Facets of Constructed Space, continued

In time, though, after socialist-feminists began to take a closer look at Marxism, there came to be disillusionment with the Marxist view and the fact that, while it had served as a launching off point for critique, it still largely ignored the primary importance of gender in the construction of culture and nature. Indeed, there were some feminists who would have had the prominence of gender issues be changed to the exclusion of any other systemic alterations (Women and Geography Study Group, 1984). If, as Johnston et al assert, "Postmodernism has been very fruitful. It has opened up a wider space for the engagement of feminism and Marxism than would otherwise have been available" (1994), then Susan Friedman's 1998 book Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter might represent a move beyond both earlier male-female dualities and economistic preconceptions of culture alike.

Friedman's perspective and her idea of "locational feminism" might be summed up as postmodern, humanistic geography with gender at the center. She says:

"I attempt with the term geographics to crystallize momentarily a new, rapidly moving, magnetic field of identity studies. Interdisciplinary in scope, this new field represents a terrain of common concerns and rhetoric that crisscross boundaries between the humanities and social sciences...Geographics involves a shift from the discourses of romanticism to those of postmodernity, with a stop in between for the metaphorics of early-twentieth-century modernism, whose emphasis on split selves and fragmentation looks back to the discourse of organic wholeness and forward to the discourse of spatialized flux. Instead of the individualistic telos of development models, the new geographics figures identity as a historically embedded site, a positionality, a location, a standpoint, a terrain, an intersection, a network, a crossroads of multiply situated knowledges...This geographic discourse often emphasizes not the ordered movement of linear growth but the lack of solid ground, the ceaseless change of fluidity in the nomadic wandering of transnational diaspora, the interactive syncretisms of the 'global ethnoscape,' or the interminable circuitry of cyberspace." (1998)

If this perspective represents a theoretical down-sizing, it is right in line with what others are advocating as an answer to the elitist machinations of the messianic global market (embodied, for example, in the WTO)--a geographic issue if there ever was one. The answers to a variety of our crises, including environmental calamity and persistent class-, race-, nation-, and gender-based inequality, lie not in hegemonic goals of disciplinary primacy or legal victory for particular social movements (appropriated messianism), but more in the psychological, emotional, moral and radically local concerns. Above all, anti-objectivist perspectives help to remind us that formalized and institutionalized knowledge is not inherently good, and force us to ask personal questions such as, "How do I know what I know," or even more importantly, "Why do I desire to know anything at all?"