A Feminist Geopolitics?

Reshaping critical geopolitics? The materialist challenge

“…Importantly for my argument here, critical geopolitical scholarship has also pushed beyond the representational in order to examine everyday practices alongside international representations. 39 While concerns regarding the political effects of representational practices have been important to a range of scholars in the field of critical geopolitics, many of those emphasizing the significance of a representational analysis have also highlighted the importance of pushing beyond representation. For example, in an article signalling the importance of affect to the Iraq invasion post-9/11 in 2003, Gearoid O' Tuathail draws on the work of William Connolly to suggest the importance of approaching thought not merely as representational, but as "enactive" of meaning.…”

“…5 Indeed, scholars such as Lorraine Dowler and Joanne Sharp pointed out early in the development of critical geopolitics that such a field of research should be "less dominated by representation and more attuned to actual [embodied] practices". 6 Despite this, and despite the diverse and contested nature of the field, 7 discussions regarding the challenge of the so-called 'materialist turn' seem to have been relatively slow to take hold in relation to the broader framing of critical geopolitics. This reflects an understandable caution regarding the potential determinism of a materialist analysis, particularly in light of the formation of critical geopolitics as a critique both of the racial and environmental determinism of classical geopolitics as well as of the Cold War geopolitical emphasis on geography and resources as determinant of politics.…”

Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life

“…Feminists writing about global/everyday relations, such as Dowler and Sharp (2001), Hyndman (2004), Katz (2004) and Pratt and Rosner (2006) Various examples of recent feminist work make these connections and insist on a 'microscale' geopolitics of the everyday. A rich case in point is Katz's (2004) ' We could see these connections as events, encounters, movements, dialogues, actions, affects and things: the materials that connect and conjoin geopolitics and everyday life.…”

Mind the gap: bridging feminist and political geography through geopolitics

“…The article provides a theoretical framework and concrete illustrations of what a feminist geopolitics might look like and how it can be done. A feminist geopolitics attends to unprecedented transnational economic integration, political transformation, and social dislocation (Dowler & Sharp, 2001 O Tuathail, 1998 (Haruway,199 l; Sparke, 2000).…”