#subalternstudies

[kobiamu58]

The Voices Beneath History

Not every silence means absence.

Some stories were buried under empires, textbooks, and polished narratives.

Subaltern Studies listens to the forgotten voices — workers, peasants, colonized lives, people history often walked past.

Maybe history was never complete. Maybe we were only hearing one side of it.

Read more here: https://worldliterature24.blogspot.com/2026/05/subaltern-studies.html

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The hegemony of masculine knowledge-making

These were the readings for the third week of my Key Concepts in Human Geography course.

Agnew, J. (2010). Ethics or militarism? The role of the AAG in what was originally a dispute over informed consent. Political Geography, 29(8), 422–423.

Bryan, J. (2010). Force multipliers: Geography, militarism, and the Bowman Expeditions. Political Geography, 29(8), 414–416.

Cruz, M. (Kiado). (2010). A living space: The relationship between land and property in the community. Political Geography, 29(8), 420–421.

Gould, P. (1979). Geography 1957–1977: The Augean Period. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 69(1), 139–151.

Herlihy, P. H. (2010). Self-appointed gatekeepers attack the American Geographical Society’s first Bowman Expedition. Political Geography, 29(8), 417–419.

Hudson, B. (2008). The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870–1918. In H. Bauder & S. E. Mauro (Eds.), Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings. Kelowna: Praxis (e)Press. pp. 140–153.

Rose, G. (1993). No Place for Women? In Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 41–61.

Steinberg, P. E. (2010). Professional ethics and the politics of geographic knowledge: The Bowman Expeditions. Political Geography, 29(8), 413.

Rather than follow the historical narrative of empire within geography, I instead chose to focus my response on the first four chapters of Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. The course organiser has recommended that I read the following discussion of the book:

Duncan, N., Domosh, M., & Rose, G. (2004). Classics in human geography revisited. Progress in Human Geography, 28(3), 363–368.

Here is my response, written before I completed reading the book.

There is sometimes a point, midway through a good crime fiction novel, where the person I had thought to be guilty turns out to be (most likely) innocent. This is an exciting moment. Initial suspicions have been denied but the suspense persists. I start thinking in other directions, turning different possibilities over in my head. But this is also a moment which establishes an expectation for what is to follow. Will I be thrilled to discover something new and unexpected? Or disappointed to find my initial suspect found guilty after all?

Having not read more than the first four chapters of Feminism and Geography, I feel as if I’m exactly at that moment. This is probably not too surprising to anyone familiar with the book’s structure. The opening chapter establishes the minority signifier of the Same/Other gender binary: the “imagined feminine Woman” (Rose 1993, 11). Chapters two and three use this to underscore Rose’s devastating critique of time-geography and humanistic geography respectively. The first is portrayed as conceiving of space in Cartesian terms. Movement is managed without bodies and knowledge formed without emotion. This is a geography which ignores Woman in favour of masculine rationality. By contrast the second—humanistic geogrpahy—is intrigued by Woman and sets out to uncover a geography of emotion and meaning. Humanistic (phenomenological and existential) approaches conceive of place not in its particularities, but in its universal essences. This erases Woman by making embodied experience a domain of masculine knowledge-making. In the fourth chapter, the concern that I had with Rose’s deconstruction of geography was raised and deftly sidestepped. Surely, I had assumed, by positioning her critique within the Same/Other binary Rose was also serving to reify its power. While my concern was granted, the affirmation of Same/Other was revealed to have been for the purpose of strategic critique, made from a consciously shifting and oscillating subject position. In the pages that remain her, Rose has promised to elaborate “a different kind of knowledge by drawing on different theorizations of different experiences” (Rose 1993, 85). I’m at the hinge of the book and I’m keen to dive back in and see where it takes me.

In this mid-point reflection, I want to describe in greater depth the character of my initial critique, partly as a way of trying to think through what I found to be suspicious. To do this I will: describe in more detail Rose’s logic of the binary-imaginary; suggest that this leads to a strategic essentialism which moves Rose philosophically from poststructuralism towards pragmatism; and conclude with a bit of speculation about where Rose might be going.

The Same/Other binary, which is derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, functions as a dyadic logic wherein each part, Same and Other, is defined in relation to the other. Same, or Man, is understood as having a concrete identity only through its distinction to Other, or Woman. Gendered difference is therefore socially constructed but still able to affect world through the performativity of its subject positions (see Butler 1990). Importantly, Same/Other is not an equal relationship; Same is always in a position of domination to the Other on which it depends. Rose applies this logic to more areas of life than Man/Woman. Culture/Nature also acts as a binary which structures knowledge. Similarly the difference between conceptual and grounded research (Rose 1993, 74):

theory – empirics general – specific abstract – concrete nomological – contextualising

The binary logic is also be applied to Rose’s critique of time-geography and humanistic geography (modified from Rose 1993, 75):

time geography – humanistic geography social-scientific – aesthetic rational – emotional space – place public – private social – body knowledge – emotion transparent – opaque

While Same/Other operates as a dyadic pair, it is also possible to read down each of the columns listed above. The left column can be loosely conceived of as representing masculine characteristics and the right as representing feminine characteristics.

As these binaries are taken to be socially constructed the question then arises: why is Rose so adamant in structuring her arguments around them? Rose’s critique of time geography is founded on its inherent masculinity. Her critique of humanistic geography on the other hand, is founded on a masculinity produced through an engagement with the feminine. These would seem to be inconsistent positions and “in some way complicit with the geographical discourse… engaged” (Rose 1993, 82). That is, by affirming the binary of Man/Woman, she is in fact reinforcing its hegemony. For Rose, this inconsistency is resolved through a “[refusal] to make a choice between two strategies” (Rose 1993, 83). As masculine knowledge-making acts at diverse capacities and scales, so too must its points resistance. Similarly her complicity with Man/Woman is positioned as a strategic attempt to face masculinity head on so as to “undermine the authority of the Same by seeking out the incoherences of its supposedly singular and stable position” (Rose 1993, 84). Her critiques do not confirm Man/Woman, because Rose is not asserting that they are real. Instead, her attack on geography is a strategic essentialism: “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (Spivak 1988, 13). Choosing a position primarily for its instrumental function rather than its explanatory weight, seems to me like the non-essentialised logic of pragmatism more so than the poststructuralism with which Rose is typically associated[1].

I want to conclude by reflecting on two possible directions in which Rose might be headed. These are based on my admittedly rather limited knowledge of feminist political theory. The first is the ontological trick of J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996) in which the rejection of the hegemonic binary of liberalism/socialism (or capitalism/communism) forms the basis for an exploration of alternative economic geographies. Applied to Rose’s work, a denial of the hegemony of masculine knowledge-making would not act in direct opposition to the dominations of Woman, but rather in parallel to them; not as a counter-hegemony but as an alter-hegemonic project. This would involve a recognition of the various and variegated ways in which bodies and subjectivities are gendered. The problem with this approach is that it fails to oppose the very real power dynamics which do operate through gender. The second is the epistemic commitment of intersectionality (Valentine 2007), wherein gender is not held to be above other sites of political contestation (such as class, race, sexuality, age and disability) but entangled with them. This might allow for more subtle and situated oppositions to masculine knowledge-making within the academy. Intersectionality does not offer a robust conceptual framework however, and so might not allow for the forms of engagement which Rose is adopting. I’m aware that both of these ideas were developed after Feminism and Geography, but it may be possible to find traces of them in the work. Whatever Rose goes with, I’m certain that it will be provocative and stimulating.

There is a risk in addressing only part of someone’s argument. It becomes easy to reduce their views and portray a caricature their position. Trying to write a response to a half-read book is, as such, something of a challenge—my reaction to the work is still quite open and shifting. I’m not entirely uncomfortable with this position. It seems like I’m here a lot. I guess I’ll have to let you know what I really think when I’m done.

Notes

I find it problematic that there is a concept designed to absolve academics from any potential (in)action inherent to their theorising—it sounds an awful lot like a cop-out to me. Given however that strategic essentialism is borrowed from postcolonial studies, it is probably a mode of public engagement which I would want to analyse at greater depth before critiquing more formally.

References

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). The End Of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A feminist critique of political economy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography. In R. Guha & G. C. Spivak (Eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–32.

Valentine, G. (2007). Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography. The Professional Geographer, 59(1), 10–21.