Feminist geographies in Aotearoa New Zealand: cultural, social and political moments

Abstract

Place, culture and time are significant in our gendered experiences as teachers and scholars of feminist geography. Our context is complex, situated, sometimes joyful and sometimes hurtful, but also intriguing and exciting. Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it also has given legal personhood to a river. During the 2017 national election a young Pākēha (New Zealander of European descent) woman lead her party to victory while a young Māori (Indigenous New Zealander) woman was ousted as head of her political party. The former secured the leadership of her party six weeks out from election day; the latter became a spokeswoman and advocate for those negotiating the intersections of poverty, motherhood and ethnicity. In this Country Report, we reflect on our current political and cultural context to highlight some of the common themes Aotearoa New Zealand-based feminist geographers have been exploring in research, teaching and praxis. We have published this piece as a network of feminist geographers, the Women and Gender Geographies Research Network (WGGRN), which is an alliance of people who learn, teach and research gender in geography and related disciplines throughout the country. We have embraced this acronym to express the collective nature of the knowledge making process. In writing this piece, our preference was to not italicise words from te reo Māori (the Māori language) that are

Gendered geographies of resistance, resilience and reworking in Aotearoa feminist geography scholarship

“…Feminist geography in Aotearoa has produced waves of collective work on social, cultural and political moments, as an alliance of people who learn, teach and research gender in geography (see Adams‐Hutcheson & Johnston, 2019; Longhurst & Johnston, 2015; Puāwai Collective, 2019; Women and Gender Geographies Research Network of Aotearoa New Zealand et al, 2019). This special issue also draws on the collective strength of work that charts feminist and sexual geographies ‘down under’ (Johnston, 2018; Johnston & Longhurst, 2008; Longhurst, 2008), which are both similar to, and different from, feminist geographies from ‘elsewhere’.…”