Space, Place and Gender E-Book

Doreen Massey

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 589

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This new book brings together Doreen Massey's key writings on three areas central to a range of disciplines. In addition, the author reflects on the development of these ideas and outlines her current position on these important issues.

The book is organized around the three themes of space, place and gender. It traces the development of ideas about the social nature of space and place and the relation of both to issues of gender and debates within feminism. It is debates in these areas which have been crucial in bringing geography to the centre of social sciences thinking in recent years, and this book includes writings that have been fundamental to that process. Beginning with the economy and social structures of production, it develops a wider notion of spatiality as the product of intersecting social relations. In turn this has lead to conceptions of 'place' as essentially open and hybrid, always provisional and contested. These themes intersect with much current thinking about identity within both feminism and cultural studies.

Each of the themes is preceded by a section which reflects on the development of ideas and sets out the context of their production. The introduction assesses the current state of play and argues for the close relationship of new thinking on each of these themes. This book will be of interest to students in geography, social theory, women's studies and cultural studies.

Leseprobe

Space, Place and Gender

Doreen Massey

Polity Press

Copyright © Doreen Massey 1994

The right of Doreen Massey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1994 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Reprinted 1996, 2004, 2007

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-6775-1 (Multi-user ebook)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10 on 12pt Garamond ITCby Acorn Bookwork, Salisbury, WiltsPrinted and bound in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxford

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

General Introduction

PART I SPACE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS

  Introduction

  1   Industrial Restructuring versus the Cities

With Richard A. Meegan

  2   In What Sense a Regional Problem?

  3   The Shape of Things to Come

  4   Uneven Development: Social Change and Spatial Divisions of Labour

PART II PLACE AND IDENTITY

  Introduction

  5   The Political Place of Locality Studies

  6   A Global Sense of Place

  7   A Place Called Home?

PART III SPACE, PLACE AND GENDER

  Introduction

  8   Space, Place and Gender

  9   A Woman’s Place?

With Linda McDowell

10   Flexible Sexism

11   Politics and Space/Time

Index

Acknowledgements

Industrial restructuring versus the cities’, written with Richard Meegan, first appeared in Urban Studies (1978), vol. 15, pp. 273–88, and is published by kind permission of Carfax Publishing Company. ‘In what sense a regional problem?’ first appeared in Regional Studies (1979), vol. 13, pp. 233–43, and is published by kind permission of the Regional Studies Association. The paper was originally presented to a Regional Studies Association conference entitled ‘The death of regional policy’. ‘The shape of things to come’ first appeared in Marxism Today, April 1983, pp. 18–27. ‘Uneven development: social change and spatial divisions of labour’ first appeared in Uneven Re-Development: Cities and Regions in Transition edited by Doreen Massey and John Allen and published by Hodder & Stoughton in association with the Open University (1988), pp. 250–76; it is published here by kind permission of Hodder & Stoughton and the Open University. ‘The political place of locality studies’ first appeared in Environment and Planning A (1991), vol. 23, pp. 267–81, and is published by kind permission of Pion Press Limited. ‘A global sense of place’ first appeared in Marxism Today, June 1991, pp. 24–9. ‘A place called home?’ first appeared in New Formations (1992) no. 17, pp. 3–15, and is published by kind permission of Lawrence & Wishart. ‘Space, place and gender’ forms part of a public lecture delivered at the London School of Economics Gender Institute, which was first published in the LSE Magazine, spring 1992, pp. 32–4. ‘A woman’s place?’, written with Linda McDowell, first appeared in Geography Matters: a reader edited by Doreen Massey and John Allen and published by Cambridge University Press in association with the Open University (1984), pp. 128–47; it is published here by kind permission of Cambridge University Press and the Open University. ‘Flexible sexism’ first appeared in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (1991) vol. 9, pp. 31–57, and is published by kind permission of Pion Press. ‘Politics and space/time’ first appeared in New Left Review (1992) no. 196, November-December, pp. 65–84, and is published by kind permission of New Left Review. I should particularly like to thank Richard Meegan and Linda McDowell for agreeing to my including articles which were written jointly with them.

The articles collected here cover a considerable period. Over those years I have worked with and learned from a large number of people, both inside and beyond academe. I should especially like to thank Richard Meegan with whom much of the earlier work was done, when we were both working at the Centre for Environmental Studies, and my colleagues in geography at the Open University. A number of the articles were written in the context of courses for the OU, either directly as part of a course, or emerging from the constantly provocative discussions in ‘course-team meetings’.

The period over which the articles were written (the late seventies to the present) was as a whole a fairly turbulent one. What is pleasing is that, from the early skirmishings with neo-classical location theory, through the debates over locality studies, to the more recent exchanges over postmodernism and feminism, disagreements in print have not overwhelmed personal friendships.

Finally, I should like to thank Rebecca Harkin of Polity for encouraging me to undertake this project, and Doreen Warwick of the Open University for her help with its physical production.

General Introduction

The terms space and place have long histories and bear with them a multiplicity of meanings and connotations which reverberate with other debates and many aspects of life. ‘Space’ may call to mind the realm of the dead or the chaos of simultaneity and multiplicity. It may be used in reference to the synchronic systems of structuralists or employed to picture the n-dimensional space of identity.1 Likewise with place, though perhaps with more consistency, it can raise an image of one’s place in the world, of the reputedly (but as we shall see, disputed) deep meanings of ‘a place called home’ or, with much greater intimations of mobility and agility, can be used in the context of discussions of positionality.

The papers in this collection pull out a few threads from the enormous complexity of this field and put the case for a particular way of thinking of space and place. It is not the only way in which they can be thought about; both concepts are incredibly mobile and I have no wish to take issue with that in principle. Nor are the views advanced here simply incompatible with all others. There are other lines of debate about space and place which derive their impetus from different questions and which concentrate on different issues. The conceptualizations presented here do not pretend to be exhaustive. What the papers collected here do is focus on particular aspects of the ways in which space and place are commonly conceptualized, in daily and political life as well as in academe. The arguments emerge from particular debates and respond to issues which I see as having lent to space and place especially problematical readings in recent years. This does mean, therefore, that there are some ways of thinking of space and place which I do want to argue against. The aim is to put forward alternative readings which are appropriate to these times.

The central thread linking the papers is the attempt to formulate concepts of space and place in terms of social relations. Throughout, there is an assumption that one aspect of those relations which is likely to be important is that of class. It was from work on the class relations within industrial geography that the arguments emerged. There is another focus developed here, however, and that is the intricacy and profundity of the connection of space and place with gender and the construction of gender relations. Some of this connection works through the actual construction of, on the one hand, real-world geographies and, on the other, the cultural specificity of definitions of gender. Geography matters to the construction of gender, and the fact of geographical variation in gender relations, for instance, is a significant element in the production and reproduction of both imaginative geographies and uneven development. The papers here, and the introductions to Parts I, II and III, draw out some of these interconnections.

But there are also other levels at which space, place and gender are interrelated: that is, in their very construction as culturally specific ideas – in terms both of the conceptual nature of that construction and of its substantive content – and in the overlapping and interplaying of the sets of characteristics and connotations with which each is associated. Particular ways of thinking about space and place are tied up with, both directly and indirectly, particular social constructions of gender relations. My aim is to unearth just some of these connections (other writers have highlighted others, and there are presumably still more). The implication is that challenging certain of the ways in which space and place are currently conceptualized implies also, indeed necessitates, challenging the currently dominant form of gender definitions and gender relations.

The most abstract and perhaps the most complex version of the proposed view of ‘the spatial’ is presented in the final paper in this collection: ‘Politics and space/time’.

Central to that paper is the argument that space must be conceptualized integrally with time; indeed that the aim should be to think always in terms of space–time. That argument emerged out of an earlier insistence on thinking of space, not as some absolute independent dimension, but as constructed out of social relations: that what is at issue is not social phenomena in space but both social phenomena and space as constituted out of social relations, that the spatial is social relations ‘stretched out’. The fact is, however, that social relations are never still; they are inherently dynamic. Thus even to understand space as a simultaneity is, in these terms, not to evacuate it of all inherent dynamism. The initial impetus to insist on this came from an urge to counter those views of space which understood it as static, as the dimension precisely where nothing ‘happened’, and as a dimension devoid of effect or implications. But the argument was buttressed by debates in other disciplines. In biology, Mae-Wan Ho was arguing that ‘form is dynamic through and through’, a formulation which neatly undermines any idea of the temporal as process and the spatial as form-which-is-therefore-lacking-in-process. It is only in our experience, Ho goes on to argue, that things are held fast, if only for a second. ‘There is no holding nature still.’ Physics, since the beginning of the century, had been advocating similar views. Thus Minkowski: