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Reviewed by:
  • Home/Bodies: Geographies of Self, Place and Space
  • Deborah Cowen (bio)
Wendy Schissel, editor. Home/Bodies: Geographies of Self, Place and Space. University of Calgary Press. 2006. ix, 206. $34.95

Home/Bodies is a collection of eleven papers derived from a conference devoted to the lived environments of girls and women. The book takes the relationships between gender, belonging, and nation as its central focus. While biographies are not included in the collection, the authorship is clearly interdisciplinary and international. Home/Bodies explores an impressive range of old and new feminist questions that deliberately cut across the intimate and the public, the private and the political. The chapters address topics ranging from the citizenship of Kimberley Aboriginals in Australia, to the gendering of Internet advertising and consumption, to the politics of colonialism and ‘race’ in friendships between Indigenous, Metis, and ‘other Canadian’ older women, to the changing forms of racism and Islamophobia after 9/11, among many others.

This empirical breadth may be a striking feature of this book, but it is also a shortcoming. The organizing principles and central themes are harder to decipher, lending this collection a somewhat random and even rambling feel. Ironically, the editor very explicitly backs away from the one theme that could bring analytical order to this mass of information and ideas: geography. Despite the heavy invocation of the language of space in the title of the book, the opening line of the introduction insists, ‘[T]his is not a book on human or physical geography per se.’ Rather, the editor suggests that the collection is more concerned with metaphorical spaces. The relationships between the metaphorical and the material do not in themselves merit attention here, even as geographers have long argued that spatial metaphor cannot be understood without explicit analysis of its relationship to spatial practice (Lefebvre 1991; Smith and Katz 1993). Indeed, with spatial concepts and questions running so centrally through this collection, and specifically with the metaphor of ‘home’ invoking the politics of both personal and national dwelling simultaneously, it is quite stunning that there is no sustained reflection in the editor’s comments on space or scale.

The largely uncritical mobilization of metaphor also informs the thematic organization of this collection. The first two sections are organized according to medical metaphors of political problems – ‘Compound Fractures’ and ‘Ruptured Sutures.’ However, there is a long and treacherous history to biological metaphors of the ‘body politic’ (see Brown and Rasmussen 2005) that are part of the exact history of national racism, pro-natalism, hetero-normativity, and ableism that the chapters of this collection set out to challenge. The playful reference to the body in the title is not enough to account for a biological lens on the political. Indeed, rather than a critical reclaiming of the medical metaphors, the editor seems to presuppose some kind of coherent body politic to be recuperated, which is precisely the meaning [End Page 135] that critical scholarship has long challenged. Perhaps even more puzzling is the suspension of biological metaphor for the third subsection, which is pro-saicly titled ‘Habitats for/of Humanity.’ The subsections furthermore do not always contain or conjure the chapters within. For instance, why is the chapter by Maureen G. Reed on women’s activism within Canada’s industrial forestry industry not a part of the final section, which is devoted to building a more liberatory and equitable community?

As a collection, Home/Bodies feels chaotic, and it is unclear for what audience it is intended. Its strength lies rather in a series of the more compelling chapters and the connections between them, even if these are left mostly implicit. While a number of the contributions are earnest and seem to reinvent the wheel, overlooking the decades of powerful feminist scholarship on gender and labour, the constructedness of identity, the gendering of nationalism, and the politics of public and private space, there are also beautifully insightful moments scattered across the text. Particularly thoughtful treatments of the intersections of gender and racialization are offered in chapters by J. Maria Pedersen, Tabassum Ruby, and Kim Morrison. There are also insightful reflections on the concept of ‘home’ that trouble any easy embrace...

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