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Sexing feminist geography

My view of geography, I was once told, was sexually perverted! This response came from a reviewer of some revisions I had made for an introductory textbook in geography. Those revisions included a fairly brief section on feminist critiques of models of urban growth, written in a straightforward manner, without exhortation or exclamation. I was stunned by this response. I had made no mention of sex or sexuality or 'perversions' in my revisions but I had used the words 'feminist' and 'women'. In the minds of some professional geographers, apparently, any mention of these terms conjured up images of the erotic. And on reflection, I realized that this was certainly not an uncommon nor particularly exceptional reaction. Scholars of western thought have outlined how the idea of woman came to be aligned with the body and the earth, while the idea of man was aligned with the mind and with 'higher', unearthly powers (Merchant, 1980; Wilson, 1991). So 'my' reviewer was simply echoing a long and often unquestioned tradition of identifying women as sexual, bodily disruptions to the 'normal' course of rational knowledge-making. I mention this incident because I think that it helps explain both why it is impossible to separate feminist geography from discussions of sexuality (in our culture, conceptions of sexuality are almost always implicated in discussions of women and gender), and why feminist geography as a 'rational knowledge-making' discourse has often avoided an alignment with sexuality (this would reinforce our cultural assumptions about women as always denoting the sexual, and might delegitimize the authority of what until recently has been a fairly precarious 'body' of knowledge). Writing of a similar dilemma in the field of women's history, Joanne Meyerowitz and Gail Hershatter (1998: 6) argue that 'some historians feared that a focus on sexuality would reduce women to the erotic, thus reinscribing longstanding Euroamerican patterns that tainted women as sexual and then excluded them from "respectable" public participation'. A recent book (Goldsmith, 1998) about the spiritualist, suffragette and free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull makes similar points about the women's movement in the second half of the nineteenth century; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony found they had to distance the suffrage cause from the free-love movement because even the hint of discussions of sex made