequality as a consequence of fundamentally cultural or religious problems. In so doing, they overlooked the specifically political nature of these women’s activism. Moving beyond such culturalist accounts, this book turns to the relations of power in regional and international politics to understand women’s struggles for their rights. Based on over a hundred extensive personal narratives from women of different generations in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, Nicola Pratt traces women’s activism from national independence through to the Arab uprisings, arguing that activist women are critical geopolitical actors. Weaving together these personal accounts with the ongoing legacies of colonialism, Embodying Geopolitics demonstrates how the production and regulation of gender is integrally bound up with the exercise and organization of geopolitical power, with consequences for women’s activism and its effects.

This handbook provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary gender and feminist geographies in an international and multi-disciplinary context. It features 48 new contributions from both experienced and emerging scholars, artists and activists who critically review and appraise current spatial politics. Each chapter advances the future development of feminist geography and gender studies, as well as empirical evidence of changing relationships between gender, power, place and space. Following an introduction by the Editors, the handbook presents original work organized into four parts which engage with relevant issues including violence, resistance, agency and desire: Establishing feminist geographies Placing feminist geographies Engaging feminist geographies Doing feminist geographies The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies will be an essential reference work for scholars interested in feminist geography, gender studies and geographical thought.

Feminist Spaces introduces students and academic researchers to major themes and empirical studies in feminist geography. It examines new areas of feminist research including: embodiment, sexuality, masculinity, intersectional analysis, and environment and development. In addition to considering gender as a primary subject, this book provides a comprehensive overview of feminist geography by highlighting contemporary research conducted from a feminist framework which goes beyond the theme of gender to include issues such as social justice, activism, (dis)ability, and critical pedagogy. Through case studies, this book challenges the construction of dichotomies that tend to oversimplify categories such as developed and developing, urban and rural, and the Global North and South, without accounting for the fluid and intersecting aspects of gender, space, and place. The chapters weave theoretical and empirical material together to meet the needs of students new to feminism, as well as those with a feminist background but new to geography, through attention to basic geographical concepts in the opening chapter. The text encourages readers to think of feminist geography as addressing not only gender, but a set of methodological and theoretical perspectives applied to a range of topics and issues. A number of interactive exercises, activities, and ‘boxes’ or case studies, illustrate concepts and supplement the text. These prompts encourage students to explore and analyze their own positionality, as well as motivate them to change and impact their surroundings. Feminist Spaces emphasizes activism and critical engagement with diverse communities to recognize this tradition in the field of feminism, as well as within the discipline of geography. Combining theory and practice as a central theme, this text will serve graduate level students as an introduction to the field of feminist geography, and will be of interest to students in related fields such as environmental studies, development, and women’s and gender studies.

This clear and concise introductory textbook guides students through their first engagement with geopolitics. It offers a clear framework for understanding contemporary conflicts by showing how geography provides opportunities and limits upon the actions of countries, national groups, and terrorist organizations. This second edition is fundamentally restructured to emphasize geopolitical agency, and non-state actors. The text is fully revised, containing a brand new chapter on environmental geopolitics, which includes discussion of climate change and resource conflicts. The text contains updated case studies, such as the Korean conflict, Israel-Palestine and Chechnya and Kashmir, to emphasize the multi-faceted nature of conflict. These, along with guided exercises, help explain contemporary global power struggles, environmental geopolitics, the global military actions of the United States, the persistence of nationalist conflicts, the changing role of borders, and the new geopolitics of terrorism, and peace movements. Throughout, the readers are introduced to different theoretical perspectives, including feminist contributions, as both the practice and representation of geopolitics are discussed. Introduction to Geopolitics is an ideal introductory text which provides a deeper and critical understanding of current affairs, geopolitical structures and agents. The text is extensively illustrated with diagrams, maps, photographs and end of chapter further reading. Both students and general readers alike will find this book an essential stepping-stone to understanding contemporary conflicts.

This book brings together scholars from across a variety of academic disciplines to assess the current state of the subfield of popular geopolitics. It provides an archaeology of the field, maps the flows of various frameworks of analysis into (and out of) popular geopolitics, and charts a course forward for the discipline. It explores the real-world implications of popular culture, with a particular focus on the evolving interdisciplinary nature of popular geopolitics alongside interrelated disciplines including media, cultural, and gender studies.

Geography is a subject which throughout its history has been dominated by men; men have undertaken the heroic explorations which form the mythology of its foundation, men have written most of its texts and, as many feminist geographers have remarked, men's interests have structured what counts as legitimate geographical knowledge. This book offers a sustained examination of the masculinism of contemporary geographical discourses. Drawing on the work of feminist theories about the intersection of power, knowledge and subjectivity, different aspects of the discipline's masculinism are discussed in a series of essays which bring influential approaches in recent geography together with feminist accounts of the space of the everyday, the notion of a sense of place and views of landscape. In the final chapter, the spatial imagery of a variety of feminists is examined in order to argue that the geographical imagination implicit in feminist discussions of the politics of location is one example of a geography which does not deny difference in the name of a universal masculinity.

A field-defining collection of new voices on gender, feminism, and geography.

Mapping Women, Making Politics demonstrates the multiple ways in which gender influences political processes and the politics of space. The book begins by addressing feminism's theoretical and conceptual challenges to traditional political geography and than applies these perspectives to a range of settings and topics including nationalism, migration, development, international relations, elections, social movements, governance and the environment in the Global North and South.