Gender, Place & Culture

This article was downloaded by: [The University of Edinburgh] On: 31 December 2014, At: 07:18 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgpc20

Gender, Place and Culture: Ten years on a

LIZ BONDI & MONA DOMOSH a

b

University of Edinburgh , UK

b

Dartmouth College , USA Published online: 14 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: LIZ BONDI & MONA DOMOSH (2003) Gender, Place and Culture: Ten years on, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 10:1, 3-4 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369032000052612

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Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 3–4, 2003

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Editorial This edition of Gender, Place and Culture marks its 10-year anniversary and to celebrate that fact Gill Valentine and I have asked the founding editors of the journal to write a brief editorial outlining their views on how and why the journal was started. In the next edition we follow with an editorial by the current editors outlining the issues now being addressed by the journal and the various communities of academics working on feminist geographies. Also starting in the next edition and running for the remaining editions of Volume 10 is a series of approximately 12 short reviews of various subjects and themes central to the work of feminist geographers. Gill and I hope you find them as useful and engaging as we have found it fun to put them together. Linda Peake

Gender, Place and Culture:

ten years on

LIZ BONDI, University of Edinburgh, UK MONA DOMOSH, Dartmouth College, USA Today it is hard for us (and many other feminist geographers) to imagine the discipline without Gender, Place and Culture. If this particular journal had not been launched, surely something else would have been invented. But, during the 1980s and early 1990s, the need for Gender, Place and Culture was not so obvious. In the mid-1980s a number of journals ran special issues about gender (for example, Antipode and Built Environment), and, as the decade proceeded, feminist scholars became increasingly prominent within the pages of several well-established disciplinary journals. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, discussion about a journal dedicated to feminist geography took place within the context of debates about the relative merits of integrating gender-sensitive analyses into ‘mainstream’ geography, versus developing dedicated ‘spaces’ for feminist geography, within both the university curriculum and human geography research. Making the decision to proceed with a proposal for a new journal of feminist geography was far from obvious, and this was reflected in the lengthy gestation period of Gender, Place and Culture. The two of us began to talk about the idea after meeting in 1991, and at that stage Liz had already had several other conversations on this theme. Through wider feminist contacts, Liz had been aware since 1989 of plans for the journal Feminism and Psychology, which was launched in 1991. Our eventual decision to go ahead with Gender, Place and Culture was made at a moment when feminist geographers were prominent as editors of other geography journals (for example, Linda McDowell was editing Area and Geraldine Pratt was editing Environment and Planning D: Society and Space). This went some considerable way ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online/03/010003-02  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd 3

DOI 10.1080/0966369032000052612

4

Editorial

to allaying our anxiety that might do more to ghettoise feminist geography than to raise its disciplinary focus. Reflecting on our deliberations and anxieties over a decade later, we are struck by the lack of subsequent debate about this. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that feminist geography had already secured a firm-enough foothold within the discipline to ensure that our fears would not be realised. That said, in many ways, little has changed. The risk of ghettoisation is ever-present, although what is now very clear is that the existence of the journal is not the cause. Feminism in whatever guise challenges the boundaries of geography, and occupies an ambivalent poistion both within and against the discipline. Its position will always be uneasy and it is almost bound to be accompanied by efforts to counter or limit its effects. When was launched, we were more confident that it would help to raise the profile of feminist geography to feminist scholars in other disciplines. How this might be judged 10 years on is a matter for debate. However, as founding editors we were swiftly surprised by how many submissions originated from outside the discipline. While has always remained true to its subtitle—it is a journal of feminist geography—it has also turned out to be a genuinely multidsiciplinary space in which conversations across disciplinary boundaries are the norm. Perhaps the most striking change in the context in which operates has been the ‘cultural turn’. Today, with ‘culture’ conceived of in very broad terms, it certainly is not surprising that a journal committed to feminist perspectives would contain the word in its title. Yet this was not the case 10 years ago. Although some of our own publications might be regarded as part of the ‘cultural turn’, we did not originally conceive of the journal in terms of, or in relation to, that agenda. As it turned out, the term ‘culture’, which was included in the title of the journal partly on the suggestion of the publishers, became subject to major rethinking within geography at much the same time as first appeared. A fortuitous coincidence, we think, since the three words—gender, place, culture—now resonate as place for feminist geography. Gender, Place and Culture

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