Pamela Moss

Negotiating spaces in home environments: Older women living with arthritis

Within medical geography there has been a surge of interest in applying critical concepts in social theory to empirical settings, including those for persons with disabilities. The ways through which persons with disabilities negotiate space vary widely according to material and social experiences of being disabled. For older women, chronic illness as a type of disability shapes the way in which they approach their daily lives with respect to both the physical and social aspects of their home environments. In the first half of the paper, conceptually, I take a relational view of space and argue that household, as a narrow reading of domestic space, needs to be replaced by home environment which incorporates more fully age- and ablement-sensitive readings of the spaces constitutive of domestic space. This lays the basis for a contextualized socio-spatial understanding of the ways older women with chronic illness negotiate the spaces in home environments because it accounts for the disadvantaged positionings of access to power and resources as well as the uneven distributions of income based on gender, age, and (dis)ability. It also takes into account the material and social aspects of being disabled. In the second half of the paper, I present case studies of three older women diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis to illustrate these arguments.

Inquiry into Environment and Body: Women, Work, and Chronic Illness

The recent call for the reorientation of analysis in medical geography to more critical approaches has been met with both enthusiasm and caution. Critical theories of health and health care services are emerging, which complement the well-developed focus on the spatial aspects of disease and service delivery. Yet in reconceptualising the links between place, space, and health, care must be taken in theorising in context experiences of health and illness. By context we mean the richly textured social formation wherein social relations are threads of a tapestry woven together. One topic which lends itself to such an inquiry is how material and discursive bodies combine to create identities for women with chronic illness around issues of gender and (dis)ability within the context of the wider social political economy. In this paper, we propose a feminist political economic analysis of environment and body as an addition to the critical frameworks emerging in medical geography. We first discuss what a radical body politics entails conceptually. Then we make suggestions with regard to undertaking such inquiry, using in illustration empirical work on womens reshaping of their environment in response to chronic illness. This type of investigation extends previous work on the formation of womens identities, experiences of chronic illness, and the materiality of everyday life. Last, we recast the concepts of environment, body, and identity formation while maintaining a commitment to the fluidity of conceptual and material boundaries.

Body, Corporeal Space, and Legitimating Chronic Illness: Women Diagnosed with M.E.

The trendiness in using the body as a unit of analysis does not keep us from trying to understand how the body is part of the mundane stuff that makes up everyday life, particularly the chronically ill body. In our research with women diagnosed with chronic illness, we found that women experience their bodies, both sensorially and in their capacity for labor and leisure, through social scripts, seeming economic imperatives, and their own blood, sweat, and tears. The synchronous existence of the discursively ill and materially ill body seemed to be highlighted in these womens accounts of their experiences of myalgic encephalomyelitis (M.E., popularly referred to as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or CFS). This spurred us to rethink the body in terms not just of embodied social practices but also of embodied experiences. In this paper we draw on womens experiences of M.E. as a way to assist in building a radical body politics. We first review and critique various attempts to come to terms with the simultaneity of the discursive and material body. We then present our empirical study comprised of in-depth interviews with women diagnosed with M.E. and living in Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We then elaborate the notion of corporeal space as a way to access embodied experience. We close with comments about how body and space create a nexus through which we can access bodily existence within space.

Some rhizomatic recollections of a feminist geographer: working toward an affirmative politics

In celebration of the 21st anniversary of Gender, Place and Culture, I have taken the opportunity to argue for an affirmative politics for feminist geography. I offer a set of rhizomatic recollections of individualized moments of limit experiences that I have encountered in my own academic practice as a feminist geographer. Although perhaps not as transformative as one might expect, the limit experiences I write about are at the very least an attempt to garner attention to those experiences that transform us into academic subjects. As reflections, these recollections are an experiment in the practice of writing as part of an affirmative politics – a collective project valuing potential and possibilities. Through the writing, I assist this collective effort by many colleagues in orienting the wider projects of reflexivity, autoethnography, and autobiographical writing away from the undermining charge of being narcissistic habits borne out of the harsh criticism of not engaging the power that swirls around us toward the affirming claim of being part of a sustainable ethics whereby researchers and scholars can write from an embodied, embedded self through recounting their own intellectual and social practices.

Positioning a Feminist Supervisor in Graduate Supervision

As part of feminist praxis in the academy, students increasingly want to engage in activist research as part of their training. Yet such research, especially that engaging participatory methods, takes time—building collaborative relationships, designing collective research projects, undertaking research and writing up results. As a feminist graduate research supervisor, the author is in a quandary: How to negotiate the relationships among her own penchant for activist research, student research interests in social change and the institutional imperatives for degree requirements? In an attempt to defer some of her angst, she engages in a reflexive exercise to position herself as a feminist supervisor through the literature on graduate supervision. Once graduate supervision has been conceptualized as both a process of subjectification and, at the same time, a site of resistance, then being in a quandary matters less, because the author comes to be more comfortable with her unsettled positioning as both complex and messy.

Spaces of Resistance, Spaces of Respite: Franchise housekeepers keeping house in the workplace and at home

ABSTRACT As a contribution to a growing geography of domestic labour, I offer this micro-scale study as a glimpse into the lives of franchise housekeepers. This study sheds light on the ways women cope with their labour both in the workplace and at home. Scrutiny of the womens ordinary actions and reactions to their labour demonstrate how they devise coping strategies through mundane, common, everyday acts and forge spaces of resistance and respite. I discuss these strategies and spaces by drawing on in-depth interviews with 14 women employed in housekeeping services franchises.

Still searching for the Promised Land: placing women in Bruce Springsteen’s lyrical landscapes

By telling stories about the unevenness of the ideal of the Promised Land, Bruce Springsteen drenches landscapes with individualized renderings that speak to a collective sense of being American and living in America.Yet what is lost in this detail is the awareness that males dominate the American imaginary, that Americans are men, and that their America is masculine. A close, critical reading of Springsteen’s lyrics via Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of ontological positivity and becoming-woman reveals complexities embedded in his American imaginary, ones rife with iconic images that assist in figuring out how women come to be an intricate part of the story without being the subject of the tale. In reading Springsteen’s lyrical landscapes, ones crafted through the ideal of the Promised Land, I use the unexplored hook of man as subject as a positive mechanism of becoming to show how the lyrics work to place women vis-a-vis men’s journeys to the Promised Land.

Reviews: Scholar's Choice, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-And-Imagined Places, Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping the Social Imaginary

My favorite book at the moment is Bill Maurcr\s brilliant Recharting the Caribbean (1997)—and not just because it contributes to Caribbean studies. Maurcr works poststructuralist identity theory through rich empirical material and delivers a model for research on space/politicaleconomy/identity. I have found Paul Gilroys The Black Atlantic (1993) repays reading and rereading. Gilroys arguments about racializcd identities at the heart of modernity and its geographies make a whole lot of sense to me. Liisa Malkkis study of politics and identity Purity and Exile (1995), based on ethnographic fieldwork, can be read as an exciting example of how political geography could be rethought and practised—although this was not anthropologist Malkkis aim in undertaking her research. A not insignificant accounting of globalization may be found in Nancy Schcper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargents disturbing collection Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (1998). The book contains a range of essays each addressing particular aspects of what is happening to children in todays world. Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things (1997) is a powerful novel set in South India. I was gripped by it.

Culture/Place/Health

likely to see stories of reservation experiences that reify their identities. Sandwiched between these two chapters is a fabulous elaboration of national and sexual identities as performed in The Crying Game, another classic. Carl Dahlman brings into sharp relief the conflation of violent sexual and geopolitics that calls ‘‘masculinism’’ into question as a political pawn in something much larger. In a somewhat related chapter, Christiane Schönfeld takes us back to early German film to suggest that modern space and modern bourgeois identities are destabilized by the character of a madman in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (a silent classic that I am afraid I have not seen). Another jewel in this section is Paul Robbins’s wonderfully personal and illuminative essay towhich I referred earlier.Hewrites about his experiences as an extra in Disney’s live action film, The Jungle Book. Robbins’s concerns are about the day-to-daymachinations of film production on site and, as such, they open new avenues for film studies in geography Trained as an ethnographer, Robbins uses his skill to elaborate the complex, contradictory, andFespecially Fracist encounters that are part of Disney’s production. In the section on pedagogy, I particularly liked Nick Brigham and Sallie Marston’s chapter on the tensions between global processes and local outcomes as witnessed in two very different films. The chapter is primarily about pedagogy, and the authors do well to turn the text (with some lovely twists) toward traditional teaching concerns in geography. Similarly, John Gold focuses on a class exercise and how the myth of documentary realism can help illuminate the production and process of townplanning. I liked Ulf Strohmayer’s essay very much, although his focus is not on pedagogy in a traditional sense and the work could have just as well been placed in the identities section of the book. I have not seen the French film that constitutes the focus of his analysis. Nonetheless, Strohmayer’s piece reminded me of Giuliana Bruno’s penetratingworkon Italian film, and it is written verywell. Like Kirsch’s work, Strohmayer’s essay is strongly related to the central issues of the book. Also like Kirsch, Strohmayer focuses on moving visual spectacle and identity transformations. The final two chapters focus more specifically on the practice of critical pedagogy and what might be called postpedagogy. Wolfgang Natter uses three relatively wellknownmovies to engage the construction ofwhiteness.He elaborates ‘‘fictive’’ racial geographies inMatewan, Avalon, and Bulworth and faces us with the moral imperative of renegingon‘‘whiteflight’’ so thatwecan take responsibility for the many visible and invisible privileges of whiteness (p. 268). The ending chapter, by Chad Staddon and his (many) colleagues/students, frames courseworkonEastern Europe within the rubric of critical pedagogy. His way of communicating knowledge focuses on dialogue and praxis before lecture and instruction. This way of knowing, as Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren (1994) articulated it, gives students a voice in the classroomandempowers them elsewhere. Staddon and his students use film effectively to deconstruct their own political identities. Movies are about movement, and, as such, they are fundamentally different from other representations.Movement requires a different way of knowing and a more flexibleacademicpractice.Standard textual andvisualmetaphors and methods do not apply to the mobilities (and identities) that are part of film. MoreoverFand perhaps most importantlyFthe study of movies loses its edge if it is reduced to language games and analysis of static visual symbolism. With Engaging Film, I encounter a different emphasis, one that engages fluidity rather than fixity and, for the most part, does not attempt to impose structure on transformational and liberating visual imagery. It is a very readablevolumeofessays that substantiates the importance of film study in geography and geographic study in film.