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| REVIEW ON FEMINIST GEOGRAPHY IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF NEW CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY |
| WAN Hui1,2, TANG Xue-qiong3 |
1. School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China;
2. School of Humanities and Law, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China;
3. School of Landscape, Southwest Forestry University, Kunming 650224, China |
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Abstract Through the transformation of cultural geography into new cultural geography,and the vigorous development of the feminist movement and feminist theory,western feminist geography have started to provide feminist perspective to analyze the geography problems from the female experience,gender rights,and female internal differences as well as to develop feminist paradigm to doubt and resist the authoritative discourse of the male subject. This paper is structured to follow the feminist geography of the main topics of the body,work,space and the nation. Our discussion is organized around three themes. Firstly,we discuss the ways feminist research explodes the concept of work. Feminist have expanded work beyond solely waged work to encompass unpaid reproductive work and the work of politics and community activism. Secondly,we discuss feminist research identifying the multitude of ways work as gendered. Finally we discuss feminist geographers' important contributions to understanding the spatiality of work in the process of economic restructuring. Gender is also related with space. Feminist geographers made a thorough inquiry on private and public space. They argued that being defined as a woman is likely to entail feeling confined in and constrained by space. Women rarely control space but instead are caught and confined by it. Gender,sexuality and nation are socially constructed and reveal the intimate relationship expressed through the nation. Women,as the biological and cultural reproduces of the national collective,are not equal in the nation but play as a symbolic role. Nationalist sentiment is expressed both through the gendered iconography of monuments and landscapes that unthinkingly reproduce distinct national identities. Feminist geography research in China is relatively weak now. Through the introduction of western scholars' studies,as well as foreign research progress review,this paper is to provide a useful lesson for the local research.
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Received: 30 October 2012
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2013, Vol. 28 
