Feminist Historical Geography

Feminist approaches reconstruct experience, privilege the everyday and embodied as a unit of analysis, and therefore foreground the significance of scale in geographical analyses. Feminist historical geography draws on the tools of feminist analyses in two distinct ways. First, by analyzing the discipline’s own history to recover the silenced or obscured perspectives that shaped geographical knowledge, feminist historical geographical approaches focus on the history of geography as discipline and practice, and the gendered norms that shaped the consolidation of geographical knowledge. Second, feminist historical geography uses the tools of historical research and its conceptual frameworks to study events and processes, with an attention to the importance of space: geographical difference (i.e., differences across space) but also the interweaving of space and time, using the critical tools of feminist analyses. One of the persistent refrains in reflections on feminist historical geographical research is that it rarely ‘travels under its own name.’ What this means is that feminist researchers using historical methods can be found in many subfields, and yet their work tends to not be identified as ‘historical geography’ but rather as ‘feminist geography’ or as historically sensitive contributions to their subfield. Landmark texts in feminist economic geography, for example, such as work exploring the spatial dimensions of women’s work in the past, may be recognized for their contribution to the theorizing of women and labor, or gender and labor, but are less often included as works of historical geography. Does feminist historical geography still travel in disguise today? What are the stakes of identifying as a feminist historical geographer in this context? These are all live and compelling questions as knowledge practices have material effects, shaping the editorial decisions of academic journals, the criteria for funders, the training of research students, and more. The context shaping feminist historical geographical work has as much to do with the direction of the subfield of historical geography over time as the ambitions of individual scholars. This bibliography takes the view that pluralizing what is included as feminist historical geographical work mirrors many of the most recent reviews of the subfield, where feminist historical geography includes work on women’s history and women’s spaces, as well as the gendering of space and intersectional approaches, all shaped by concerns for telling ‘other’ stories of the discipline’s history, and of myriad geographies. What is truly exciting about the expanded definition and inclusion of work traveling under the name of feminist historical geography, as well as other names, is the widening of what is meant by feminist historical geographical work, and the multiplying of empirical sites on which geographers inspired by feminist approaches are turning their analytical lens.