Thinking About Making a Difference

Abstract

This article works across disciplines: politics, geography and social and cultural theory. Issues of space and body are brought to bear on how we think about the question 'making a difference'. By considering difference in terms of the socio-spatial impact of the presence of hitherto socially excluded groups, such as women and racialised minorities, the gendered and racialised nature of the body politic and most specifically its 'elite' positions is brought into focus. The co-existence of women and 'black' and Asian MPs in Westminster demonstrates how these 'groups' are both historically and conceptually 'space invaders'. This positionality underlies a series of social processes which illustrate how their very presence is a disruption as well as a continual negotiation. While accepting the agnostic perspective that there are 'no guarantees' that the arrival of these 'new' bodies will articulate a different politics, in terms of policy outcomes and political debate, this article asserts that the sociological terms of their presence deserves in-depth attention.I can remember very clearly a sight which often used to strike me when I was nine or ten years old. I lived then on the outskirts of Manchester, and 'going into town' was a relatively big occasion; it took over half an hour and we went on the top deck of a bus. On the way into town we would cross the wide shallow valley of the river Mersey, and my memory is of dank, muddy fields spreading away into a cold, misty distance. And all of it-all of these acres of Manchester-was divided up into football pitches and rugby pitches. And on Saturdays, which was when we went into town, the whole vast area would be covered with hundreds of little people, all running around after balls, as far as the eye could see. (It seemed from the top of the bus like a vast, animated Lowry painting, with all the little people in rather brighter colours than Lowry used to paint them, and with cold red legs.) I remember all this very sharply. And I remember, too, it striking me very clearly-even as a puzzled, slightly thoughtful little girl-that all this huge stretch of the Mersey flood plain had been entirely given over to boys. I did not go to those playing fields-they seemed barred, another world (though today, with more nerve and some consciousness of being a space invader, I do stand on football terraces-and love it) (Massey 1996, 185).The sheer maleness of particular public spaces and women's experience of increasingly occupying them while still being conscious of being 'space invaders' even while they enjoy these places is vividly captured by Doreen Massey. Westminster has also been a space that has been given over to men, and has, over time, witnessed the increased entry of women and 'other' excluded groups, such as racialised minority groups. When minorities or hitherto excluded groups enter institutions that have for a long time been dominated by men (usually white and 66 NIRMAL PUWAR from a specific social class), people are generally inquisitive to know whether these 'newcome...

On Objects and Actions: Situating Self-Objectification in a System Justification Context

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An Ethnographic Investigation into Gender and Language in the Northern Ireland Assembly

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The Irish legislative gender quota: The first election

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“…Women entering politics are contrasted against the 'naturalised' male inhabitants (Puwar, 2004). Their presence is queried and behaviour scrutinised, which, in turn, contributes 'to a notion of women as out of place and unnatural in the political sphere' (Falk, 2010, p. 37;Puwar, 2004).…”