Gender, Place & Culture

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Bodies, gender, place and culture: 21 years on a

Robyn Longhurst & Lynda Johnston

a

a

Geography Programme, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand Published online: 03 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Robyn Longhurst & Lynda Johnston (2014) Bodies, gender, place and culture: 21 years on, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 21:3, 267-278, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2014.897220 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.897220

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Gender, Place and Culture, 2014 Vol. 21, No. 3, 267–278, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.897220

21 YEARS OF GENDER, PLACE AND CULTURE Bodies, gender, place and culture: 21 years on Robyn Longhurst* and Lynda Johnston Geography Programme, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand

Downloaded by [University of Waikato] at 20:00 28 April 2014

(Received 16 August 2013; final version received 17 January 2014) This article examines research on embodiment published in Gender, Place and Culture (GPC) over the past two decades. We searched using the keywords ‘body’, ‘bodies’, ‘embodiment’, ‘embody’, ‘flesh’, ‘fleshy’, ‘corporeality’ and ‘corporeal’, the titles and abstracts of all the articles that have appeared in GPC since it first began publication in 1994. Articles containing these keywords were listed in a searchable bibliography. What we found was a growing volume of research inspired by ‘body politics’ produced over a 21-year period that compares favourably to cognate geography journals. We also found that various themes have emerged including maternal and geopolitical bodies. In other areas, we identified gaps. Throughout the article, we engage with the question: has the upsurge of interest in embodiment, as expressed in the pages of GPC since 1994, led to an upheaval of masculinist ways of thinking in the discipline? We conclude by expressing our feelings of ambivalence. Keywords: embodiment; gender; masculinism; ambivalence; materiality

Introduction Johnson (2008), reflecting on 15 years of publication for Gender, Place and Culture (GPC), identifies three areas in which she thinks the journal has been ‘ground-breaking’: masculinities, sexualities and embodiment. In this article, we examine the third of these areas; embodiment. Johnson writes: Embodiment . . . became a subject which appeared regularly across the years in GPC. The ways in which gendered bodies were subsequently discussed signals some of the broader developments in thinking on identity, discourse and power over these 15 years and serves to illustrate the ongoing transformative nature of discussions within GPC. (Johnson 2008, 563, italics in original)

In this article, we analyse how research on, or which invokes, ‘the body’ published in GPC has changed over the past two decades, not just in the volume of work produced, but also in the themes addressed. We are particularly interested in whether the upsurge of interest in embodiment, as expressed in the pages of GPC, has over the past two decades led to an upheaval of masculinist ways of thinking in the discipline as was suggested by one of us close on 21 years ago (Longhurst 1995; also see Rose 1993). Or, has ‘the body’ as it is represented in the pages of GPC in recent years become ubiquitous and more of an accepted marker of identity and difference than of a radical upheaval of masculinism? (See Sharp 2009, 74, who asks a similar question about the ‘ubiquity of gender’ and whether this has ‘emptied it of its power’.) When writing the viewpoint article ‘The body and geography’ (Longhurst 2005), it seemed that focusing on embodiment was a route for

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] q 2014 Taylor & Francis

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feminist geographers to deconstruct binaries such as mind/body, sex/gender, conceptual/ corporeal and essentialism/constructionism thereby disrupting hegemonic masculinist structures of knowledge production (Rose 1993). This article provides us with an opportunity to assess to what extent this may have been the case. In the first section, we note the methodological process used to carry out the research. Second, we comment on the increase in the volume of work published on embodiment in GPC and compare this to work published in cognate journals. Third, we review some of the early articles in GPC on embodiment. Then, in the fourth section, we review research published in the second decade of the journal’s publication. Following this, we point to some gaps in the literature, namely in the areas of ‘embodied fieldwork’ and ‘body, race, ethnicity’. Finally, we conclude that we feel ambivalent as to whether 21 years of scholarship on embodiment in GPC has destabilised masculinism in human geography. A note on methodology In order to examine the research in GPC on embodiment over the period 1994 –2013, with the help of a research assistant, we searched the titles and abstracts of all the articles published in GPC since it first began publication. Keywords searched included body, bodies, embodiment, embody, flesh, fleshy, corporeality and corporeal. Articles containing these keywords were then listed in a searchable bibliography (EndNote). We also scanned a number of articles that did not contain these key terms in their title or abstract if we thought for one reason or another that they might address the theme of embodiment and we had missed including them. This turned out to be the case in just a couple of instances. Once we had identified articles with a focus on embodiment, we grouped them into themes we saw emerging, namely maternal and geopolitical bodies. We also paid attention to the places and spaces authors were writing about and from. In short, this analysis led us to some key insights. A growing ‘body’ of work It quickly became apparent that the ways gender is lived in and through bodies, ranging across various scales such as homes, workplaces, cities, regions and nations, has been explored through a broad array of themes over the past two decades in GPC. In fact, GPC has published no fewer than 70 articles that focus on, or reference, embodiment. In the first five years of the journal’s publication (1994 – 1998), just 9 articles were published but in the past five years (2009 – 2013), more than 25 articles have been published. And, we ought to add here that at the time of writing this article only one issue of a total of eight to be published in 2013 had gone to press so the count is likely to be higher. The same search for the terms embodiment, embody, bodies, the body, flesh, fleshy, corporeality and corporeal was also conducted in several other journals: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Progress in Human Geography, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Social & Cultural Geography and ACME: An International EJournal for Critical Geographers. We chose these journals because, in addition to GPC, they are where we often turn for insight when conducting our own research on embodiment. These journals all include in their aims wanting to address issues of spatialities, society and culture from a critical geographical perspective. Also, like GPC, they seek not only to analyse sociocultural relations but also to positively transform them. Environment and Planning D has published an impressive 69 articles on embodiment in the past 21 years (many of the more recent articles focusing on emotion, affect and non-

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representational geographies), Progress in Human Geography 37, Antipode 15, Social & Cultural Geography 54 (since beginning publication in 1999) and ACME 5 (since beginning publication in 2002). These statistics are indicative only. It is not possible to easily compare different journals because not only have they published for different periods of time but also some have produced more issues per year than others. These considerations aside, it seems fair to suggest, however, that our approximate count does indicate that GPC has been an important site for geographical scholarship on embodiment over the past two decades publishing on average more articles per issue than any other geography journal.


The early years: radical possibilities Having established something of the volume or size of ‘the body’ of work under consideration in GPC, and other similar geography journals, we now consider the themes which have emerged since 1994. In the early years, the theme of embodiment, no matter the specific focus, was in some regards groundbreaking. Most other geography journals at this time (perhaps with the exception of Environment and Planning D – see McDowell and Court 1994; Brown 1995; Stewart 1995; Blum and Nast 1996) had not yet begun to publish much (if anything) on embodiment. Most work on embodiment was still available only in conference proceedings or in unpublished theses. For example, Johnson 1989 wrote an early piece suggesting that feminist theorising on the (sexed and gendered) body could offer new possibilities for human geographers but this was published not in a journal but in the New Zealand Geographical Society Proceedings of the 15th NZ Geography Conference. Likewise, Cream (1992) presented a paper to the Sexuality and Space Network, Lesbian and Gay Geographers in London which was published in a volume of proceedings. In the first year of publication, GPC published two issues and both contained articles that make reference to embodiment. Johnson (1994, 103) speculated on several possible futures for feminist geography suggesting that it could be incorporated into other areas of the discipline, that it could be ‘regarded with indifference or included within a pluralist, but basically unaltered discipline’ or, more positively, that it could actively engage with other progressive developments in the discipline and creatively incorporate new developments in feminist scholarship such as work on the body. Johnson was correct. In a sense, all of these futures have been realised. There has been some incorporation and indifference to feminist geography over the past two decades, but at the same time there has also been a sustained engagement with embodiment not only in the discipline, in general, but also in the pages of GPC. In fact, in its first decade of publication, GPC sent to press approximately 21 articles containing the word ‘body’ or related terms. In the second decade, this number more than doubled. In addition to Johnson’s article, volume 1, issue 1 carried Bell et al.’s (1994, 31) landmark article ‘All Hyped Up and No Place to Go’ in which the authors draw on Judith Butler’s notion of performing gendered and sexed identities to think through two dissident sexual identities – the hypermasculine ‘gay skinhead’ and the ‘hyperfeminine lipstick lesbian’. Both of us have used this article extensively over the years in our teaching in order to prompt students to think about the intersections between bodies, gender, sexuality, space and place. Usefully, the article was followed by four viewpoint responses in the following volume (see Kirby 1995; Knopp 1995; Probyn 1995; Walker 1995). Another important article published in the first volume of GPC was Jackson’s (1994, 49) ‘Black male’ in which he argues that during the 1980s, ‘men’s bodies began to appear with increasing frequency in television, cinema and billboard advertising’. These were general images of young, white, able-bodied and staunchly heterosexual men but Jackson examines an exception to this – Ogilvy and Mather’s highly successful relaunch of the soft


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drink, Lucozade which uses selected images of black male bodies and their popular associations with sporting and sexual prowess. Jackson deftly weaves together understandings of the body, gender, sexuality and ‘race’ long before ‘intersectionality’ became a popular term in geography. Kobayashi and Peake (1994, 225) also in issue 1 explore intersections illustrating that ‘Geographers’ long-term involvement in the construction of “race” and gender has occurred through literally and metaphorically mapping out the world in ways that highlight, perpetuate and naturalize difference’. In other words, bodies are constructed for ideological ends. In 1996, GPC published three articles on embodiment. Nash (1996) considered feminist critiques of the masculinity of landscape and problematised the notion that there is some kind of singular female or male gaze. Nash (1996, 149) writes: ‘we need to look again and reconsider the radical potential of visual pleasure and traditions of visual representation’. Lewis (1996) focused on the practices and aesthetics of the Rio de Janeiro Carnival in Brazil illustrating that women in the carnival actively perform and masquerade their femininity. Through their embodied performances, they both conform to and contest dominant understandings of ‘woman’. One of us (Johnston 1996) addressed the topic of women’s body building and, like Lewis, offered a reading of the bodies of the women under examination as contradictory. On the one hand, their muscular physique built in the highly masculinised space of the gym weights room, contests traditional notions of femininity. On the other hand, women bodybuilders often conform to traditional notions of femininity, for example by continually monitoring their bodies through diet and exercise. As can be seen, most of the scholarship published in these early years was informed by a post-structuralist feminist politics. This research is interested not just in the social construction or representation of bodies, but also in ‘real’, material bodies that occupy ‘real’ spaces and places such as ‘lipstick lesbians’ that might sometimes pass as straight in clubs and women bodybuilders who work out in gyms. In the years that followed, GPC continued to publish more and more empirically rich research on embodiment. By way of example, Martin (1997, 89) focusing on an Irish nationalist sense of place and drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory developed what she describes as a ‘corporeal approach to the nation’. Woodward (1998) examined the British male ‘soldier’s body’ engaged in military training in the UK countryside. Woodward (1998, 291) explains: ‘If soldiers become particular types of men in the countryside, it is through the body that this transformation is experienced and expressed’. In 1999 and 2000, at least nine articles focused on embodiment (Dwyer 1999; Kesby 1999; McCormack 1999; Mehta 1999; Nelson 1999; Cooper et al. 2000; Krenske and McKay 2000; McKittrick 2000; Prorok 2000). Most of these authors tease out ideas about ‘real bodies’ in ‘real places’; however, empiricism and theory cannot be easily separated and feminist geographers were also pushing the boundaries theoretically. For example, Nelson (1999), aware that many feminist and post-structuralist geographers were incorporating Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’ into their work in order to consider the intersections between gender, sexuality, space and place, undertook a close and critical reading of Butler’s theory. She concluded: ‘Butler posits a subject abstracted from personal, lived experience as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness’ (Nelson 1999, 331). Nelson encouraged geographers to engage instead in a more ‘thoughtful and nuanced’ use of performativity that would enable them to ‘map how concrete subjects (individual or collective) do identity’ (331). Between 2000 and 2003, another 10 articles that examine embodiment were published. These addressed a range of topics such as the provision of public toilets for men and women in nineteenth-century New Zealand (Cooper et al. 2000); gendered structures of power in a heavy metal music club in Brisbane, Australia (Krenske and McKay 2000); the meanings of


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being black (McKittrick 2000); the feminised spatiality of Puerto Rican Espiritismo in New York City (Prorok 2000); historical constructions of irrational women (Bankey 2001); the agoraphobic body (Davidson 2001); Irish women moving to English cities in the 1930s (Ryan 2001); embodied pain and pleasure in the forests of the Kumaon Himalayas, India (Gururani 2002); sleeping arrangements on field trips (Nairn 2003) and the links between feminist geography and cultural geography in relation to embodiment (Jacobs and Nash 2003). In all these accounts of embodiment, there is a desire to address unequal power relations and an acknowledgement that bodies are historically and geographically situated. There is also an acknowledgement that they are discursively produced but also physical, sensuous, emotional and affectual (although the words ‘emotional’ and ‘affectual’ were not yet being widely used in the discipline, humanist geography in the 1970s withstanding).


The second decade: flourishing bodies In the second decade of GPC’s publication, not only was there a continuation of feminist, poststructuralist inspired but empirically ‘grounded’ work on embodiment but indeed a substantial growth in this area. In fact, twice as many articles that reference embodiment were published in the second decade than in the first. This no doubt reflects a trend in the discipline of human geography more generally but in GPC some identifiable themes began to emerge. The first was maternal bodies that included research on breast pumps (Boswell-Penc and Boyer 2007), midwifery in New Zealand (Davis and Walker 2010), maternal health care in France (Fannin 2013), lesbian parent families (Gabb 2004), dressing pregnant bodies (Longhurst 2005) and pregnant women ‘working out’ at a prenatal fitness centre (Nash 2012). A second theme to emerge was geopolitical bodies, for example asylum-seeking bodies (Mountz 2011), bodies in conflict zones (Hyndman and De Alwis 2004), geopolitics in aid/development spaces of Afghanistan (Fluri 2011), ‘corporeal modernity as part of the larger “savior and liberation” trope produced for Afghan women by US-led military, political and economic intervention post-9/11’ (Fluri 2009, 241), South African landscapes and bodies (Murray 2011) and ‘embodied negotiations’ of garment workers in the Dominican Republic (Werner 2010). There were also some minor themes that emerged such as body size and shape (Colls 2006, 2012; Lloyd 2013); sporting and active bodies (Evans 2006; Mills 2011) and bodies that excrete (Cooper et al. 2000; Browne 2004 on public bathrooms and Waitt 2013 on sweat). Another theme was men’s bodies, masculinity and male identity, for example Malam’s (2008) research on ‘bodies, beaches and bars’ which explores heterosexual masculinity in southern Thailand’s’ tourism industry, and Tivers (2011, 45) who carried out on an ethnographic study at the ‘Britain’s Strongest Man’ competition 2007 concluding ‘a particular style of “gentlemanly” masculinity is performed by competitors’. Finally, a noteworthy theme addressed in 2012 (in a themed section) was ‘Towards trans geographies’ (see introduction by Browne, Nash, and Hines 2010). This collection of articles (including Nash 2010 who focuses explicitly on embodiment, Browne and Lim 2010; Doan 2010; Hines 2010; Rooke 2010) is important in problematising the normative binaries between man/woman, male/female and masculine/feminine that are articulated through bodies and spaces. These authors locate trans lives, bodies and subject positions within various contexts in the UK and North America to illustrate the importance of different histories and geographies for trans people. Spaces for growth Clearly, there has been a wealth of literature published in GPC that addresses embodiment. We did note, however, a few gaps or shortcomings in this literature. One area where we


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expected to find more scholarship was ‘embodied fieldwork’ and methodologies. Datta (2008) drawing on her fieldwork in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi, makes a start in this area by adopting the notion of ‘performance’ to examine how male and female bodies in the field are perceived by both researchers and participants as markers of gender identity. Billo and Hiemstra (2013, 313) each draw on accounts of their own PhD research projects to examine how ‘the researcher’s personal and field life bleed into each other to shape the conduct of research’. The authors emphasise the importance of considering the concepts of reflexivity and embodiment and what they mean in fieldwork. Nairn (2003) also drawing on her PhD fieldwork (which focused on field trips) analyses some of the everyday embodied practices surrounding field trips. We think that fieldwork, and indeed methodologies more generally, is one area where there is potential for GPC to publish more research. A start has been made but given its importance in the discipline of human geography we were somewhat surprised that we did not find more articles. Another area where there is potential to publish more is on bodies, ‘race’, ethnicity and indigeneity. In most of the articles published in GPC, gender is privileged in favour of more diffused subjectivities. This, at one level, is not surprising given that the articles published were submitted to a journal that focuses on ‘gender, place and culture’. At another level, this absence is worthy of further consideration. We are not suggesting that there is a complete dearth of scholarship in this area but there is room for more work given the persistence of racism and dominance of whiteness in the discipline of human geography including feminist geography (Peake and Sheppard in press). Research which does address issues of the body, race, ethnicity and indigeneity published in GPC to date includes Matthee (2004) who explores the emotional geographies of eating practices drawing on a qualitative study of the everyday food rituals of women farm workers of colour in the Western Cape province of South Africa and Carter (2006, 227) who focuses on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, to examine ‘the mobility of identities across racial geographies and how this movement destabilizes notions of race and of raced spaces’. Kaufman and Nelson (2012) discuss the bodies of poor women, particularly poor women of colour, in relation to welfare reforms in the USA in the 1990s. Valdivia (2009, 535) explores ‘how perceptions about bodies and interpersonal exchanges contribute to the production of indigenous subjectivities in the Ecuadorian Amazon’. There is, however, a need for more research that examines the embodied intersections between race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and other axes of subjectivity that intersect contributing to systematic social, political and economic inequality. Related to this point about an absence of work on bodies, race, ethnicity and indigeneity is a subsequent point about the voices of those who reside outside the Anglophone centres. Nearly all of the approximately 70 articles published in GPC over the past two decades on ‘the body’ have been written by scholars who live and work in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. In an editorial, Peake and Valentine (2003, 108) reflect on 10 years of publication noting many of the journal’s successes but also that ‘the story of Gender, Place and Culture’s first decade is not just one of progress and triumph. Rather, there are a number of notable silences’. The silences Peake and Valentine point to are the voices of radical women of colour, women from the South, those who reside outside the Anglophone academic hegemony of the UK, North America and the Antipodes. In another reflective piece, Garcia-Ramon, Simonsen, and Vaiou (2006) note that from 1994 to 2005, of the 242 authors of articles and viewpoints, only 19% were not based in Anglo-American universities or research centres – which included Australia and New Zealand. In the approximately 70 articles that feature embodiment, only 3 appear to be written by authors who work outside the Anglophone centres – one from the Middle East, another


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(co-author) from south Asia and a third who describes herself as an independent scholar (so might or might not be working in an Anglo-American context). Of the remaining 67 articles, 27 were published by authors working in the UK, 22 by authors working in the USA, 7 by authors working in Canada, 7 by authors working in Australia and 4 by authors working in New Zealand. Also there are a few articles which have been jointly published by authors working in the UK and USA. Our combined involvement with the journal (both as editorial board members and as editors over a period that spans more than a decade) mean that we are aware that over the years the range of manuscripts submitted to GPC from different countries has increased but clearly this does not include research on embodiment unless manuscripts on ‘the body’ from outside the Anglo-American centres are being submitted and rejected. This is an issue that we raise here as one that is worthy of further examination. Conclusion: feelings of ambivalence As we suggested at the beginning of this article, we are interested in whether 21 years of work on the body in GPC has destabilised masculinism in the discipline of human geography. We agree with Johnson (2008) whose quote opens this article that embodiment has been a subject which has appeared regularly across the years in GPC but has this lead to an ‘upheaval of the dominant/subordinate structure between mind and body, between sex and gender, and between essentialism and constructionism [that] threaten[s] the dominant term’s unquestioned a priori dominance in the discipline’ (Longhurst 1995, 103)? Or, has ‘the body’ become little more than a ubiquitous marker of identity and difference, emptied of it power to unsettle the masculinist epistemology of the discipline of geography? Undoubtedly, the body, bodies, embodiment, corporeality and other related terms are currently being used within a wider variety of frameworks than in the past, including in non-representational theory, performative geographies, and geographies of emotion and affect (see Davidson and Milligan 2004; Bondi 2005; Pile 2010 as examples of the ‘emotional turn’ in geography) both in GPC and beyond. Previously familiar categories such as gender, ethnicity, age and ability are sometimes now gathered together under headings such as embodied, performative, psychological, emotional and affectual. While this might be useful in unfixing categories of individual or even intersecting subjectivities, this strategy might also carry with it some risks, namely that the unmarked body may potentially elide the materiality and specificity of bodily difference. In the process, particular bodies – white, male, abled-bodied, materially well off, Western bodies – come to be assumed and privileged over other bodies. Twenty years ago, the mere mention of bodies, especially their messy materiality, could prompt a sense of disease amongst geographers (at least some!). Bodies were largely ignored in the discipline of geography. Today, the subject of embodiment sits more squarely within the frame of acceptability but still only when represented in particular ways. For example, it is now acceptable to discuss emotion and affect but other words more directly used to describe the materiality of bodies still remain unspeakable. In a newspaper article titled ‘Enough with the euphemisms on women’s body parts’, media researcher Nina Funnell (2010) laments that advertisements for tampons still depict women wearing white, ‘frolicking’ on beaches, while blue liquid is poured onto absorbent pads. She was writing in response to a tampon advertisement being censored by three American networks for using the word ‘vagina’. Funnell comments that ‘apparently it is fine to mention things such as “erective dysfunction” but any allusion to female genitalia

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seems to be too much for people to cope with’. Drawing on academic research to convince The Sydney Morning Herald readers, she continues:


. . . academic Robyn Longhurst argues that Western society holds a deep revulsion for almost all bodily fluids and for the processes through which they are emitted. From sneezing and spitting to lactation and breaking waters, as a collective, we tend to harbour a deep cultural anxiety over what Longhurst refers to as ‘the leaky body’. So much so that we can barely even speak of, or write about such matters without producing intense discomfort or causing offence. (Funnell 2010)

Today, embodiment tends to carry with it a greater sense of acceptability, even authority, in many areas of the discipline of human geography, namely social, cultural, psychoanalytic, anti-racist, queer and feminist geographies, and yet as in the worlds of advertising and popular culture the words that describe the fleshy, material and messy bits of bodies, especially women’s bodies, remain largely unacceptable. We can write about and discuss emotion and affect, performativity, the unconscious, etc., but not menstrual blood, incontinence and other bodily fluids that are part of daily life. In some senses then, ‘real’ fleshy bodies still represent that which is too banal, too material, too feminised, too mysterious, too Other for geography. In reaching the end of this review, therefore, we admit to feeling somewhat ambivalent about scholarship on embodiment. Bondi (2004, 4), in her GPC 10th Anniversary Address, suggests that ‘in a variety of ways, feminist academics confront dilemmas, and . . . often find ourselves in contradictory positions’. We collude in practices of which we are also critical. This statement resonated with us because when we comment on scholarship on embodiment we are aware that we both colluding in, and critical of, an area of scholarship that includes our own work. Our ambivalence comes from a deep sense that the vast majority of articles on embodiment in GPC are empirically and theoretically rich, sometimes ‘real’ bodies are discussed in very meaningful ways and this has deepened understandings of how gender is lived, thought about and practiced through imaginary, discursive and material bodies. The numerous articles on embodiment, however, do not appear to have necessarily destabilised masculinism in the discipline of human geography, at least not to the degree that we both, perhaps somewhat naively, imagined 21 years ago. Many of the power relations (patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, neoliberal) that structure of our daily lives in spaces, such as homes, supermarkets, universities, geography departments, have not improved dramatically for the better since the mid-1990s. It is not possible to simply break out of fields of power by focusing on bodies (perhaps not even the fleshy, material and messy bits of bodies), or by adopting any other one strategy. We, along with other feminists, have been part of the process of writing bodies and their complex assemblages into a variety of geographical discourses but this strategy has not necessarily prompted a questioning or destabilisation of masculinism in the discipline, at least not to the degree we had envisaged. Nor are we convinced that it has helped progress gender equality, or women’s capacity for self-determination, or recognition of and respect for differences amongst women, or a deconstruction of binary categories such as sex/gender, man/woman, mind/body and material/immaterial. On a more positive note though, it has provided some excellent and in-depth insights into the (gendered) lives of people in a variety of spaces, places and times and perhaps it has helped shift the political ground so that it is now possible, in a way that it was not 21 years ago, to consider emotion, affect and non-representational geographies. In this regard, GPC has succeeded in making a powerful contribution over the past two decades and one that we feel pleased to have played a small part in.


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Acknowledgements We would like to thank Gail Hutcheson for helping us put together a list of feminist geography publications on ‘the body’. This turned out to be a big job and we are grateful for the assistance. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and Peter Hopkins for useful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Finally, we would like to acknowledge all the committed feminist scholars who produced the work we have reviewed. It has been a privilege engaging with this scholarship.

Notes on contributors


Robyn Longhurst is Pro Vice-Chancellor Education and Professor of Geography at University of Waikato. Her teaching and research focus on issues of space, place, gender and the body, especially embodied knowledges, maternal bodies, body size and shape and more recently bodies in relation to information communication technologies such as Skype. She has been an Editorial Board Member, Editor and Editor-in Chief of Gender, Place and Culture. Lynda Johnston is Professor of Geography at University of Waikato and a current Editor of Gender, Place and Culture. Her research and teaching focus on queer bodies, places, spaces and tourism and she publishes on topics such as love, wedding tourism, haptic geographies of drag queens, gay pride, embodied methodologies and knowledges.

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ABSTRACT TRANSLATIONS Cuerpos, geńero, lugar y cultura: 21 anõs despue´s Este artıćulo analiza la investigacioń sobre la encarnacioń/corporizacioń publicada en Gender, Place and Culture (GPC) a lo largo de las u´ltimas dos dećadas. Realizamos bu´squedas utilizando los te´rminos “cuerpo”, “cuerpos”, “encarnacioń”, “encarnar”, “carne”, “carnoso”, “corporalidad” y “corpo´reo”, los tı´tulos y los resu´menes de todos los artıćulos que han aparecido en GPC desde su primera publicacioń en 1994. Con los artıćulos que contenıán estas palabras claves armamos una bibliografıá en la que se pudieran realizar bu´squedas. Lo que encontramos fue un volumen creciente de investigacioń inspirada en “la polı´tica del cuerpo” producido a lo largo de 21 anõs, que compara favorablemente con las revistas de geografıá ana´logas. Tambień encontramos que emergieron varios temas, incluyendo los cuerpos maternales y geopolı´ticos. En otras a´reas, identificamos huecos por llenar. A lo largo del artıćulo abordamos la pregunta: ¿el aumento de intere´s en la encarnacioń, como se la expresa en GPC desde 1994, condujo a una conmocioń en las formas masculinistas de pensar en la disciplina? Concluimos expresando nuestros sentimientos de ambivalencia. Palabras claves: encarnacioń; geńero; masculinismo; ambivalencia; materialidad 身体、性别、地方与文化：历经二十(一载本文检视“性别、地方与文化（GPC）”期刊过去二十年来所发表的有关体现（embodiment）的研究。我们运用“身体（body与bodies）”、“体现（embodiment 与embody）”、“肉体（flesh与fleshy）”，以及“肉身性（corporeality与corporeal）为关键词，搜寻GPC期刊自1994年发行以来的所有文章标题与大纲。含有这些关键词的文章，被列入一个可供搜寻的书目中。我们发现，与同类的地理期刊相较之下，本刊受到“身体政治”所啓发的研究数量，在过去二十一年来日益增长。我们亦发现各种议题的浮现，包括怀孕的身体与地缘政治的身体。在其他的领域中，我们则指认出落差。我们在通篇文章中涉入以下问题：对于体现（embodiment）的高度兴趣，如同GPC期刊自1994年开始所展现的一般，是否已对该领域中的男性气概思考方式造成剧变？文末，我们将以表达矛盾的看法作结。关键词：体现; 性别; 男性气概; 矛盾; 物质性