Karen M. Morin

Strategies of Representation, Relationship, and Resistance: British WomenTravelers and Mormon Plural Wives, ca. 1870–1890

During the 1870s and 1880s, several British women writers traveled bytranscontinental railroad across the American West via Salt Lake City, Utah, the capital of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. These women subsequently wrote books about their travels for a home audience with a taste for adventures in the American West, and particularly for accounts of Mormon plural marriage, which was sanctioned by the Church before 1890. “The plight of the Mormon woman,” a prominent social reform and literary theme of the period, situated Mormon women at the center of popular representations of Utah during the second half of the nineteenth century. “The Mormon question” thus lends itself to an analysis of how a stereotyped subaltern group was represented by elite British travelers. These residents of western American territories, however, differed in important respects from the typical subaltern subjects discussed by Victorian travelers. These white, upwardly mobile, and articulate Mormon plur...

Gender, nature, empire: women naturalists in nineteenth century British travel literature

Among the many British women abroad in the late nineteenth century were a number of travellers who toured the American West with a naturalist’s pen and sketchbook. California, with its giant sequoias and redwoods, scenic Yosemite Valley and Sierra Nevada, and the Mediterranean flora of the southern coasts, especially attracted travellers with a naturalist orientation. We examine the botanical and naturalist writings and art of two well-known (and well-heeled) world travellers – Constance Gordon Cumming and Marianne North – and another more obscure British aristocrat, Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster, who travelled in California in the late nineteenth century. We examine relationships among these elite women’s association with the Romantic aesthetic and naturalist traditions, natural sciences, class-based associations between women and flowers, and emergent environmentalism. The works of these women indicate the process by which natural history rhetorics and styles became embedded within gender, class, and imperial relations; and how the division of natural history into professional and amateur domains relegated women to discursive margins.

Peak Practices: Englishwomen's “Heroic” Adventures in the Nineteenth-Century American West

Many Englishwomen explored the mountainous regions of the American West in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, hiking and taking excursions into popular tourist destinations such as the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Valley. This paper examines the writings of seven women who toured these regions and published accounts of their journeys. These elite international travelers produced a complex array of gendered subjectivities in their writings. They represented themselves as actively “conquering” mountain peaks as well as passively waiting for the men to do it, as fearing danger and fatigue but also ridiculing the incompetency of local male guides, and as “resisting” adventure, yet expressing female empowerment and abandonment in it. The paper problematizes “feminine” codes of behavior, first-wave feminism, and convergence of these within nineteenth-century British imperialism and narratives of adventure, to show how conventional as well as more transgressive discourses of Victorian womanhood worked with imperialist...

Security Here Is Not Safe: Violence, Punishment, and Space in the Contemporary US Penitentiary

The US penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, was retrofitted in 2008 to offer the countrys first federal Special Management Unit (SMU) program of its kind. This model SMU is designed for federal inmates from around the country identified as the most intractably troublesome, and features double-celling of inmates in tiny spaces, in 23-hour or 24-hour a day lockdown, requiring them to pass through a two-year program of readjustment. These spatial tactics, and the philosophy of punishment underlying them, contrast with the modern reform ideals upon which the prison was designed and built in 1932. The SMU represents the latest punitive phase in American penology, one that neither simply eliminates men as in the premodern spectacle, nor creates the docile, rehabilitated bodies of the modern panopticon; rather, it is a late-modern structure that produces only fear, terror, violence, and death. This SMU represents the latest of the late-modern prisons, similar to other supermax facilities in the US but offering its own unique system of punishment as well. While the prison exists within the system of American law and jurisprudence, it also manifests features of Agambens lawless, camp-like space that emerges during a state of exception, exempt from outside scrutiny with inmate treatment typically beyond the scope of the law.

Charles P. Daly's Gendered Geography, 1860-1890

The American Geographical Society (AGS) serves as a case study for considering the nature of “gendered geography” in the nineteenth-century United States. This article links the ideals and programmatic interests of the society—which were fundamentally commercial in nature—with the personal subjectivity of its chief protagonist, Charles P. Daly, AGS president from 1864 until his death in 1899. Daly is presented as an “armchair explorer” who shifted the focus of the society away from statistical representations of the world toward the action-packed narrative descriptions of the world supplied by embodied explorers in the field. The gender dynamics associated with the center versus the field provide a useful way to contrast both sides of Dalys persona—as a scholar performing detached, careful study yet someone who also derived a great deal of personal authority by staging popular and dramatic spectacles in New York City, speechifying and presenting himself on stage at geographical society meetings with returning heroic explorers. Daly not only served as New Yorks most influential access point to the Arctic at the time, he also served as an important node in the reproduction of masculine culture in promotion of a particularly masculinist commercial geography.

Geographical literacies and their publics Reflections on the American scene

The well-known geographer Harm de Blij (in Murphy et al., 2005: 168–170), author of Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America (2005) and its later iteration Why Geography Matters: More Than Ever (2012), was interviewed in summer 2011 on a Boston WGBH radio program about the sorry state of American geographical awareness. In the interview, De Blij warned that Americans’ persistent geographic illiteracy constitutes nothing short of a national security risk. ‘We’re in a shrinking world’, De Blij asserted, and ‘our competitors know about us, but we don’t know about them’. As evidence, De Blij recalled that when he speaks to audiences he routinely finds that only about half of those present know whether China borders Afghanistan, one of his ‘litmus test’ examples that confirm over and again a pattern of geographical illiteracy. Yet, later in the interview, De Blij asserted that such ‘place naming’ is not what geography is about anyway. What geography is really about are pressing global issues such as disparities in wealth between cores and peripheries, globalization, and climate change. In fact, the subtitle to De Blij’s 2005 book identifies the challenges facing Americans as climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism. (He added others such as a destabilized Europe and the ascent of India and Brazil in his 2012 volume.) In this commentary, I examine how such slippage around geography’s content presents a problem for studies of American geographical literacy and awareness, and raises serious questions about relationships between academic geography and various publics. I also draw attention to the fact that such discussions around geographical literacy carry significant implications beyond American borders, specifically in how arguments for tackling illiteracy are often associated with particular ‘pro-American’ narratives and ambitions. For starters, we might consider how public knowledge and awareness about de Blij’s (2005) themes of climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism may be quite a bit different than that of any number of ‘map borders’ or ‘longest river’ questions. Thus, whenever a researcher or study defines geography as an array of such place facts, the effect is to reaffirm a definition of the subject from which most geographers want to distance themselves. (And in case you were not sure, China and Afghanistan do share a border.) That said, it seems axiomatic to most that Americans, except those ensconced in the university Ivory

Feminist Groups within Geography

This article outlines the main feminist groups working in geography today – their locations, constituencies, and goals. The article begins with a discussion of the only feminist geography group that is international by design and mission – the International Geographical Union’s (IGU) Commission on Gender and Geography – and then proceeds to outline feminist groups in various regions and countries throughout the world. What constitutes a feminist geography ‘group’ varies considerably by location, but for purposes of this article, will refer mainly to an organization, society, or other formalized group of academic geographers whose research and work advances feminist and/or gender geography, or women’s status in the discipline of geography. Though the essay attempts to cast a worldwide net around feminist groups, its discussion is limited to scholarship, communications, and other sources available in English, and to information retrieved through the US-based feminist geography electronic listserv, Geogfem, which has little membership from Latin America, Asia, or Africa.

Men’s Modesty, Religion, and the State Spaces of Collision

This article examines religious practices in the United States, which govern modesty and other dress norms for men. I focus both on the spaces within which they most collide with regulatory regimes of the state and the legal implications of these norms, particularly for observant Muslim men. Undergirding the research are those “gender equality” claims made by many religious adherents, that men are required to maintain proper modesty norms just as are women. Also undergirding the research is the extensive anti-Islam bias in American culture today. The spaces within which men’s religiously proscribed dress and grooming norms are most at issue—indicated by First Amendment legal challenges to rights of religious practice—are primarily those state-controlled, total institutions Goffman describes, such as in the military and prisons. The implications of gendered modesty norms are important, as state control over religious expression in prisons, for example, is much more difficult to contest than in other spaces, although this depends entirely on who is doing the contesting and within which religious context. In American society today — and particularly within the context of growing Islamaphobia following the 9/11 attacks — the implications are greatest for those men practicing “prison Islam.”

Book review: American commodities in an age of empire. By Mona Domosh. New York: Routledge. 2006. ix + 202 pp.

523 That ‘gardens signify’ and ‘landscapes are contested’ will not surprise cultural geographers. And while Garden plots does not seek to critically engage, at the intellectual level sustained in its core approach, with geographical approaches to landscape, it might well have benefited from this, not least because cultural geography has itself gained much from feminist, psychoanalytical and postcolonial theories. That said, Saguaro offers a valuable, readable perspective on the politics of landscape and identity in recent history and the global reach of even small, anonymous plots.