Space & Polity, Vol. 5, No.

3, 165± 176, 2001

A Feminist Geopolitics?

LORRAINE DOWLER and JOANNE SHARP

[Paper ® rst received, July 2001; in ® nal form, September 2001]

Introduction
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Recent debates centring on a nascent feminist geopolitics indite the historical

reasoning of geopolitical arguments as masculinist. These discussions have taken
place in a variety of settings from informal conversations at meetings of the
Association of American Geographers (AAG) to more institutional investiga-
tions, such as a recent survey conducted by the Political Geography Speciality
Group (see Staeheli, in this issue). An unavoidable point of entry to these
debates is the continued relative absence of women in the sub-disciplineÐ partic-
ularly noticeable given the changing gender balance of other parts of geography.
Feminist and other marginal voices have made great impacts on geography
and related disciplines in recent years, but their impact on political geography
has been much slighter. Although political geography has turned to an interest
in the everyday and mundane exercise of power, it has tended to articulate this
in terms of the `cultural turn’ rather than an acknowledgement of the feminist
insistence that `the personal is political’. Nor has there been much attention
given to from where political geography emanates. Political geographers have
decentred the seat of power and engaged in critiques of the orientalism of global
geopolitical discourse but, if anything, political geography has become more
eurocentric in terms of the focus of empirical research. It would appear that
Richard Ashley’s call in 1987 for a ª geopolitics of geopolitical spaceº is still
keenly required of the intellectual spaces of political geography. However, 14
years later we still ® nd little interaction between political and feminist geogra-
phy (with the exception of the emergence of some interesting collaborations
between political, cultural and feminist geographers such as the Politics and
Identity in Place and Space Group (PIPS) at Penn State and a few published
discussions such as Dalby, 1994; Kofman and Peake, 1990; McDowell and
Sharp, 1997; Staeheli, 1996). And yet many feminist and post-colonial geogra-
phers are producing work that is primarily concerned with the politicisation of
the world around us, whether the politicisation of leisure, the body or knowl-
edge about peoples and places around the world. This has required a reconcep-
tualisation of the politicalÐ something which political geographers would

Lorraine Dowler is in the Department of Geography, 302 Walker Building, University Park,
Pennsylvania State University, PA 16802, USA. Fax: 814 863 7943. E-mail: lxd@psu.edu. Joanne Sharp
is in the Department of Geography and Topographic Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow
G12 8QQ, UK. Fax: 0141 330 4894. E-mail: jsharp@geog.gla.ac.uk.

1356± 2576 Print/1470-123 5 Online/01/030165-1 2 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1356257012010438 2
 166 Lorraine Dowler and Joanne Sharp

bene® t from an engagement with. The use of politics in such reconceptualisa-

tions would similarly be enriched through a sustained dialogue with political
geography.
We felt that, at the AAG meeting in New York in 2001, there had been a
signi® cant shift in presentations from those primarily concerned with the critical
analysis of texts and representations to those much more clearly focused on
research `on the ground’ and on struggling with what could be done to make
things better. The prominence of sessions on activist politics and those with a
decidedly feminist approach made it clear to us that new possibilities for
convergence in political and feminist geographies are emerging, if not actually
articulated as such. The idea for this Special Issue of Space & Polity emerged from
our discussions about these themes at the AAG conference. Most importantly,
the issue will offer thoughts on how these interventions from feminist (and
relatedly from post-colonial geographies) might inform developments in critical
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geopolitics, perhaps the part of political geography most responsive to cultural

and interpretative turns. However, we also want to think about the insights that
political geography can bring to feminist and post-colonial analyses. It is
signi® cant that our three contributors each offer different expectations of the
possibilities for greater dialogue between the sub-disciplines, but that each sees
great value in opening up these lines of communication.

Disciplinary Differences
Lynn Staeheli (in this issue) addresses the improbability of a feminist
geopolitics due to an ontological and epistemological impasse between the two
sub-disciplines. A review of some of the major journals and textbooks in political
and feminist geography, as well as a survey of feminist geographers, leads
Staeheli to argue that the boundary between the two sub-disciplines seems
actively maintained on both sides through academic practice. Despite the
inability of the two sub-disciplines to engage, Staeheli encourages practitioners
of both political and feminist geography to carry on building a body of research
that can be used in opposing the systems of inequality in the world. Although
there are clearly issues of identity politics within the discipline, it is important
to note that neither sub-discipline has solely been concerned about issues of
power and inequity.
Political geography has been signi® cantly in¯ uenced by the `cultural turn’ in
geography, and rightly so, as it has broadened the scope of research so
highlighting the hidden and mundane acts of power that structure identities,
interpollate citizen-subjects and therefore create and recreate political communi-
ties and agency. Political geographers have examined the role of language in the
construction of imagined geographies at all scales (Dalby, 1990; O Â Tuathail and
Â
Agnew, 1992), in resistance movements (O Tuathail et al., 1998) and in the media
(Sharp, 2000a). Critical geopolitics is perhaps the most signi® cant emergence
from this period of intellectual endeavour and has generated new understand-
ings of the ways in which political geographies are written at different scales.
The focus of critical geopolitics on the geo-graphing inherent in the articulation
of geography in international relations produced by world leaders, the media
and resistance groups has led to much more sophisticated understandings of the
ways in which knowledges of the world are circulated, but also of how different
geographical models underwrite political understandings of local, national,
 A Feminist Geopolitics? 167

regional and global networks and processes. The emphasis on the entangled
nature of power and knowledgeÐ the creativity inherent in any description of
political worldsÐ represents a widening of the realm of the political to include
the often mundane world of hegemonic culture in the realm of the public but
also in ideas and discourses that comprise the private realm. As such, the
intentions of critical geopolitics are similar to those of feminism and post-
colonial theory which want to point to the hidden and insidious workings of
power throughout the structures of everyday life.
However, just as other areas of geography are reconsidering the impact of the
cultural turn (see Cook et al., 2000), so too should political geography. Perhaps
the concentration on the cultural has been at the expense of society and economy
but more importantly to us here, of the political and geographical elements of
political geography. Perhaps by moving too far into the realm of the cultural, the
political has been undervalued: by labelling all as political, a sense of what
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might comprise more important or more immediate issues have become down-
played. Re¯ ections on the cultural turn have pointed to the increasing emphasis
on representation and identity, at the expense of some of the material aspects of
the world around us. By shifting attention from the actor to the actionÐ as
post-structural approaches insistÐ some of the important historical contexts for
struggle have been hidden.
Although critical geopolitics might offer very eloquent deconstructions of
dominant political discourse, there is often little sense of alternative possibilities.
It offers an important critical intervention but the critique is constantÐ where is
it possible to stand to enact radical politics? Where, as an intellectual and political
project, can critical geopolitics go from here? Important interventions have been
made and there will always be a need to analyse the distortions of powerful
geopolitical discourse; however, can there be a more constructive side to critical
geopoliticsÐ a more positive politics? In the case of this Special Issue, this
constructive side takes form in putting forth a feminist geopolitics, an embodied
position where different scales of analysis come together.
Moreover, there are limitations of the type of critiques offered by critical
geopoliticians. A number of commentators have noted that, just as the formal
actors of international politics have been disembodied, offering a `spectator’
theory of knowledge, so too are their critical geopolitical commentators undiffer-
entiated by the marks of gender, race, class, sexuality or physical ability (Sharp,
2000b). Critics stand at an ironic distance, constantly critiquing the representa-
tions with which they engage. The critics open up the spaces of representation
in the text without having to disclose their own location. The language of critical
geopolitics is presented as being as universal as that which it seeks to create, and
yet it is a Western form of reasoning, dominated again by white, male aca-
demics. Women and others omitted from this tradition have not generally been
included on the pages of the international texts (see Sharp, 2000b). Thus they
remain invisible to critical geopoliticians for whom resistance is a textual
intervention, a subversion of a sign or displacement of meaning. A few women
are allowed into the footnotes of some works, but still the central narrative is one
of the exploits and thoughts of men. Thus, political geographyÐ the history of
struggles for space, identity and political representationÐ is reduced to a gen-
ealogy of heroic men, signi® cantly not just when discussing the masculinist
history of geopolitical strategies of eÂlite practitioners, but also in the interven-
tions of `critical geopoliticians’ themselves (see OÂ Tuathail, 1996b; Sharp, 2000b).
 168 Lorraine Dowler and Joanne Sharp

Embodying Geopolitics

Women’s bodies are inherently caught up in international relations, but often at

mundane or everyday levels and so are not written into the texts of political
discourse. Women’s places in international politics tend not to be those of
decision makers, but of international labourers and migrants, as images in
international advertising and as `victims’ to be protected by international peace-
keepers. However, as Cynthia Enloe (1989, 1993) has long insisted, this does not
mean that women have no role in the recreation of international orders, simply
that their agency is hidden from the traditional gaze of geopolitics. How
different would international geo-politics be without these images of woman-
hood, and the international ¯ ows of workers and refugees?
It is not only important to rewrite the actions of women back into geopolitical
debates, but also to question their absence in the ® rst place. The ® rst move
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towards critically addressing the marginalisation of certain voices from the

recording of geopolitical events came from O Â Tuathail (1996a) when he desig-
nated the ª anti-geopolitical eyeº . This `anti-geopolitics’ represents an embodied
and situated geographical view of the world which avoids what Donna
Haraway (1988) has called `the God trick’ that simultaneously allows the viewer
to be both everywhere and nowhere. O Â Tuathail’s anti-geopolitical eye sees the
world from a vantage-point which is readily acknowledged; it is a position that
takes responsibility for its representation from somewhere. The political geogra-
phies produced by an anti-geopolitical eye emphasise moral proximity and
anger: it is not distanced and dispassionate, even-handed or ironic, but is angry
at injustice, exploitation and subjugation; it wants to see change. O Â Tuathail
(1996a) offers Maggie O’Kane’s impassioned reports of the war in Bosnia as a
situated, moral and subjective alternative to the distanced all-seeing-eye of the
traditional geopolitician. Her reports emphasised the agency and acts of people,
and the materiality of violence. She discusses the imagined geographies and
representations through which the region gains its political identity and through
which con¯ ict has been con® gured, but also the actions of peopleÐ heroic acts
and violent repressionÐ the impacts are not only words or discourses, but pain,
sorrow and death.
Similarly, in the case of Northern Ireland, women have been marginalised in
the consciousness of most of those who have written of the geopolitcs of this
war. This phenomenon is not unique to Northern Ireland and scholars have
addressed the gendering of war in South Africa, Namibia, Israel, Palestine,
Croatia and Peru (see Enloe, 1983; Cock, 1993; Radcliffe and Westwood, 1993;
Mayer, 1994; Zarkov, 2001; Sharoni, 2001). There is an exhaustive amount of
literature focused on political violence; however, most of this literature concen-
trates on the operational study of war. Historically armed con¯ ict was executed
by men, ª whether as armed forces, guerrilla groups, paramilitary or peace-keep-
ing forcesº (Moser and Clark, 2001, p. 3). As a result, men were the heroes and
the soldiers of war, protectors of wives and children. On the other hand, women
are considered helpmates to the male warrior or the victims of war, particularly
of sexual abuse and forced abduction (Dowler, 1998; Moser and Clark, 2001).
As a result, the nation is expressed through the recording of the actions of the
public sphere rendering it as masculine. However, deconstruction of the inter-
dependent nature of public and private space in this case inverts patriarchal
power structures and reveals a political solidarity which is constructed of the
 A Feminist Geopolitics? 169

actions of both men and women. This type of geopolitical analysis, which is
grounded in the everyday of experiences, rewrites women back into this con¯ ict
as both mothers and warriors (Dowler, 1998).
Rewriting the actions of women (and other marginalised voices) into geopolit-
ical thought or, as OÂ Tuathail argues, a move towards the anti-geopolitical eye,
represents a move towards recognising the inherent and unavoidable embodi-
ment of geographical processes and geopolitical relationships at different scales.
In order to rewrite the everyday experiences of individuals back into geopolitical
events, academics are relating the scale of their investigations from the global
and national to that of the community, home and body. Examining the world
through the scale of the body has altered geography’s understanding of space
as it has become clear that spatial divisionsÐ whether in the home or in
the workplace, at the level of the city or the nation-stateÐ are also
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affected by and re¯ ected in embodied practices and lived social rela-
tions (McDowell, 1999, p. 35).
This position argues for the need to think of bodies as sites of performance in
their own right rather than nothing more than surfaces for discursive inscription.
Discourses do not simply write themselves directly onto bodies as if these bodies
offered blank surfaces of equal topography. Instead, these concepts and ways of
being are taken up and used by people who make meaning of them in the
different global contexts in which they operate. This will bring women and other
marginalised ® gures back into the sight of critical geopolitics. Most speci® cally,
a feminist geopolitics does not simply rewrite women back into geopolitical
histories. Instead, it offers a lens through which the everyday experiences of the
disenfranchised can be made more visible.
This is not to suggest that to understand geographies and identities of the
national and international it is necessary to abandon discourse but, instead, to
see it in a broader way that is less dominated by representation and more
attuned to actual practices. Political geographies can be regarded as emerging
from the textualised practices and discourses that actually draw people in as
subjects. Women, caught up in different forms of international traf® c, are
especially vulnerable to racialisation and eroticisation of their bodies and labour.
National security de® nes women’s bodies as requiring protection, but this is
often de® ned from a masculinist position. Women’s bodies become quite liter-
ally a part of making `the international’. For example, in the con¯ ict in Kosovo,
NATO went to war to protect some of the most patriarchal kinship structures in
Europe. In her attempt to write a feminist geopolitics, Fiona Smith (in this issue)
demonstrates the ways in which particular spatialitiesÐ here the global geopoli-
tics of `East’ and `West’Ð are inherently entangled with gender politics in eastern
European countries and so are embodied in everyday practices through which
people project their identities (for example, the performances of femininity
through dress and make-up).

Locating Geopolitics, Locating Critique

A danger in posing the question `can there be a feminist geopolitics?’ is that
it renders feminist critique singular. Non-Western feminists have recently
challenged the complacency of Western feminists in their claim to represent
all women. Post-colonial theorists have drawn attention to the location of
 170 Lorraine Dowler and Joanne Sharp

knowledge and the dominance of Western views being abstracted to the univer-
sal. For example, in her contribution to this issue, Fiona Smith discusses
`post-communist’ critiques of the dominant views of history which see the
transition of eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War as being on a unilinear
path towards Westernised neo-liberalism. This grand narrative ignores both the
different experiences of the many societies lumped together as `eastern Europe’,
as well as the multitude of resistant practices woven into the fabric of daily life.
Like feminists, post-colonial (and post-communist) theorists have sought to
decentre knowledge and to allow in the voices of those ignored by traditional
representation, not only by mainstream work but also feminists themselves.
The increasing reference to post-colonial theorists in mainstream work in
recent years might suggest a decentring of knowledge and acknowledgement of
the displacement of the central authority of the West. But, instead, we see the
production of what Sparke (1994) has called an `anaemic geography’ wherein an
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instrumental use of spatialised language stages broader arguments where the

`non-West’ is never examined as a multiply-inscribed self. It is a marker to
indicate the failings of Western thought and to illustrate the inability of Western
geographical imaginations properly to represent `the rest’. The heterogeneity of
this geographical marker is ignored (except to note that it is heterogeneous)
because, as in the older versions of orientalism, its role is to mark a debate about
the limits of the West. Despite initial appearances, then, new debates replicate
the `geographical violence’ of orientalism rather than overturning it.
The major impact of post-colonialism then has been at the abstract level of
theorisation rather than having signi® cant impacts upon the actual practices
within the academy. The rise of post-colonialism in geography has coincided
with a declining interest in regional studies. Goss (1996, p. 248) suggests that
post-colonial critics, ª have guaranteed themselves the position of armchair
decolonisersº . And, perhaps, critical geopoliticians sit quite close-by in the
academy’s front room.
Said’s (1978) critique of the geographical violence of orientalism has had
long-lasting effects as critical researchers have backed off from studying other
places and have become wary of trying to speak for those outside the academy.
Ironically, then, the impact of post-colonial theory has led to an intensi® cation
of interest in the West and an increasing marginalisation of other voices and
places, even in the recoding of regional study. Post-colonial work, although
super® cially studying difference, is more interested in what representations of
others says about the self, about the West. On the one hand, this could be seen
as a positive move in that `Others’ are no longer being (mis)represented by
Western research but, at the same time, they are being further marginalised from
the production of so-called global knowledges and from institutions of power.
Despite the popularity of post-colonial theorists, attention has not always been
given to the implication of their demands. In 1990, bell hooks writes that she has
felt silenced by Western academics seeking the experience but not the wisdom
of the other. She argues that ª I was made `other’ there in that space ¼ they did
not meet me there in that space. They met me at the centerº (bell hooks, 1990,
p. 342). The experiences of the marginalised are used as the raw materials for
post-colonial theories but this does not require an opening of the process of
theorising to the knowledges and wisdom of the marginalised. When there is a
meeting, it is in the centreÐ in the (predominantly) Western institutions of
power/knowledge (aid agencies, universities, the pages of journals and so on)
 A Feminist Geopolitics? 171

and in the languages of the West (usually English). So, by approaching the
institutions of knowledge, hooks has been forced to the centre, a location both
metaphorical in its control of authority and geographical in its physical presence.
Another illustration of the problematic relationship between colonial and
feminist theory was made apparent during Lorraine Dowler’s recent ® eld work
in Cuba. Cuban feminist scholars argued that the US embargo not only prevents
the exchange of material goods but also the growth of a Cuban identity politics.
Cuban feminists point with pride to the accomplishments of the revolution in
terms of gender equity, citing statistics demonstrating that more than 60 per cent
of the professional workforce are women. Cuban women bene® t from superior
maternity and daycare policies, which would be envied by most of the nations
in the developed world. However, as a result of the economic crisis brought
about by the US embargo and the special period following the end of the Soviet
Union, discussions in regard to issues of identity and representation were
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disregarded as frivolous. Western feminists have argued that the needs of

women are often ignored for the greater goal of national solidarity thereby
relegating feminist agenda’s to a back-burner (see Yuval-Davis, 1997; McClin-
tock, 1993). Interestingly, in Cuba this was not the case; feminist and revolution-
ary discourses became imbricated and women were active and equal members
of the nation. However, their identities were and are still relegated to the
domestic arena as `mothers of the revolution’. As a result, Cuba bene® ts from a
social system which is highly favourable to women while the political landscape,
museums, monuments and other representations of the nation are rendered
masculine. Cuban feminists have recently started to embrace feminist critiques
of the representation and are challenging both the gender and racial stereotyping
of individuals in the local media. The feminist community of Cuba is indeed
welcoming of US academic interest; however, Lorraine Dowler was consistently
concerned with issues of positionality in her ® eldwork for two reasons. First,
given the long history of US colonial interference in Cuba, she was concerned
with committing an academic form of colonial appropriation. Secondly, given
the strides that Cuban feminists have made in social equality, she had to ask
herself if US feminist scholars should take a lesson from the Cubans and instead
question issues of gender equity in the US while allowing a Cuban identity
politics to emerge in its own time.

Grounding Geopolitics
In order to start to think in terms of a feminist (or post-colonial feminist)
geopolitics, it is necessary to think more clearly of the grounding of geopolitical
discourse in practice (and in place)Ð to link international representation to the
geographies of everyday life; to understand the ways in which the nation and
the international are reproduced in the mundane practices we take for granted.
For example, the construction of a single national identity may seem obvious at
a global scale, however, it is less clear when viewed by way of sociospatial forces
such as gender, race and class (Newman and Paasi, 1998; Sharp, 1999; Dowler,
forthcoming). For example, at ® rst glance, Irish West Belfast would appear to a
world audience as a place of ideological solidarity. Landscape elements such as
public demonstrations, political murals and anti-British graf® ti reinforce an
image of national solidarity. However, not re¯ ected in this monolithic represen-
tation of resistance were the concerns of women who wondered what affects
 172 Lorraine Dowler and Joanne Sharp

reuni® cation with the Republic of Ireland would have on their daily lives.
Questions of divorce, birth control and day-care availability were eclipsed in
favour of the appearance of a uni® ed Irish national solidarity.
Of course, no attempt at creating a national identity can be totally successful:
unintended consequences will emerge. The images of nation perpetuated by eÂlite
® gures may be successful in drawing in individuals as national subjectsÐ but
perhaps incompletely, or in tension with other identities and allegiances, which
means the creation of unseen results (hybrid identities, for example). It is in the
processes of subject creationÐ and resistance to thisÐ that we can see how
politics works. It is in the performance of identities and the creation of geo-
political images and practices that Foucault’s notion that space is where dis-
course becomes relations of power (Wright and Rabinow, 1982) is exempli® ed in
all of its messiness.
Sparke (1998) explains how this process of subject creation through particular
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places worked for the construction of one particular political subject: Timothy
McVeigh, the Oklahoma Bomber. McVeigh’s actions can only be understood
through an examination of the ways that political identity was performed
through his own biography. McVeigh was the subject of US discourses of
inside± outside, of the safety and value of US culture and identity, and of the
threats from those `Others’ beyond the boundary who sought the destruction of
the US. He was interpolated into these discursive practices as a consumer of US
culture throughout his life but also, most extremely, in his experience in the
military in the Gulf War (he was in fact awarded a medal for his actions in the
con¯ ict and so regarded himself as a patriot). On his return to the US, McVeigh
apparently developed a sense that America had lost its way (Sparke, 1998). He
was a loner, feeling marginalised by dominant society which was unable to see
the trouble it was in. However, reconstructed through the narratives of the lone
warrior-masculinity of Rambo ® lms, this subjectivity merely reinforced his sense
of patriotism. With the representations of US global geography that he had
experienced, there was little difference between
turning the people working for the federal government into minions of
an evil state apparatus and turning the people of Iraq into minions of
an evil state apparatus (Sparke, 1998, p. 202).
Sparke shows how the Gulf representations have played outÐ in a very speci® c
wayÐ in this person’s biography and how to make sense of his actions as a
consequence of this. Analysis of the discourses signi® cant to this story might
suggest that the danger would always lie outside the boundaries of the US.
However, Sparke’s almost ethnographic account of the production of geopoliti-
cal images and their actual impact on people’s daily lives shows how these have
been remade, in this case, to provide rather different results. A broadening of the
methodology of critical geopolitics from textual analysis to what might be
considered to be an ethnography of international relations offers exciting possi-
bilities for understandings of the complex local embodied geographies that
reconstruct the nation and the geography of international relations.

Grounding Ourselves
As mentioned, it is important not to overemphasise the uniqueness of the body
to the point that it could lose its usefulness in determining similarity amongst
 A Feminist Geopolitics? 173

groups of individuals. This is an important issue for us to ponder when we, as

Western academics, based in the US and the UK, examine the agency of women
in other parts of the world, in Cuba and in the Middle East. This type of
work raises questions such as ª Is it possible to geo-graph moral and ethical
geographies which are separate from the geographical centredness of the
viewer?º and ª How is it possible to write global geographies of patriarchy and
exploitation, of allegiance and struggle, without recognising the contingency of
gender performance?º
There is an increasing tendency for women in the Middle East to `return’ to
the veil, as many outside commentators have noted. It is something that Joanne
Sharp has found intriguing during her recent work in Egypt. She had assumed,
from the baggage of her Western feminist politics, that this was due to reaction-
ary forces, seeing women as symbolic of the nation and thus repositories for
traditional image. And yet some of the most independent and capable women
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she came to know and work with were veiled. Her inherited Western view of
modernised woman versus passive instruments of tradition faced a challenge. It
seems that there are many `gender performances’ in Egyptian societies which
may end up with apparently the same imageÐ indeed, there are those whose
reveiling represent a resistance to the values of the West; but, in her research,
Sherifa Zuhur (1992) discovered that others use the image of the veiled woman
to negotiate the public spaces of work, to present a non-threatening image to
male workers whilst transgressing the public± private divide (a strategic use of
clothing to allow women greater freedom whilst under the guise of an image of
the good woman); for other women, more straightforwardly, it seems it has
become fashion, with the colour and material of the headscarf being chosen with
the same attention as the remainder of the out® t.
As part of this critique, feminists have long argued that the roles of women
have been ignored because their actions were designated to the private spaces of
the home. Traditionally, private spaces have been associated with the home and
designated as feminine, whereas public spaces (or spaces outside the home) have
been determined as masculine. Feminist theorists have explored alternative
de® nitions of the public and private by analysing the public in relation to the
private (Staeheli, 1996; Secor, this issue). Moreover, other scholars address the
social interaction and power relationships that exist in and across public and
private space such that ª those who have the greatest power over space have
both the greatest power of access and greatest exclusionº (Kilian, 1998, p. 27).
The power to permit access or to exclude individuals from a space is important
to consider when analysing the interaction between the pubic and private
spheres. However, it is equally important to understand the productive and
reproductive acts that occur across public and private space which can disrupt
these traditional designations.
For this reason, it can be argued that Egyptian women do respond in whatever
way to global geopolitics, to the orientalist and anti-Islamic cultures of the West.
However, this global context must negotiate local and national processes as well.
To this end, Anna Secor’s paper in this issue reclaims the role of the Islamist
women as politically independent and active thinkers. In this study, she reveals
some of the ways that women participate in the daily production and contesta-
tion of Islamist politics in Istanbul. Secor’s analysis embraces geopolitical,
international, national and local discourses within a social theoretical framework
of the ¯ uidity of boundaries between public and private space. She argues that
 174 Lorraine Dowler and Joanne Sharp

our Western predisposition to view Islamist women as non-political actors was

the result of not considering private/domestic space as a politically active arena.
For this reason, the political should not be viewed as only housed in speci® c
institutions; rather, the political can be `housed’ in the home.
The Irish, Cuban, German, Egyptian and Turkish women who are central to
the work discussed here make themselves as political subjects through geo-
political processes at different scalesÐ global geopolitics of orientalism or `east’/
`west’, national tensions between modern secular forces and religious powers,
and the pressures of Western views of change that unproblematically point
towards a single solutionÐ coalescing in the performances of individual women
in their attempts to manage and negotiate their everyday lives. And it is in the
linking of these scales from the body and the local up to the nation and the
international that offers possibilities.
A feminist geopolitics could neither be a traditional mapping of boundaries or
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an embracing of the ¯ uidity of international politics exempli® ed by certain

post-modern geopoliticians. Whilst there must be a recognition of the social,
political, cultural and economic constructedness of boundaries and differences,
to deny their existence is simply naõÈ ve. These are accepted as social constructs,
but this in no way reduces their power over individuals and communities that
need to negotiate them on a daily basis. Lives are constructed and reconstructed
around political and patriarchal boundaries through discourses which appar-
ently operate at the global and national scales. Attempts to understand the
complex relations between the international and everyday demonstrate the
importance of ensuring that small, mundane daily practices of everyday life are
understood in relation to the reconstructions of the nation and the international.
At the same time, the impacts of the movement of global geopolitical discourses
onto individual bodies needs to be examined. Recent protests against the
impacts on communities around the world of World Trade Organisation deci-
sions are testament to an emerging politics which recognises, accepts and
challenges the complex processes linking bodies and nations, communities and
globe, unfortunately in increasingly painfully embodied ways. Various local
articulations of struggle and protest became linked into a number of global
geopolitical visions.
It would seem that one of the responses to both feminist and post-colonial
critiques would be to abandon the possibility of creating geopolitical maps given
the dangers of misrepresentation of `others’, of homogenising and `speaking for’,
of the unavoidablity of situatedness. But perhaps this is the easy way out. Rather
than taking one’s privileged heritage as a reason to be silent, Spivak (1990,
pp. 62± 63) argues that this should generate a sense anger at our position and an
eagerness to learn. A culturally informed but nevertheless still resolutely politi-
cal take on nation and international relations could consider the practices and
institutional locales of international relations and nations. This would involve
continued engagement with the discourses and narratives which structure these
geographies (it is important to deconstruct common sense, to stop it from
working without thought) but would go further to see how these discourses
actually work in everyday life and how they make subjects of people: how they
are articulated and performed in different contexts to make subjects of their
identities and geopolitical visions.
The editors and authors of this Special Issue are in agreement that a feminist
geopolitics may be dif® cult terrain to negotiate, in terms of research and
 A Feminist Geopolitics? 175

disciplinary politics, but nonetheless is a critical one. Despite these problems, all
the contributors are committed to a feminist geopolitical vision which is not
exclusionary to traditional geopolitical study; rather, it incorporates the every-
day lives of those who have been overlooked until this point in time. For this
reason, a feminist geopolitical vision may also mean relocating ourselvesÐ and
not just decentering in a metaphorical sense.

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