Catherine Nash

Performativity in practice: some recent work in cultural geography

For the appreciation of difference requires the acknowledgment of some point beyond which the dancer cannot go. If she were able to go everywhere, there would be no difference, nothing that eludes. Denial of the unity and stability of identity is one thing. The epistemological fantasy of becoming multiplicity – the dream of limitless multiple embodiments, allowing one to dance from place to place and self to self – is another. What sort of body is it that is free to change its shape and location at will, that can become anyone and travel anywhere?’ (Susan Bordo, quoted in Foster, S.L., 1998: 29).

Reclaiming Vision: Looking at landscape and the body

This paper responds to feminist critiques of the masculinity of the landscape tradition within geography. It draws upon reassessments of the gaze within film theory, art history and cultural studies as well as within representational practice. It does so in order to reclaim the concept of landscape as a theoretical tool and subject of study for a feminist cultural geography. In theorising a reclamation of looking and landscape through a critical feminist approach, issues of vision and space, gender and representation, politics and pleasure are brought forcefully together through considering images of the male body as landscape by two contemporary women artists. While recognising the politics of representation, the aim is to deconstruct ideas of an unproblematic womens vision and of a singular or essential male or female gaze. Despite the way in which the metaphor of the body/land has been employed to justify both approaches to women and the environment and to legitimate colonisation, this paper suggests ...

Lifepaths: geography and biography

Abstract Despite the differences identified in the famous clerihew on the subject, the arts of geography and biography are historically connected. Narratives of the lifepath in western culture have been plotted in an explicitly geographical way, through the metaphor and technique of mapping. This is evident in a variety of forms of life writing: spiritual autobiographies, travel writings, novels, educational texts, sociological studies and memoirs of professional geographers. The papers which follow this introductory essay focus on relations between script and space in the making of life histories, both individual and collective.

Too little, too much: Cultural feminist geographies

This paper traces some of the contours of recent critiques of cultural geography and reflects upon the implications they have for the continuing vitality of a feminist geography concerned with the cultural. The paper seeks to work away from this current disenchantment suggesting that in the field of feminist geography there are explicit intellectual and political imperatives that keep central the field of concerns associated with cultural geographical perspectives. Along the way we examine emergent scholarship on the governance of gender through culture concepts, the idea of gender as a form of foundational ordering grammar, the implications of non-representational claims for feminist scholarship, and the nature of performativity. We conclude by encouraging feminist cultural geography to chart the emergent geographies of relational natures and material cultures that reveal gender as both embodied and discursive, given and enacted.

Geopower: A Panel on Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selection—a corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for arts work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation, and life. In the book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008, Duke University Press, Durham, NC), that is the subject of this panel discussion, Grosz sets out an ontology of art, looking at its forms of emergence as territorialising force, sexual selection, and nonhuman power. In Groszs terms, art is an art of existence. This is not a narrow understanding of art as a practice that is about taste, cultural accomplishment, or a reflection of society, but an art that is—at its most provocative—an extraction from the universe and an elaboration on it. This ‘geoaesthetics’ which is both biospheric and biopolitical, presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time, and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly different kind of biopolitics? And what might Groszs concept of ‘geopower’ offer in terms of a renegotiation of a more active ‘geo’ in geopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise.

Genetics, Race, and Relatedness: Human Mobility and Human Diversity in the Genographic Project

The National Geographic Societys Genographic Project to reconstruct the geography of early human migration through analysis of the genetic material of indigenous people features a geographical imagination of human interconnection and diversity and differentiated human mobilities. It combines its central focus on human genetic difference with a simultaneous insistence on the progressive value of its explicitly antiracist message about shared human origins and interconnections. An apparently progressive language of multiculturalism, diversity, global human harmony, and indigenous rights frames reductive versions of relatedness, unreflexive assumptions of scientific authority, and primitivizing accounts of exotic and isolated indigeneity. Through its focus on bio-political geographies of difference, this article provides a productive contribution to critical geographies of race and a scholarly engagement with new genetic geographies of human diversity in academic geography. It is also a starting point for a political–pedagogical project that uses the Genographic Project against itself as a resource for an alternative critical exploration of race and relatedness.

Border crossings: new approaches to the Irish border

This paper explores and extends recent work on the Irish border that has sought to redress the relative lack of attention to the social, economic and cultural dimensions of the border in contrast to its intense political symbolism. In particular it addresses the theme of border crossing as a way to consider the border in terms of its everyday dimensions and in terms of questions of conventional and reconfigured categories of identity shaped by borderland life. The first section of the paper outlines recent approaches to the Irish border and their relationships to the field of border studies. The second section uses new research material to explore the ways in which the border was experienced on the ground in the lives of those most directly subject to its changing nature over the course of the twentieth century. The final part of the paper addresses recent suggestions that those experiences may form the basis of new cross-border and cross-community ‘border identities’. The term ‘border crossing’ in the papers title thus stands both for the issue of physically crossing the border whose difficulties and effects have been central to the lives of those who have lived near the border, and for recent arguments that shared experiences of the impact of the border may be the basis for new senses of identity and commonality that imaginatively cross the borders of old categories of religion, culture and political affiliation. Recent efforts to reconceptualise border identities are emerging within a context still dominated by more polarised perspectives on identity and history, but they represent one significant strand of engagement with the Irish border. They suggest possibilities for forms of border identities that co-exist with, run counter to or cross cut old categories of division and difference.

Irish Origins, Celtic Origins

In Brian Friel’s most recent play The Home Place, which opened in Dublin in February 2005, the setting is the house and garden of Christopher Gore, a ‘Planter’ landlord in Ballybeg, Donegal, in the summer of 1878. His cousin, Dr Richard Gore, an English scientist and his assistant are staying en route to the Aran Islands as part of their anthropometric survey of ‘racial’ types in Ireland. Their attempt to do some local measuring while visiting ‘The Lodge’ comes just after the murder of an abusive local landlord. Christopher Gore tries to facilitate their work, encouraging his tenants to volunteer for measurement; Con Doherty, a local man, forces them to leave. This local resistance precipitates a crisis in the household and threatens each individual’s negotiations of the intersections of class, blood and belonging. For Christopher Gore the ‘home place’ in Kent was never really home; now Ballybeg can no longer be home. Here Friel dramatises ‘the doomed nexus of those who believe themselves the possessors and those who believe themselves dispossessed’ in terms of the way these categories have been shaped by ideas of inheritance, difference and mixing—ancestral, cultural, material and social. The Home Place stages two entwined issues: the character of the native—in both colonialist racial typologies and in nationalist accounts of spirit, blood and ‘race’—and the presence of the settler, as they were being worked through in late nineteenth-century science, politics and culture. The printed edition of the play includes an extract of a scientific paper published in 1893 in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy that presented the results of an anthropometric survey of the Aran Islands, Co. Galway, by Professor A. C. Haddon. In 1891 Haddon, one of the founding figures of British anthropology, had established Dublin’s Anthropometric Laboratory to study the racial characteristics of Irish people. His work with C. R. Browne on the Aran Islands utilised new anthropometric techniques for the study of ‘racial types’. But it was also part of a tradition of romantic antiquarian, ethnological, linguistic studies and literary accounts which located in these islands a primitive nobility, organic community, purity of race—a Gaelic stock protected by distance from modernity and, for cultural nationalists, Anglicisation. The work of Haddon and Brown was foundational for an extended history of visiting scientists investigating people in Ireland. Their focus on the Aran Islands continued as the tradition of anthropometric measurements was replaced by or supplemented with studies of variation based on blood type in the mid-twentieth century. Serological studies of the 1940s and 1950s both focused on the Aran Islands and other rural areas in the west of Ireland, on blood type variation in general and on the ‘two main racial components’ in Ireland. Between 1931 and 1936 Ireland (in the pre-Partition sense) was the subject of the Harvard Irish Survey, or Harvard Irish Mission as it is also called. Under the leadership of Earnest Hooton of the Anthropology Department at Harvard, the survey sought to investigate ‘the origins and development of the races and cultures of Ireland’ by correlating

Gendered geographies of genetic variation: sex, power and mobility in human population genetics

This article explores the ways in which geographies of human genetic variation are increasingly differentiated in terms of gender, and the ideas of reproduction, sex, power and mobility that underpin their interpretation. It thus seeks to extend recent work on the ways in which the ideas of race and relatedness are being shaped by recent accounts of human genetic variation and evolutionary history within human population genetics by exploring the gendered and sexual imaginaries of this field. At the same time, it seeks to extend feminist geographical work on social reproduction by attending to the figuring of reproduction itself. The article focuses on accounts of the geographies of Y-chromosome variation and the differences between the geographies of Y-chromosome variation and mitochondrial variation, and explores the degree to which this work is underpinned by, and potentially reinforces, particular accounts of gender, sex and the reproductive strategies of women and men. More specifically, I argue that despite some differences between the perspectives of those involved, much of this work deploys a model of male sexual competition that is at the heart of claims about the universal and determined fundamentals of reproduction, and indeed all social life, within evolutionary psychology. Gendered geographies of human genetic variation are being used as evidence for hitherto asserted but unproven claims about human nature. This article is a critical feminist engagement with the renaturalisations of culture within this strand of human population genetics.

The politics of genealogical incorporation: ethnic difference, genetic relatedness and national belonging

ABSTRACT This paper explores the relationship between genomic accounts of ethnic origins and distinctiveness and genealogical models of ethnic and national similarity and difference. It does so by focusing on genetic investigations of Irish Traveller origins in the context of ongoing campaigns for state recognition of Irish Travellers as an ethnic group, and in relation to the politics of national belonging. The ostensibly ethical practice of liberal genomics is entangled with the fraught politics of the Irish state’s commitments to addressing ethnic minority rights, insistence on differentiating between Travellers and other ethnic groups on the basis of genealogical difference, and the genealogical incorporation of Travellers within the national community of shared descent. Though ideas of ancestral relatedness across social or cultural boundaries are often figured as politically progressive, locating groups within a national family tree on the basis of genealogical relatedness can simultaneously deny ethnic difference and naturalize exclusive models of nationhood.