Progress in Human Geography 33(1) (2009) pp.
74–80
Geography and gender: what belongs to
feminist geography? Emotion, power
and change
Joanne Sharp*
Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Key words: affect, emotional geographies, gender, politics, power.
I Introduction
I have found writing these progress reports
much more difficult than I imagined. As a
result (I would like to think) of the influence
of feminists or (as I think is more likely) the
cultural turn, gender has become ubiquitous,
a now accepted marker of identity and dif-
ference alongside class, ethnicity and race.
As I noted in my first report, almost anything
written in the more critical part of human
geography in recent years could be included
in these reports. And herein lies the problem.
What should be included in these reports?
What makes these reports about gender
rather than research methods (in the case
of my first report), political geography (my
second), cultural geography (this one),
economic and so on?
Could it be that the ubiquity of gender
has now made it invisible, emptying it of its
power? The title of this my third and final
report paraphrases Nancy Miller: ‘What – if
anything – belongs to feminism?’ she wonders.
‘Doesn’t it all become cultural studies, if
we don’t “privilege gender”?’ (quoted in
Friedman, 1998: 33). We would probably
*Email: jo.sharp@ges.gla.ac.uk
© 2008 SAGE Publications
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want to substitute ‘cultural geography’ for
‘cultural studies’ but the theme remains the
same. Friedman wants a return to a feminist
project from the multiplicity of feminisms
of the previous decade. ‘If feminist critics
abandon the “privileging” of women and
gender transformations in favor of a diffused
progressivism, then who can be trusted to re-
sist the heroic forces producing gender back-
sliding and backlash?’ (Friedman, 1998: 33).
In this context, I want to consider the
relationship between feminist and cultural
geographies. We should perhaps not be too
surprised that the first feminist journal in
geography is entitled Gender, place and culture.
It has been noted that cultural geography
is an obvious ally for feminist geography
(Jacobs and Nash, 2003; Sharp, 2004). Not
only does cultural geography share with
feminism a desire to challenge instrumental
reason as the dominant form of knowledge,
but also an understanding of the power of
representation through which it has been
possible to theorize the sex-gender distinc-
tion and thus the constructedness of ‘men’
and ‘women’ in different times and places;
DOI: 10.1177/0309132508090440

and also therefore the possibility of resisting
this power (Jacobs and Nash, 2003: 268).
There are many common points of interest
between feminist and cultural geographies
but also places where many feminists are
wary of the direction cultural geography
might take them. More recent developments
into non-representational theory and actor-
network theory have, for example, offered
feminists an important critique of the some-
times overdetermining discursive analyses
that came to dominate cultural geography.
However, these approaches, while inter-
esting in examining the effects of micro-
practices of everyday life, are perhaps too
descriptive for the overtly political aims of
much feminist geography which seeks to
describe not only how it is that women and
men are guided towards particular identities,
roles and practices, but also how to intervene
to change them. The recent rise in interest in
emotional geographies and concepts of affect
might see cultural and feminist geographies
coming closer still. However, what has perhaps
most characterized the discussion around
emotions recently has been the debate be-
tween those who focus more on ‘emotion’ (on
the whole, feminist geographers) and those
who prefer the term ‘affect’. As Tolia-Kelly
(2006: 213) has noted, the rise of these two
approaches has been ‘simultaneously con-
joined and separate because of their subject
matter, language, their political vision and
genealogies’.
II Emotional geographies
In 2001, Anderson and Smith could say that
there was little talk of emotion in geography,
and when it was mentioned it came from
cultural and feminist corners of the discipline,
something that came as no surprise to them:
‘The gendered basis of knowledge pro-
duction is probably a key reason why the
emotions have been banished from social
science and most other critical commentary
for so long’ (Anderson and Smith, 2001: 7). In
the history of western thought, the binaries
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Joanne Sharp: Geography and gender 75
that structure knowledge of the world placed
emotion on the side of the feminine, opposing
the enlightenment ideal of the rational, ob-
jective masculine knower. The recent rise
of interest in emotions in geography would
seem evidence of yet more influence of fem-
inist geography in the discipline. Davidson
and Bondi (2004) argue that ‘geographies of
emotional life’ contribute to and are rooted
in feminist geography (see also Parr, 2005).
The first indication of interest in emotional
geographies emerged in writing about meth-
odology. Discussions about the difficult and
often contradictory emotions involved in the
research process moved from the space of in-
formal conversation into the space of formal
reflection on the research process (Bondi,
2005a). Fieldwork especially can be a very
emotional experience and the emotional
work of qualitative research has attracted sig-
nificant study (Laurier and Parr, 2000; Cupples,
2002; Bondi, 2003; 2005b). However, Bondi
(2005b) notes that quantitative research pre-
sents no fewer emotional challenges, although
their form may be different (on attempts to
develop a feminist politics of emotion through
geospatial technologies, see Kwan, 2007).
Second, though, is a range of pioneering
feminist work which has emerged with the
aim of understanding the role of emotion as
a part of the making and remaking of the
social (Bingley, 2003; Davidson and Milligan,
2004; MacKian, 2004; Davidson et al., 2005).
Davidson and Milligan (2004: 523) draw out
the links between emotion and space evident
in language, reminding us that ‘we speak of the
“heights” of joy and the “depths” of despair,
significant others are comfortingly close or
distressingly distant’ (see also MacKian, 2004),
arguing that ‘emotions are understandable
– “sensible” – only in the context of particular
places (Davidson and Milligan, 2004: 524).
Davidson (2003) has examined the emotive
geographical expressions of various psycho-
logical states such as agoraphobia and an-
xiety. Others have focused on other emotions
– for example, in the engagement of forms
76 Progress in Human Geography 33(1)
of masculinity in film (Aitken, 2006; 2007);
consumer culture (Ettinger, 2004; Heenan,
2005); vulnerability (Philo, 2005), grieving
(Robinson, 2005) – and emotional work
(Kawale, 2004; Lea, 2006), although anxiety
appears particularly frequently (eg, Colls,
2004; 2006; Boswell-Penc and Boyer, 2007).
It has been noted that this interest in
emotion may be a reflection of changes in
contemporary society where neoliberal
notions of the internalized individual have
made emotion a commodity to be consumed
as a spectacle or a target for therapeutic
intervention. However, rather than viewing
emotions as the internal expression of sub-
jective identity, feminist conceptions of
emotion have tended to focus upon the inter-
connections inherent in understandings of
emotion.
III Connecting emotions
While feminist geographers’ attempts to
place emotions beyond the confines of
the individual subject appear similar to the
more-than-human focus of the study of
affect, the ways in which this has been con-
ceptualized are quite different. Theorists
of affect have tended to base their work on
a critique of representation and therefore
want to move towards conceptualizing post-
humanist networks (Thrift, 2004; Lorimer,
2005; 2008; McCormack, 2007). This has led
some feminist geographers to claim others
have reimposed the public-private boundary
onto a vision of public affect and private
emotion, disavowing a feminized ‘personal’.
As Thien (2005) puts it:
Emotion as a ‘personal quality’ is perceived
as a discrete, contained and containing space.
The jettisoning of the term ‘emotion’ in favour
of the term ‘affect’ seems compelled by an
underlying revisiting, if in a more theoretically
sophisticated register, of the binary trope of
emotion as negatively positioned in opposi-
tion to reason, as objectionably soft and impli-
citly feminized. In this conceptual positioning,
these transhuman geographies re-draw yet
again not only the demarcation between
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masculinist reason and feminized emotion, but
also the false distinction between ‘personal’
and ‘political’ which feminist scholars have
extensively critiqued. Instead, affective geo-
graphies should draw our attention exactly
because they dissolve such public/private
boundaries (Harding and Pribram 2002).
(Thien, 2005: 452)
Thien is critical of work on affect that moves
towards the ‘transhuman’, being beyond or
after human, as going too far in abandoning
the subject.1 Bondi (2005a) makes a similar
point:
While Thrift (2004) often uses the terms emo-
tion and affect more or less interchangeably,
he tends to associate the former (emotion) with
specific, nameable states (joy, shame, envy,
pride, etc), empirically attributable to or claimed
by individualized and mobilized subjects, and
the latter (affect) with that which is pre- or
extra-discursive, non-individualized and mob-
ilized conceptually rather than empirically. In
so doing, he follows nomenclature generally
preferred by psychologists, who have tended
to associated emotion more with cognition
… and affect more with the body. (Bondi,
2005a: 437)
While feminist geography might want to
highlight interconnection, it might be more
resistant to abandoning the notion of sub-
jective experience and the importance of
recording these in research. Perhaps this is
because, as Bondi has highlighted (2005b),
feminists come from the margins to begin
with and so value the ability to make space
within which to be heard.2 Bondi (2005a)
thus argues that the feminist version of
emotional geography will retain a central
role to the discursive due to the significance
feminists pay to the accounts articulated
by the marginalized figures in their research
(but also see Parr, 2006, for an example of
a psychotherapeutic practice that relies on
expression through art and nature rather
than speech; and Wood, 2002, on emotions
in music). Drawing on Ekman (2003), Wood
and Smith (2004: 534) highlight the place of

emotions at the intersection of the personal
and social; the ‘physical manifestation of
emotional experiences in facial gestures,
crying and laughter, are readily recognized
even if not easily understood’. However,
Rose (2004: 559) warns not to equate the
emotional ‘with the inexpressible; some
feelings may be hard to express, but others
are not’.
In her version then, Thien (2005: 453)
offers a feminist model that is not distanced
or technocratic: ‘An emotional subject offers
an intersubjective means of negotiating our
place in the world, co-produced in cultural
discourses of emotion as well as through
psycho-social narratives … Irigaray builds her
ethical/political agenda on the knowledge
that we are only autonomous vis-à-vis our
relationships.’ Bondi (2005a; 2005b) presents
an emotional geography that links subjects
through the bonds of the psychotherapeutic
relationship (which has at its core ‘meaning
making’ between people).
IV Emotions as transformative
Tolia-Kelly (2006: 213) has argued forcefully
that the literature on affect has been ‘par-
ticularly inattentive to issues of power; ne-
gated is a focus on geometries of power
and historical memory that figure and drive
affective flows and rhythms’. This absence
of power therefore overlooks the differing
capacities that individuals have ‘to affect
and be affective’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2006: 213). She
argues that a historicist account is necessary
to be attentive to these differences – it is not
just undifferentiated bodies that are caught
up in these networks of affect but specific
bodies carrying (representational) burdens
of meaning, expectation and ability.
Again this emerges from the location of
feminist critique in geography. Despite the
apparent mainstreaming of gender in geo-
graphy, feminist geography still operates on
the discipline’s margins, remaining acutely
aware of the structuring effects of discursive
categories:
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Joanne Sharp: Geography and gender 77
We might ask whether the fact that social
relations of labour and gender and collective
political protest slip from view in some accounts
of the performative is a problematic loss for
feminist geography or a subversive slippage in
the cycle of citational reiterations of categorical
versions of identity. Houston and Pulido
argue that non-representational accounts of
performativity risk reifying ‘the minutiae of
everyday practices’ and replace materiality
(historical and embodied praxis) with a fluid
and contingent notion of ‘embodiment’. This
implies physicality and sensuous experience,
yet is suspiciously disconnected from the
labouring body and from contradictions of
labour and capital (2002 p404). (Jacobs and
Nash, 2003: 274)
The mundane – yet still vitally important –
categories of age, sex, ethnicity, race and
dis/ability do not feature in the topography
of affect. Thrift and others may seek to
avoid ‘the reduction of the world to familiar
accounts of meaning, value and signification.
If this is an escape from those categorical
fixes, it also risks unintentionally reinstating
the unmarked, disembodied, but implicitly
masculine subject’ (Jacobs and Nash, 2003:
275).
So, many feminist accounts still strive to
produce progressive counter topographies
(Katz, 2001) in collaboration with women
across the world through these literatures.
But it would seem that the geographies of
emotion and, particularly, affect are remark-
ably limited at present. These are not travelling
theories. The interest in emotional geography
and affect has barely made it across the
Atlantic, let alone into the workings of feminist
geographies outside of the Anglo-American
tradition. Yet there is much emotional geo-
graphies can offer to feminist geographies.
Quoting Taylor and Rupp, Bosco (2007: 546)
highlights the importance of ‘emotional
labour’ in ‘the acts of channelling, transfor-
ming, legitimating and managing one’s and
other’s emotions and expressions of emotions
in order to cultivate and nurture the social net-
works that are the building blocks of social
movements’. He argues for the importance
78 Progress in Human Geography 33(1)
of understanding the emotional dynamics
of movements in order to understand the
ways in which they are built and mobilized,
and to develop a conceptual framework
where emotions ‘can be harnessed for pro-
gressive social change’ (Bosco, 2007: 549;
Kwan, 2007, wants to use a feminist GIS to
create affective stories of the conditions of
the marginalized to similarly effect change).
Similarly, Ettinger (2004: 41) wants to think
beyond ‘essentialist interpretations of emo-
tions that separate them from rationality
and freeze them in time and space’:
My question is, how might we understand an
individual’s disarticulation from her or his local
work, social, family, avocational, and/or other
communities, and how might we identify this
disarticulation so that we can subsequently
link it proactively to others’ disarticulations and
develop fruitful collective action? (Ettinger,
2004: 26).
This sentiment closely parallel’s Sarah
Ahmed’s influential reflections on feminist
pedagogy which similarly seeks to develop
connections for transformation. She con-
siders that feminist pedagogy can be thought
of ‘in terms of the affective opening up of
the world through the act of wonder, not as
a private act, but as an opening up of what is
possible through working together’ (Ahmed,
2004: 181):
The politics of teaching Women’s Studies, in
which feminist pedagogy becomes a form of
activism as a way of ‘being moved’, is bound
up with wonder, with engendering a sense
of surprise about how it is that the world has
come to take the shape that it has. Feminist
teaching (rather than teaching feminism)
begins with this opening, this pause or hesit-
ation, which refuses to allow the taken-for-
granted to be granted. In the Women’s Studies
classroom, students might respond firstly
with a sense of assurance (‘This is the way
the world is’), then with disbelief (‘How
can the world be like this?’) and towards a
sense of wonder (‘How did the world come to
take this shape?’). (Ahmed, 2004: 182)
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V Conclusion
There is undoubtedly a danger of the incor-
poration of emotions into neoliberal cultures
of individualized psychological well-being,
which might distract us from the collective
into the introspection of individual life, that
it distracts from other – dare I say more im-
portant, more immediate – politics. But the
emphasis on the political manipulation of
emotion/affect is key, and indeed offers a
necessary line of examination for geography.
Taking this further, could it not be argued
that there is an important sense of emo-
tional or affective hierarchy for feminist geo-
graphy? This would be an approach which
insists that there is a necessity for countering
dominant emotional/affective economies
with one based around feminist concerns,
connecting emotional politics back up with
a politics of representation to wonder at how
the patriarchal world is as it is and to be angry
at the continuing daily survival strategies
enacted by the majority of the world’s
women. It is perhaps this which can articulate
that which belongs to feminist geography:
My own relationship to feminism has always
been imbued with hope, a hope that things
can be different, and that the world can take
different forms. Politics without hope is imposs-
ible, and hope without politics is a reification of
possibility (and becomes merely religious).
Indeed, it is hope that makes involvement in
direct forms of political activism enjoyable:
the sense that ‘gathering together’ is about
opening up the world, claiming space through
‘affective bonds’. (Ahmed, 2004: 184)
Notes
1. Interestingly, this appears to go against Haraway’s
(1988) feminist vision of the emancipatory prospects
for the human-technological hybrid.
2. This is similar to Mascia-Lees et al.’s (1989) claim
that poststructualism deconstructed the subject
just as marginalized figures had come to achieve
subjectivity. This leads me to wonder which human
states are to be abandoned in posthumanism.
As Thien (2005: 452) argues, ’These moves can
surely only be made when and where power is
already (with)held’.

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