Gender, Place and Culture

Vol. 11, No. 1, March 2004

ISSN 0966369X (print)/ISSN 13600524 (online)/04/01000313 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0966369042000188521
10th Anniversary Address For a
Feminist Geography of Ambivalence
LIZ BONDI
Geography, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
ABSTRACT This article argues for and invokes an ambivalent feminist spatiality. Drawing on the
idea that the position of feminist academic is a contradiction in terms, together with my ambivalence
about presenting the Gender, Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture, I illustrate ways in which
feminists successfully inhabit unresolved tensions about academic authority. I then explore four
themes in feminist politicsequality, autonomy, difference and deconstructionshowing how each
contains internal tensions that are held as ambivalences through the spatialities to which they appeal.
The two sections of the essay deploy different voices with a view to generating space for ambivalence.
Introduction
In 1992 I signed a contract through which I became founding editor of the journal
Gender, Place and Culture, the first issue of which appeared in 1994. I continued
to serve as editor until 1999, initially alongside Mona Domosh and then alongside
Lynn Staeheli. When Gender, Place and Culture first came into existence I did not,
as far as I can recall, give a thought to the moment when I would see ten volumes
lined up on a library bookshelf. And if by chance the thought did cross my mind, I
am sure that I would have chased the idea away as a bit of grandiose day-dreaming.
At that time, my horizons were a great deal closer. I worried about whether the
journal would attract sufficient good-quality submissions to fill the first issue, let
alone ten volumes. I worried about whether the journal would reach the sales target
needed to retain the commitment of our publisher, and about how the journal would
be received academically. And I kept such worries under control, in part, by attend-
ing to the practical necessities my first co-editor Mona Domosh and I needed to
address, such as how we would handle manuscripts, and how we would work with
referees, authors, editorial board members and the publishers.
Looking back to those early days, one of the things that strikes me is that
although we (Mona and I) felt that we made it up as we went along, in the sense
that we did not have available to us templates, models or mentors for how to set
about being academic journal editors, let alone feminist academic journal editors,
we actually proceeded along a pretty well-trodden path with no more than minor
deviations. Indeed, sometimes this was explicit. For example, I remember early
discussions in which we gravitated towards the view that we might most effectively
Correspondence: Liz Bondi, Institute of Geography, School of Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK EH8 9XP; e-mail: liz.bondi@ed.ac.uk
4 L. Bondi
create a space dedicated to feminist scholarship by sticking fairly closely to some
of the established conventions of academic journals. We felt that breaking with
some academic traditions in order to foster feminist scholarship might be best facil-
itated by adhering closely to other academic traditions. And so, at a time when some
journals were moving towards open review processes, we instituted a system of
fully anonymous refereeing, arguing that this traditional approach to peer review,
in which both authors and referees are anonymised, was the most likely to secure
respect for a new, upstart feminist journal (also see Bondi, 1998, 2001). Similarly,
Mona and I positioned ourselves in relation to authors and referees in ways that
drew on the conventional idea that editors exercise independent judgement,
informed, but not bound, by referees' commentaries. We were, contradictorily, also
deeply critical of claims to neutrality associated with such ideas (Bondi & Domosh
1992), but we wanted to ensure that the journal, and the journal's authors, had the
best possible chance of accruing institutional respectthat is, that publishing in
Gender, Place and Culture would benefit and not detract from contributors' CVs
as well as fostering innovative feminist interventions. It therefore seemed to us that
we needed to work within some academic norms that would give the journal author-
ity at the same time as making clear that we welcomed submissions that would chal-
lenge such norms. Putting this another way, we sought to embed within the journal
a contradictory relationship to academic traditions.
Feminist academics constantly confront questions about which bits of academic
traditions to use and thereby reproduce, and which to avoid, discard, discredit or
otherwise attempt to get away from. Questions about how to design a manuscript
review process for a feminist journal exemplify how this operates within the acad-
emy, but exactly the same dilemmas confront us in relation to the larger context of
our work, for example in the notion of serving society, which was one of the core
themes of the 2003 Annual Conference Royal Geographical SocietyInstitute of
British Geographers, where the first version of this paper was presented. Broadly
speaking, feminists seek to serve societies by working to counter inequalities and
oppressions, and our efforts necessarily deploy less than ideal tools and resources.
So, for example, we might appeal to liberal notions of human rights in order to
challenge violence against women, thereby perpetuating problematic notions of
people as bearers of individual rights, as well as leaving the category women
unquestioned, at the same time as addressing vital feminist political concerns
(Cornell, 1991). Such choices are never innocent and never unproblematic in their
effects. Hard-won and important achievements may, simultaneously, entrench
ways of seeing the world that impede other interventions. Moreover, interventions
that make use of our positions as feminist academics, whether we understand our
activism in terms of putting ideas into circulationfor example by questioning
taken-for-granted assumptions about gender categoriesor in terms of more prac-
tical interventions, are always also about our own careers, whether beneficially or
detrimentally. I am not arguing that feminists are ultimately careerist, only that,
within the deeply individualistic institutions in which we operate, our interventions
are inevitably about our individualised selves as well as about others.
I have suggested that, in a variety of ways, feminist academics confront
dilemmas, and that we often find ourselves in contradictory positions. Indeed,
Susan Friedman (1985) (among others) has described the position of the feminist
For a Feminist Geography of Ambivalence 5
academic as a contradiction in terms, in the sense that being an academic is
impossible without compromising feminist principles, and being a feminist is
impossible without compromising academic principles. We cannot undertake
feminist academic work without colluding in practices of which we are also criti-
cal. My intention in this essay is to reflect on how we collectively inhabit the
contradictoriness of feminist academic work. More specifically, I argue for a
politics of ambivalence, and I will endeavour to show that such a politics is not
about sitting on the fence, but about creating spaces in which tensions, contra-
dictions and paradoxes can be negotiated fruitfully and dynamically. I want to do
this in part by acknowledging and not resolving something of the contradictori-
ness of this essay. To that end I trouble my own authority as knowledge-
producer, focusing on my enactment of the role of presenter of the Gender,
Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture, at the same time as using academic
authority in conventionaluntroubledways to advance my argument about a
spatialised politics of ambivalence.
Confessions of an Ambivalent Speaker
I approached the task of delivering the Gender, Place and Culture 10th Anniver-
sary Lecture with considerable ambivalence. It was, of course, a great honour, but
I approached the event with anxiety, even dread, as well as pleasure. When I was
first asked to give the lecture, I was delighted, both because the event itself struck
me as a wonderfully celebratory idea, and because being asked to present it was
clearly an honour that expressed appreciation of my contribution to Gender, Place
and Culture. And so, without hesitation, I said yes. Why, in that case, was I in the
least bit ambivalent? At one level the answer is obvious. Many of you will share
with me numerous experiences of having said yes to something many months
ahead, thinking that will be great, only to find yourselves approaching the dead-
line wondering what on earth you could have thinking about and when you are ever
going to learn to say no. But in the case of this lecture, I never felt that I should
have said no. And yet I also felt more intensely than with many other commit-
ments that I wished I could have said no or otherwise avoided it, at the same time
as knowing that there was no way I would deprive myself of the honour, or renege
on my commitment. So why did it fill me with such dread (and that is not too strong
a word to capture one aspect of my ambivalence) as well as delight? The problem
lay, I think, in my sense of what is expected at an event of this nature. Rightly or
wrongly, I felt called upon to occupy a particular kind of position, a bit different
from other kinds of conference presentations. In the academic tradition with which
I am familiar, journal lectures are typically relatively sweeping in purview, and
authoritative in voice and substance. They step back from specific research agen-
das and aim to speak more broadly about directions, trajectories, visions, themes
and so on. But feminists are deeply critical of claims to authority that warrant the
right to speak in such ways (e.g. Haraway, 1988). So this kind of event accentuates
a more pervasive dilemma, namely how can feminists fulfil the contradictory
requirement to take up a position of authority at the same time as acknowledging
the fraudulence of claims to such a position? Putting this more personally, how can
I sustain the contradiction between my need to feel authorised to speak and my
6 L. Bondi
recognition of the problematic politics of any such authorisation? The intensifica-
tion of that familiar conundrum was, at least in part, responsible for my disquiet
about what I had let myself in for.
The contradictoriness of the event in which this essay originated was evident in
other ways as well, that are also reflected in feminist academic work more gener-
ally. Unlike other journal events at the 2003 Annual Conference Royal Geograph-
ical SocietyInstitute of British Geographers (including the Antipode lecture and
the Progress in Human Geography lecture) the Gender, Place and Culture 10th
Anniversary Lecture was not in fact a plenary lecture but was scheduled within the
parallel sessions. This highlights another tension that feminist academics routinely
negotiate. The conference itself did not take ownership of this event as a core part
of the programme, positioning it instead within the domain of the specialist rather
than the discipline-wide
1
. And, while that might have relieved me of some anxiety
about the kind of expectations attaching to it, it generated other kinds of ambiva-
lence about processes of marginalisation. More widely, to what extent can feminist
academics challenge the dynamics of marginalisation by insinuating ourselves into
more central positions, or by inscribing marginality with new significance (Hooks,
1984)? These are certainly not either/or choices, but all our work is situated both
within and against the conventions of academic authority, simultaneously repro-
ducing it and opening up possibilities for reshaping it in undecidable ways.
I would argue that we do this routinely in our interactions with students,
colleagues, research participants and so on. As I have already suggested our pres-
ence as feminist geographers and feminist academics can be thought ofand expe-
riencedas a contradiction, which we necessarily, and in many ways successfully,
inhabit. In so doing we both reproduce and reshape academic authority in ways that
go far beyond our awareness. For example, many of you will share with me the
experience of occasionally receiving feedback, years after the event, about how
something I said influenced a student's subsequent direction. Some of them tell me
how I unwittingly helped them to take one step that turned into a highly successful
career in, perhaps, the diplomatic servicehardly my most radical moment you
might thinkwhile othersmore comfortinglyrealised that it might be possible
and useful to combine political commitment with academic research. The impos-
sibility of knowing what comment or action might generate which kind of
response, and, that the same comment or action might actually generate both, is
what I mean by undecidability.
Against the background of this process of workingoften unwittingly and
undecidablyboth within and against academic authority, in the next section I
engage with the contradictoriness from another angle by thinking about the spati-
alities of themes in feminist politics, which have informed a good deal what we
have been doing over the past decade or so in the name of feminist geography.
Four Perspectives on the Ambivalent Spatial Politics of Gender
The contradictoriness I have described calls upon feminist geographers (among
others) to occupy two mutually exclusive positions at once, within but also
sufficiently outside to work against academic traditions and conventions. And so,
taking myself as an example, what I needed as I struggled to prepare for the
For a Feminist Geography of Ambivalence 7
Gender, Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture was an imaginative geogra-
phy within which that kind of contradiction is made possible. Gillian Rose (1993,
p. 141) has described such a geography as a paradoxical spatiality. This influen-
tial formulation is a useful start, but it does not provide any easy solutions to the
difficulties feminist academics face. In my own case, I knew that I wanted to hold
onto my academic authority at the same time and in the same place as calling it into
question, and I could just about glimpse such a possibility, but I also felt that possi-
bility to be always just out of my reach (see Bondi & Davidson 2004). To elaborate
this problem further, I draw on Judith Butler (1990) who has reminded us that what
is is performatively constituted, thereby suggesting that we might be able to do
gender, authority, and much else besides, differently. Her argument about the
performativity of identities has been widely taken up in feminist geography (but for
a critical review see Nelson, 1999), and Gillian Rose (1999) has argued for an
understanding of space itself as performative. But Butler (1997) has also reminded
us that there is no escape from the regulatory regimes we inhabit because these
regimes sustain our sense of agencyour sense of being able to make a differ-
enceas well as the subject's subordination. Caroline Desbiens (1999, p. 182) has
elaborated this kind of conundrum in her critique of paradoxical space arguing that
Rose's conceptualisation of paradoxical space invokes a utopian space else-
where, which is more problematic than Rose concedes because it implies the
possibility of escaping those inescapable regulatory regimes. As Desbiens (1999,
p. 183) argued, this underestimates the need for an elsewhere within capable of
acting as a bridge from what is to some place beyond. This accurately
describes my experience: the idea of paradoxical space held out to me the possibil-
ity of occupying mutually exclusive positions in relation to authority, but I still
could not reach it. Stepping back from my own particular struggles, a task for femi-
nism in general and feminist geography in particular therefore entails expanding
the room available for manoeuvre in the form of an elsewhere within in which to
mobilise ambivalence to erode or subvert the boundary (or barrier) between what
is and what might be.
It is in an attempt to contribute to such a project that this essay draws on two
different voices, one more personalised and one more conventionally authorita-
tive (compare Rose, 1996), through which to offer two different takes on ambiv-
alence. I have described feminist geographers as routinely working both within and
against the authority invested in us often with undecidable effects. Completing a
shift in voice initiated in the preceding paragraph, I seek to expand the space avail-
able for such work by arguing that feminism, or, more accurately, feminisms, draw
on particular conceptualisations of space as well as gender, generating distinctive
spatialities that can be understood as ways of holding ambivalence. My analysis is
underpinned by an understanding of these conceptualisations as ways of doing
both space and gender, and therefore as embodying political commitments (Rose,
1999). I elaborate my argument using a fourfold categorisation of feminist
approaches, namely equality, autonomy, difference and deconstruction, which I
have used elsewhere for other purposes in work co-authored with Joyce Davidson
(Bondi & Davidson, 2003). While the four approaches on which I focus are some-
times presented chronologically, with one succeeding another (e.g. Warner, 2000),
I think that this fabricates progress too unquestioningly, and diverts attention away
8 L. Bondi
from potentially productive tensions between them. I would argue that equality,
autonomy, difference and deconstruction are more usefully considered as co-exis-
tent, concurrent and deeply interwoven themes, sometimes mutually reinforcing
each other and sometimes operating more contradictorily (Hirsch & Keller, 1990)
2
.
My purpose here is to strengthen that case by showing how, in different ways, each
approach in itself fosters spaces of ambivalence that need to be mobilised rather
than resolved or foreclosed. Albeit very briefly, I argue that equality spatialises
ambivalence by relocating gender from one place to another; that autonomy
spatialises ambivalence by conceptualising gender and space as inseparable; that
difference spatialises ambivalence by focusing on and troubling movement
between positions; and that deconstruction spatialises ambivalence by focusing on
and troubling boundaries. In one sense, my argument is, ironically, a classic exam-
ple of a sweeping overview of a very rich and complex field, and it rides roughshod
over many important nuances. For example, it risks misrepresenting feminist poli-
tics as always concerned primarily with gender. However, the purpose is less to
generate a robust analysis of different feminist political strategies, and more to
draw to attention, and to value, spaces that enable ambivalence to be explored
rather than resolved.
Equality
The idea of equality is a very familiar theme within feminist politics. It assumes
that membership of the category human is far more significant than membership
of particular sub-divisions such as those women and men. In other words, simi-
larity, including similarity between the genders, trumps differences, which are
deemed superficial. Within Western Anglophone intellectual traditions, this
perspective is often traced to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking of
Mary Wollstonecraft (1792/1975), who sought to challenge the androcentrism of
liberal humanist thinking. In so doing she helped to set in train an approach that has
generated numerous demands for equal rightslegal, political, economic, social
and so onon the part of oppressed and disadvantaged groups, including, but not
limited to, women (Whelehan, 1995).
A deep-seated tensionor contradictionwithin a feminist strategy of equality
is its continuing reliance on, and reproduction of, the binary construct of gender it
describes as a superfluous and unnecessary distraction from the reality of the
human condition. The unproblematic attribution of human beings to the category
women or the category men is repeated over and over within a politics of equal-
ity because it is the means by which gender inequalities are identified and
contested. The same applies to claims for equal rights made by other oppressed and
disadvantaged groups. And the contradictoriness exemplifies the process of work-
ing within and against conventions that I have already described. By drawing out
the spatiality of gender equality I want to explore how this tension is negotiated.
The emphasis on similarity associated with the idea of equality suggests that the
sources of gender, also often termed masculinity and femininity, are socially
produced rather than biologically given (Oakley, 1972). This formulation situates
gender as separable from, preceding, and external to the human individuals who
are allocated to one of two mutually exclusive gender categories, at, before, or
For a Feminist Geography of Ambivalence 9
occasionally soon after, birth (Stoller, 1968; Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Subsequent
reassignment may be possible but is hotly contested by some feminists, who argue
that the notion of a mismatch between outward appearance and inner experience
mistakenly locates gender as something inherent or interior when it should be
understood as constructed, superficial and external (Shapiro, 1991; Cream, 1995).
This argument appeals to an important feature of the spatiality of gender equality,
namely its insistence that gender is located outside, rather than inside, human indi-
viduals, and becomes attached to human surfaces or outward appearances, but does
not reside deeper in. This spatiality is, therefore, also one in which that differenti-
ation between inside and outside is taken-for-granted rather than questioned.
The idea of equality has spawned concerted efforts to enable women to gain
access to opportunities on equal terms to men. More often than not this has meant
entering spaces previously dominated by menspaces associated, for example,
with work and employment, with politics and policy-making, with justice and
legislation. Barriers to women's entry have generally been understood to reside in
outmoded attitudes, behaviours, rules and criteria for access, and feminist geogra-
phers have drawn attention to the spatial character of these exclusionary mecha-
nisms (Spain, 1992). A feminist strategy of equality, therefore, does not rest
content with the insistence that gender is located outside human individuals, but
also contests these external geographies. The gendering of spaces is deemed as
superficial, unnecessary and expendable as the gendering of human bodies.
Interventions associated with gender equality mobilise a vision of spatial inte-
gration between members of two groups whose similarities outweigh their differ-
ences (Spain, 1992). The spatiality of gender equality can be described as one of
spatial de-differentiation, in which the externalisation of gender, and the definition
of interiors as gender-free, is a first step towards a degendering of space. Space is
conceptualised in a particular way within this strategyas transparent, unmarked,
contentless and fundamentally gender-free (cf. Rose, 1993). However problematic
this conceptualisation may be, my key point is a different one. What I want to
emphasise is that a feminist strategy of equality rests on the externalisation of
gender, that is, on it being located outside rather than inside human beings, and
outside rather than integral to the spaces and places within which women and men
work, play and live. It is by means of this process of relocating gender conceptu-
allyfrom human interiors to human surfaces to specific spaces to somewhere
else that the contradiction between mobilising and dismantling binary gender
categories is negotiated. Space, or, more precisely, a particular conceptualisation
of space, is the medium through which the contradictoriness of a feminist strategy
of equality is inhabited. It is a strategy for holding the ambivalence between chal-
lenging and reproducing the inegalitarian effects of a binary construct of gender.
Autonomy
Turning next to the idea of autonomy this also has a long heritage within feminist
politics. In some contexts, autonomy goes hand-in-hand with equality because the
capacity for self-determination operates as a pre-requisite for the capacity to
exercise equal rights (de Beauvior, 1949/1997). However, the idea of autonomy
does not necessarily bear any relation to the pursuit of equality, and is sometimes
10 L. Bondi
mobilised to rather different ends, namely the pursuit of independence, and sepa-
rateness (Morgan, 1970). Thus a key tension within a feminist strategy of auton-
omy lies in the issue of whether it is regarded as a means to an end or an end in
itself.
A feminist strategy of autonomy attaches considerable importance to the
creation of spaces for and by oppressed and disadvantaged groups, perhaps the
classic example being women-focused, women-friendly or women-only spaces
(Valentine, 1997; Taylor, 1998). Rather than seeking access to spaces previously
dominated by men, the pursuit of autonomy suggests that spaces acquire gendered
attributes and associations, which need to be understood, fostered and revalued.
Genderas an attribute of people and of spaceis conceptualised as profound and
pervasive rather than as superficial or expendable. Herein lies its contrast with the
spatiality of equality. As many feminists acknowledge, the pursuit of equality risks
unwittingly demanding that women become more like men, and spatial integration
risks leaving the gendering of space undisclosed so that women's access turns out
to be on men's terms. In other words, apparently neutral or unmarked attributes
together with supposedly gender inclusive spaces often conceal gendered assump-
tions that reflect or express men's interests. Creating women-centred spaces is a
key means through which a strategy of autonomy seeks to counter the devaluation
and denigration of women and the feminine.
The idea of autonomy refuses to separate gender from space: space is understood
to be saturated with gender, or gendered through and through. The spatiality of a
strategy of autonomy is therefore one in which gender and space are mutually
constituted, produced or performed (Jardine, 1985; Rose, 1999). It is through this
spatiality that a strategy of autonomy negotiates the tension between its status as
means or ends. Consider, for example, how feminist geographers have sought to
influence the practices and agendas of geography through the development of
women-centred, and sometimes women-only, groups, networks, meetings, texts
and so on (Women and Geography Study Group, 1984). Are these activities under-
stood as relatively short-term tactics, which will, in due course, secure full equality
and fall away, or are they expressions of commitment to independence and sepa-
rateness? Most of us, I think, prefer to embrace this tension and sustain our ambiv-
alence, rather than choosing between these possibilities. The spatiality of autonomy
helps us to get on with the task of producing feminist geographies, without resolv-
ing the question of whether women-centred spaces constitute means or ends.
Difference
The idea of autonomy emphasises gender as a source of difference, and in so doing
focuses attention on women, women's experiences, and women's spaces. But, as
many commentators have argued, gender is just one among a multitude of politically
significant differences (Ramazanoglu, 1989; Collins, 1990; Skeggs, 1997). Differ-
ences among women, for which the term diversity is sometimes preferred, have
therefore been an important, and often contentious, idea within feminist politics.
The idea of difference is closely linked to the politics of identity, that is, to forms
of political mobilisation that draw on the recognition of similarities within groups,
and differences from other groups (Bondi, 1993). The category women is an
For a Feminist Geography of Ambivalence 11
inadequate basis for such mobilisation because it is fractured by numerous salient
differences, such as race, class, sexuality, age, forms of embodiment and so on
(Spelman, 1990). But herein lies a contradiction for a feminist politics of differ-
ence: acknowledging a multiplicity of differences risks inviting a debilitating trend
towards the fragmentation of feminist politics.
I want to suggest, however, that a politics of difference is also a politics of
mobility, and that this spatiality, including impediments to mobility, is the means
by which the contradiction between foregrounding diversity and working together
politically is productively negotiated. To elaborate, the idea of differenceof a
plethora of differencesanimates the field of feminist politics in important ways
precisely because it acknowledges these risks of fragmentation. There would be no
mobilisation around hyphenated identities in the absence of keenly felt frustra-
tions around efforts to work across differences (Ramazanoglu, 1989; Fine, 1994).
Thus, as well as foregrounding issues of identity, the idea of difference also draws
attention to the possibility, at the very least, of forging connections that are not
based on presumed similarities: recognition of difference is often an important
element within efforts to foster alliances around non-identical but nevertheless
overlapping interests and affinities (Pratt, 1984).
I am not suggesting that alliances are easily built. Indeed feminist geographers
have drawn attention to the intensely geographical constraints that go hand-in-hand
with processes of globalisation which sometimes appear to facilitate movement
(Massey, 1994). As Geraldine Pratt and Susan Hanson (1994, p. 25) have argued
there is a stickiness to identity that is grounded in the fact that many women's lives
are lived locally. This often leads to a strong sense of differences between women,
which mask interdependencies and commonalities. Building alliances therefore
requires consideration of women's social, economic and political geographies. If
differences literally keep women apart, alliances cannot be forged. Working to
enable movement across space and between positions is integral to the possibility
of working together and working politically (Pratt & Hanson, 1994). But the spati-
ality invoked by a feminist politics of difference is not one of free, frictionless
movement. On this account, space is neither gender-free nor gender-saturated.
Rather it is characterised by striations, fractures and fragmentations that simulta-
neously disrupt and precipitate movement and connectedness, and it is the means
by which the contradictoriness of, and ambivalence towards, different differences,
is negotiated.
Deconstruction
The idea that gender categories are constructs is as fundamental to feminism as the
ideas of equality, autonomy and difference. It is expressed, for example, in the sex-
gender distinction (itself a core feature of the idea of gender equality) between
what is socially createdgenderand what is biologically givensex. But the
sex-gender distinction leaves intact the binary structure of both sex and gender.
Indeed it draws on dualistic thinking to set up sex and gender as expressions of
another binary opposition, namely biology and culture. The strategy of deconstruc-
tion addresses and seeks to undo the binary framework on which dominant under-
standings of sex, gender and the sex-gender distinction depend.
12 L. Bondi
Whereas the idea of difference prompts us to think in terms of the proliferation
of versions of femininity and masculinity, the idea of deconstruction draws into
question the stability and coherence of all such identities (Butler, 1990). Moreover,
it highlights instabilities at the interface between many other distinctions
between self and other, between subject and space, between person and environ-
ment (Kirby, 1996; Davidson, 2003). The contradiction for feminist politics is the
direct counterpart to that associated with equality. If gender categories are incoher-
ent, unstable constructs, how is the subject of feminism to be defined (Rose, 1995),
and how are the interests of those subjected to (and by) the category women to be
addressed? We need boundaries but we need to unbound ourselves too. The tension
is played out vividly and sometimes vociferously in relation to gender reassign-
ment (Taylor, 1998). Does transsexuality disrupt, subvert, bend, queer and decon-
struct binary gender categories, or is it inextricably bound up with the policing of
a rigid gender dichotomy (Shapiro, 1991; Stone, 1991)? Is transsexuality about
opening up spaces for gender ambiguity, whether understood as hybrid identities,
queer identities or third genders, or is it yet another way of shoring up a fiction of
gender coherence within a dichotomous, either/or model?
If we remain bound by the terms of these questions we are stuck with highly
polarised positionswe have to come down on one side or the other without room
to sit on the fence. However, if we take deconstruction seriously then the polarisa-
tion itself needs to be problematised, and we can open up space for ambivalent
responses, which might enable us to develop analyses that move beyond either/or
answers
3
. I would therefore suggest that a strategy of deconstruction sustains
ambivalence through a spatiality characterised by troubling boundaries and bound-
ary troubles. This spatiality does not banish boundaries but persistently questions
them, fostering a politics in which boundaries are negotiated as processes rather
than givens. Deconstruction is, paradoxically, just as vigilant about boundaries as
foundationalism, but whereas foundationalism seeks to stabilise boundaries,
deconstructive efforts are devoted to destabilising them. A strategy of deconstruc-
tion troubles the boundaries between mutually exclusive opposites of many kinds,
including decisive responses to either/or questions, as well as binary constructs like
gender. In so doing, it invites us, for example, to remain ambivalent about the
gender politics of transsexuality, and invokes a spatiality of instabilities, undecid-
abilities, fictional cartographies and subversive forms of creativity.
Conclusion
In this article I have offered an outline analysis of the spatialities implicit in femi-
nist politics, showing how four different feminist strategies contain internal
tensions that are held as ambivalences through the spatialities to which they appeal.
As my summary suggests, and as numerous other feminist geographers have noted,
feminist politics entail rich spatial imaginaries. My discussion of these feminist
spatial imaginaries flowed from a search for space within which to inhabit contra-
dictions associated with the position of feminist academic. The effect has been to
construct a essay that consists of two rather different parts, characterised by two
different voices. In so doing my intention is to create something of the ambivalent
spatiality about which I have sought to communicate. So, having begun with a first
For a Feminist Geography of Ambivalence 13
person account that troubled its own coherence and authority, I moved to a position
in which that diffident first person voice became subdued and gave way to a more
conventionally authoritative one. Or did it? Might it actually be that the voice that
lays claim to diffidence in a conference lecture or a journal article is in fact the
more deeply authoritative (Fleischman, 1998)? Might that apparently diffident,
self-questioning first-person voice be the more authoritative voice because of all
that accretes to my peculiar and privileged position as presenter of the Gender,
Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture and author of the ensuing essay? Does
my attempt to trouble my own recruitment into a position of academic authority,
presuppose and enact a certain security in that recruitment? Using Jane Gallop's
(1995, p. 16) formulation, both voices can be understood as im-personations that
operate within a knot of pretense and reality. In one I claim a position of self-
doubt; in the other I enter into academic authority unproblematically. Neither voice
is true or false, authentic or inauthentic; moreover, each voice reverberates through
and frames the other.
My intention in juxtaposing these voices is to help to expose, and to play with,
their constructedness. This playing draws attention to the way in which feminist
critiques of academic authority (and much else besides) are always self-directed as
well as other-directed or, to borrow a description offered by Vicki Kirby (2002, p.
268) in another context, this mode of argumentation is parasitic, a re-animation of
the host argument. But this is a process which intensifies my ambivalence. On one
hand, the play of impersonation may be productive in efforts to call academic
authority into question; on the other hand, it may be no more than an all-too famil-
iar self-indulgent cleverness. For me, as author, that remains undecidable, although
you, as readers, may choose to decide.
Acknowledgements
This essay has its origins in a lecture delivered at the 2003 Annual Conference
Royal Geographical SocietyInstitute of British Geographers to celebrate the
10th anniversary year of Gender, Place and Culture. My thanks to Linda Peake
and Gill Valentine for the invitation to present the lecture, and to all those who
attended for participating in the celebrations as well as for their questions and
feedback on the paper. I am very grateful to Andrea Nightingale for her generosity
in commenting on multiple drafts, and to Joyce Davidson, Mona Domosh and the
current journal editors for their feedback on the draft prepared for publication.
ABSTRACT TRANSLATION
Este ensayo argumenta a favor de e invoca una espacialidad feminista ambivalente.
Partiendo de la idea de que la posicin de acadmica feminista es un contrasentido,
junto con mi ambivalencia acerca de presentar la Conferencia del Dcimo Aniver-
sario de Gender, Place and Culture, ilustro maneras en que feministas ocupan con
xito las tensiones no resueltas sobre la autoridad acadmica. Luego exploro cuatro
temas en la poltica feministala igualdad, la autonoma, la diferencia y la decon-
struccindemostrando como cada uno contiene tensiones internas que se
sostienen como ambivalencias a travs de las espacialidades a las cules recurren.
14 L. Bondi
Las dos partes del ensayo utilizan voces distintas con el propsito de generar un
espacio para la ambivalencia.
Notes
1. I am not suggesting that this was an active decision on the part of the Conference organisers. The impression
I gleaned indirectly was that this positioning was the outcome of processes that could be read in a variety
of ways.
2. Notwithstanding this claim, I have retained a conventional ordering within this essay, thereby reproducing
the chronology, and have not undertaken the (considerable and complex) work of articulating the conceptual
distinctions at issue completely afresh. My decision to do thisto remain within the framing at the same time
as claiming to distance myself from itis another example of contradictoriness.
3. My thanks to Angie Fee for helping me to thinkambivalentlyabout this example.
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