Making Worlds

by Aiken, Susan Hardy; Brigham, Ann; Marston, Sallie A.; Waterstone, Penny

• ISBN13: 9780816517800
• ISBN10: 0816517800
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of Arizona Pr

Summary

Making Worldsbrings together thirty-one distinguished feminist activists, artists, and scholars to address a series of questions that resonate with increasing urgency in our current global environment: How is space imagined, represented, arranged, and distributed? What are the lived consequences of these configurations? And how are these questions affected by gender and other socially constructed categories of "difference"--race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality? How are the symbolic formations of place and space marked by cultural ideologies that carry across into the places and spaces we inhabit, the boundaries and institutions we maintain? In recent years these questions have occasioned intensifying debates, but they have seldom extended beyond the boundaries of individual academic disciplines or crossed the divide that has traditionally separated the academy from the "outside" world. Making Worldsboth questions and traverses those divisions by combining personal essays, activist political rhetoric, oral history, poetry, iconography, and performance art with interdisciplinary academic discourses. Representing a wide range of perspectives, Making Worldsdevelops a provocative conversation about gender and spatiality in the interwoven symbolic and material environments we create. The contributors engage such issues as the body as site of symbolic action, fabrication, and desire; the place and play of sexualities; the cultural implications of everyday life--home, travel, work, childbirth, food, disease, and death; technology and mass media; surveillance, confinement, and the law; the dynamics of race and ethnicity; imperialism, oppression, and resistance; the politics of urban spaces; landscape and cultural memory; the experience of time; and the nature of "Nature." For students and scholars in cultural studies, geography, literary criticism, anthropology, history, and women's studies, it offers new ways of thinking about space, place, and the spatial contexts of social thought and action.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 3
Locating the Issues	p. 11
Geographic Metaphors in Feminist Theory	p. 13
Making Sense of the World	p. 31
Reading Marginality	p. 45
Motion, Stasis, and Resistance to Interlocked Oppressions	p. 49
Jews, African Americans, and Urban Space: Constructing Progressive Alliances	p. 53
On Location	p. 60
Bodies Politic	p. 67
The Production of Abstract Space	p. 69
Codes of Law and Bodies of Color	p. 90
Specular Morality, the War on Drugs, and Anxieties of Visibility	p. 110
Bodies in Democratic Public Space: An Eighteenth-Century Perspective	p. 128
Sightings, Sites, and Speech in Women's Construction of a Nationalist Voice in Tanzania	p. 141
The Place of the Letter: An Epistolary Exchange	p. 161
A Different Script: Constructing Moral Geographies	p. 203
Feminist Ethics in a World of Moral Multiplicity: Dimensions and Boundaries	p. 205
The View from Waist High	p. 215
A Feminine World: Pueblo Spaces	p. 221
Locked In or Locked Out or Holding Both Ends of a Slippery Pole: Confusion of Metaphors, Collaborations, and Intellectual Travesties	p. 227
Silence and Subjectivity (A Position Paper)	p. 243
Sites and Spectacles	p. 253
Poems from Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert	p. 255
Confinements: The Domestic in the Discourses of Upper-Middle-Class Pregnancy	p. 258
Civilization, Barbarism, and Nortena Gardens	p. 274
Dancing for Dollars	p. 288
Reflections on Upward Mobility: Performance Spaces, Critical Practice, and the Spectacle of Flight	p. 294
Telling Time: Time, Metaphor, Feminism	p. 302
Source Acknowledgments	p. 309
Contributors	p. 311
Index	p. 317
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