Feminist inclusions in economic geography: What difference does difference make?

摘要

This special section of Environment and Planning A is the outcome of a panel we organized at the Fourth Global Conference on Economic Geography (GCEG) held in Oxford, UK in August 2015. The panel was intended to reflect on the role and influence of feminist work in economic geography; a sub-discipline distinguished by its heterogeneous theoretical and methodological approaches. In particular, it sought to encourage reflection on the extent to which economic geography as a sub-discipline has responded to feminist interventions that have drawn attention to the cultural construction of difference in ways that pose a challenge to its more generalized categories and frameworks of analysis (for example, regional development, labour, the firm, the state). Taking as our starting point, Linda McDowell's (1991) article 'Life without Father and Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-Fordism', which was published a quarter of a century ago (and revisited 10 years later, see McDowell, 2001), we asked to what extent and in what ways feminism (here referred to in the singular, but clearly 'feminisms' in practice) has changed the way economic geography is done? To what degree has the sub-discipline benefitted from the attention paid over the past 25 years to reproductive and domestic labour, the gender order and the interactions of categories of difference such as gender, class and race in our research enquiries?