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| FEMINIST SOCIAL-SPATIAL CONSTITUTION WITHIN THE PROCESS OF GENTRIFICATION |
| WU Qi-yan |
| School of Geography Science, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210046, China |
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Abstract The process of gentrification and its social consequence have attracted many scholars' attention since 1960's after the famous article written by Glass, ‘London:aspects of change’ (1964) was published. However, as Neil Smith commentated in ‘Of yuppies and housing:gentrification, social restructuring, and the urban dream’ (1987), this school of research of urban social science has not successfully bumped the movement of women and social gender into relevant study until 1990's which was known as the time of (new) social movements such as booming movement of women liberation, civil rights movement in the West. At that time, theoretical-led feminists seem to have to fight for themselves and empirical researchers, such as geographers, urban planners and so on were all standby as bunch of wall flowers. In fact, after 1990's energetically social movement of women revolution has progressively ‘invaded’ many disciplines of social science, some interesting research perspectives in feminists on gentrification process caused a serially reaction in geographical society. Undeniably, Women have been living in the chain of patriarchy, and have been discriminated politically, culturally as well as economically. Unfortunately, many researches in this direction fell into the trap of over positivism or paying too much attention on daily exquisite in the way of empirical study of pieces of empirical-led feminist social life stories, or too abstract in inscrutable theories. So, in this paper, the author tries to bridge the gap between these two extreme directions of researches in the feminism gentrification study. In fact, there are many ways to construct the linkage within the social-spatial weaving reaction of feminist gentrifies in inner-city areas. The author thinks the path of feminist social-spatial constitution within the process of gentrification would not only trigger or stir up the empirical interests of urban planners, professional geographers etc., who could adjust their work paradigm to fulfill the demands of Chinese ‘new-born’ feminism gentrifies. The paper will give some inspiration to urban sociologist and feminist who would take advantage of the facts of feminist social spacial constitution of gentrifies to extend their researches into the crossfire field of geography, socialogy and feminist research.
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Received: 25 April 2012
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2013, Vol. 28 
