Doreen Massey
Massey's 2013 book Space, Place, and Gender "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.
From Intro to Space, Place & Gender:
"The concern is not with the geography of women but with the construction of gender and gender relations. Moreover, intellectual work as a feminist involves not only working on gender but also, and I think in the end perhaps even more importantly, it involves confronting the gendered nature of our modes of theorizing and the concepts with which we work. Thus I want to argue that certain of the (always culturally specific) 'masculine' elements in the currently dominant constitution of the concepts of space and place have become problematical in these times. The issues around conceptual dualisms of General introduction 13 the either/or variety, around concepts of place-identity which call upo exclusivity and boundedness, and the sentimentalized association of plac with home are examples of such elements. All of these are currently not serving us well; they have run into blockages both intellectual and political. The aim, however, is not to substitute a 'feminine' view for a 'masculine' one (though it may be to substitute a particular variant of a feminist one), but rather to problematize the whole business. The argument is that some currently widespread and significant ways of conceptualizing space and place are constructed in the same manner as, and both reflect and affect, the contemporarily dominant western modes of conceptualizing gender. And so it is that the papers in this collection move from an awareness of spatial differences in the construction of gendered persons, through to a questioning of the relationship between, on the one hand, the current, culturally specific, construction of these genders and, on the other hand, certain aspects of our conceptualization of space and place."
From Massey's March 2016 obituary in the guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/27/doreen-massey-obituary):
"Through her politically engaged books and essays, Doreen Massey, who has died aged 72, electrified geographical scholarship. From the 1970s onwards, her writings on space, place and power inspired generations of geographers and many others, including creative artists and trade unionists. From challenging the tendency to blame poor regions for their own poverty to articulating a progressive politics of place, she shaped a passionate belief that unequal spatial relations could, and should, be different.
Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984) demonstrated that a Marxian approach to uneven regional development and capitalist production could be combined with an attention to the dynamic trajectories and cultures of particular places. The essays in Space, Place and Gender (1994) brought a feminist perspective to the rethinking of power relations. Her concept of “geometries of power” drew attention to the ways in which different people and places experienced processes such as globalisation.
Central to her contribution was her “relational” approach to understanding space and place. Rather than seeing space dispassionately as a surface on which phenomena were distributed, she theorised space in a much more lively and contested way as a constellation of different trajectories of activity.
While she saw the role of capital as significant in the production of space, she viewed it as having a less determinant role than other radical geographers, notably David Harvey. This position was informed by a politically hopeful stance. If space was unfinished and in the course of being produced, she argued that there was also the possibility for it to be politicised and created in different and potentially more equal ways. In her article A Global Sense of Place (1991), she proposed that places were still significant and were being reworked through processes of globalisation rather than annihilated by it."