Facets of Constructed Space: Capital and Gender

The Marxist and feminist geographies that came about in the 1970s might be thought of as complementary sides of a die. The social transformations that had begun in the decade before had stirred up institutions and disciplines far and wide; at first the critiques must have been quite like the throws of folks playing a collective dice game, saying, "We have reason to believe we have not been throwing correctly. Let's try some new approaches, some new angles, some new positions, and see what happens." No one could have known for sure what would come about, but in geography, it is fair to say, there developed a radical orientation, that is, a normative and proactive stance that aimed to break with the mere quantification goals of the recent past, and instead to accept the primacy of geographic and spatial analyses in social science, in all social and cultural considerations.

In this sense, new geography sought to broaden geographic considerations from the narrower econo-political issues of industrial location and other mapping activities to the more vital, value-laden realms of ghettoization, spatially-correlated gender-role reproduction, etc. Marxist and feminist critiques were (are) to a great extent aiming at the same target--positivist and reductionist disciplinary inbreeding and complicity in the perpetuation of the patriarchal, monopoly-capital status-quo--but in somewhat different fashions. Where there has been divergence, it is possible that postmodernism, with its decentralization effects, humanism, with its emphasis on ordinary concerns of ordinary people, and ecology, with its emphasis on interdependence and synergy, can bridge the gaps to some extent or other.

One of the figures associated with bringing Marxism to U.S. geography is David Harvey; Harvey and his ilk were responding to the Quantitative Revolution of the '50s and '60s, which formalized a "long-standing but ill-defined commitment to positivism" (Johnston et al, 1994). Positivism is characterized by particular attention to five Comtean principles: le réel, la certitude, la précis, l'utile, and le relative (Gregory, 1976). While these in effect established the so-called "scientific method," they also, paradoxically, made value judgements about not merely the method but also the role of science (l'utile, le relative). It came to be seen that if an analysis didn't include these facets (especially the first three), if it didn't focus on the measurable, the quantifiable, the capitally useful, the pragmatic pieces in a campaign for mechanistic domination of people, space, and time, then it wasn't scientific.

Massimo Quaini describes that young Italian geographers deserted geography prior to the Quantitative Revolution because they were disillusioned with its hyperdisciplinary nature, thinking of it as "a fragmented, disorganized summary of ideas culled superficially from many other subjects" (Gambi qtd. in Quaini, 1982). It is quite possible that geographers came to be jealous of that other great, spatially-related field which had quantified itself into scientific legitimacy: economics. Economic theory had become a very clear-cut activity, one that encouraged a great deal of attention to itself to no small extent by addressing the issues which made the most powerful people--the industrialists--prick up their ears and pay attention. To save geography from comparative obscurity and marginality, geographers chose to join the enemies instead of attempting in vain to beat them.

Hardly any time passed, though, before there developed a counterrevolution to the quantitative one, a revolution in which Marxist and feminist critiques played an important part. This counterrevolution was, of course, not just a reaction to a stepped-up numbers orientation, but was also a byproduct of general social upheaval, related to civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, etc. If one contends that the Quantitative Revolution was, to some extent, an acquiescence to the aims and needs of the general growth mania that had occurred in the post-war era, then the explorations of new geography beginning in the 1970s were an inevitable side-effect some twenty-five years in the making.