Mona Domosh

Toward a Feminist Historiography of Geography

Recent attempts to contextualize the history of geography have ignored the gendered construction of much of that history, while arguments for a post-modern human geography have ignored feminist theory. By examining the stories of Victorian women explorers, this essay suggests how women have contributed to the formation of geographic knowledge, and, by implication, asks what can be learned by considering the contribution of womens ways of knowing to our reconstruction of human geography.

Those “Gorgeous Incongruities”: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century New York City

The streets of mid-nineteenth-century New York City were sites of complex social engagements and economic activity. The promenades along both Broadway and Fifth Avenue were highly scripted rituals, where social mores and upper-class values were enacted and embodied on a daily basis. Focusing on analyses of three images, I argue that these streets were also the sites of political activity, but a politics that I define as “micropolitics” of “tactical” transgressions made possible by the structure of these social rituals. By making such an argument, I show how the streets of nineteenth-century cities were neither completely democratic nor totally controlled public spaces. I also provide a broader alternative to thinking about politics, one that understands the complex and contextual nature of human agency, and suggest that our frameworks for thinking about contemporary public space may be blinding us to potential sites of transgression.

Other Figures in Other Places: On Feminism, Postmodernism and Geography

In a recent paper entitled “Travels in the postmodern”, Elspeth Probyn uses the metaphors of local, locale, and location to open up a political dialogue between feminism and postmodernism, providing a particularly explicit example of a more general use of spatial figures in contemporary theoretical debate. These spatial references are not entirely figurative, but allude to our positioning within particular contexts, which both frame and are constructed by our texts. Thus, Probyns dialogue inevitably raises geographical questions. Moreover, geography is not merely a passive, unnamed party through which Probyns dialogue is conducted; it is not immune from or in any way ‘outside’ the situatedness its terminology is employed to articulate. In this context, the metaphorical maps Probyn uses to find her way between the differing terrains of feminism and postmodernism are far from neutral, truthful, transparent representations. In this paper an extension of Probyns travels at the boundaries between feminism and postmodernism is sought by introducing a more active, self-critical geographical voice. The often hidden tensions underlying the linkages between geography, postmodernism, and feminism are explored, and key issues at the interface between critical human geography and feminist deconstruction are brought to the fore.

On the Contours of Public Space: A Tale of Three Women

This article explores the changing contours of the relationship between gender and the distinction between public and private spaces in western cities. Our account returns to the emergence of a modern understanding of public and private spaces to highlight its class and gender connotations. Then, focusing on middle-class womens experiences of public spaces, we use examples from the mid-nineteenth century and the late-twentieth century to illustrate continuities and changes. We emphasize persistent but evolving exclusions from the category “public,” which have been sustained in part by changing delineations of “public space” associated with consumer activities. In developing our argument, we question representations of public spaces invoked in arguments about its decline and argue for a politics sensitive to different experiences of such spaces.

Unintentional Transgressions and Other Reflections on the Job Search Process

In this article I examine connections between my past experiences on the academic job market and my research interests, particularly in regard to the notion of transgression. I offer my personal “story” of job seeking as a contribution to the dialogue concerning the relationships between personal lives and professional experiences, and as a case study of how considerations of merit can become clouded by personal and social discomfort with difference.

A ‘civilized’ commerce: gender, ‘race’, and empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago represents a turning point in American history, a point when the United States moved from an era of nation-building to one of empire-building. This paper examines the links between these eras through an analysis of the ideologies that underpinned two types of exhibits at the Exposition - depictions of Native-Americans, and commercial displays of American products sold overseas. I argue that the turn-of-the-century discourse of civilization that helped legitimize American economic imperialism was formulated from within, and built upon, the discursive construction of Anglo-American/Native-American relationships.

The ‘Women of New York’: A Fashionable Moral Geography

The landscape of mid-19–century New York City was marked by pockets of consumer and leisure spaces. I argue that many of the fears and anxieties generated by this visual efflorescence of consumption focused on what became a socially constructed ‘type’: the New York Woman. The association of moral outrage at the dangers of consumption with spaces inhabited by the New York Woman created what I have called a fashionable moral geography. I suggest that this moral coding of the 19th-century city reverberates in contemporary discussion of late 20th-century cities.

Geoeconomic Imaginations and Economic Geography in the Early Twentieth Century

The geoeconomic discourses that underpinned the commercial expansion of the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century drew on and produced an imagined geography that positioned the United States in the center of a world in which commerce and trade moved freely around a globe comprised of nations whose economic growth potentials were just being realized. Drawing on two case studies of large corporations that expanded outside the United States, and in response to scholarly interrogations of the historicization of geoeconomics and geopolitics, I argue that geoeconomic imaginations fueled and legitimized economic expansion in the early decades of the twentieth century, thus refiguring the narrative that positions geoeconomics as a more recent phenomenon and reconceptualizing the term geoeconomics as a discursive field. In addition, by analyzing the intersections of the discourses of civilization, geoeconomics, and commercial geography, I provide an important new chapter in critical examinations of the histories of geography.

Pickles and purity: Discourses of food, empire and work in turn-of-the-century USA

For the most part, American imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterized by an expansive search to secure markets for its industrial products, not to establish colonies of subjects and/or citizens. In this article, I analyse the story of Heinz Corporation, the first international American food manufacturing company, in order to begin to understand some of the ideological underpinnings of this form of imperialism. I show how and why gendered and racialized discourses of food production and consumption were integral to the successful marketing of manufactured food within the USA and beyond its national borders.

North American spaces/postcolonial stories

10.1191/1474474002eu239xx As nations that have been colonized, and that have in turn acted as colonizers, Canada and the United States share a complex historical imagination and historical geography of national identity formation. In the first instance, as colonies, Canada and the United States formulated stories of statehood drawing on key ideas from the narratives of the European Enlightenment – individualism, equality, citizenship. As the colonizers, they formulated national imaginaries from, in Richard Drinnon’s terms, the metaphysics of Indian-hating and/or Indian-loving.1 These stories set Canada and the United States apart from the ‘Old World’ nations who had colonized them, and above the native cultures they have colonized. In this sense, as national discourses formulated from within historical colonial relationships, but which are constantly re-enacted in contemporary politics, these are postcolonial stories. Although Canada and the United States share a relationship to British imperialism, the diverse experiences of the two nations point to the complexly differentiated contours of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and postcolonialism everywhere. 2 In the case of Canada, the legacies of diverse European metropoles, British and French, exerted profound impacts on the national polity and imaginary. Today, demands by diverse indigenous groups across that country for political autonomy and sovereignty are increasingly insistent.3 By contrast, in the United States, despite the formal recognition of Indian nations within the nation, and the enduring role of the ‘native’ in American notions of manifest destiny and the frontier,4 there are blind spots in public culture concerning colonial occupation of the indigenous lands of the ‘Americas’. There are, then, important differences between the two countries’ experiences. And yet, given the relative silence in the United States surrounding native pasts, presents and futures – a introduction cultural geographies 2002 9: 125–128