Introduction to Special Issue: “Theorizing Space and Gender in the 21st Century”

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.

--Judith Butler

In this quote from Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler suggests a link between gender and space. Rather than the manifestation of an unchanging and cohesive essence, Butler claims, gender identity is unfixed, provisional, and fragile. Arguing that the repeated public “performance” of gender reinforces gender identity, she situates gender in external space, in both individual performative acts and the physical environment. When the body publicly articulates the social relationships of a certain time and place, the space in which the articulation occurs becomes the site of cultural inscription. Butler’s quote thus denotes how concerns of time and space, particularly the relationship of time and space to the physical performance of gender, converge in contemporary gender studies.

Effectively, the junctions of space and gender have gradually moved more and more into the feminist critical purview, including the relation between gender and movement and the gendered public/ private binary, to convey how space itself can become a form of control, of limitation of women’s mobility—but also a site of women’s actualization, of breaking out of gender constraints, and of achieving power. In order to resist existing gender paradigms and envision alternatives to patriarchal oppression, feminists, however, repeatedly find themselves facing the constructivist dilemma: If gender and identity are culturally constructed and discursively controlled, from where does agency arise? Feminist spatial readings propose that space itself can offer resistance to gender hierarchies. A critical focus on the nexus between gendered space and spatially constructed gender identities might offer a promising approach for alternative gender configurations. The understanding of space as multiple, shifting, heterogeneous, situational, and contested may help subvert the oppressor-oppressed paradigm, the opposition between those with power to shape knowledge and spatial practice and those who suffer them. Focusing on theorizing space and gender, the present issue provides an outlook on ways in which contemporary critics view the junctions between space and gender in the twenty-first century.

Finding its conceptual origins in the 1960s, the “spatial turn” in geography and other spatial social sciences marked a radical critical move away from concerns of time to space.¹ As globalization, modern information technology, and faster and more affordable transportation transformed communication and economic structures worldwide, they also affected the ways in which we live in space and perceive it. Thus, Fredric Jameson maintains, “our daily life, our psychic experiences, our cultural languages are dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time” (qtd. in Tally 40). Space hence moved into the foreground of critical discussion. Philosophically, contemporary geocritics are largely indebted to postmodernism’s and poststructuralism’s examinations of the spatial distribution of power and knowledge in social space. They suggest that space is never neutral but always discursively constructed, ideologically marked, and shaped by the dominant power structures and forms of knowledge. In other words, even if a manifestation of the “real” world, space is both created and articulated through cultural discourse, including gender discourse. Thus, we cannot grasp space outside a socially mediated perspective.

Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja are among those recognized as leading the spatial turn. Though stressing the discursive and ideological nature in which all spatial perception and representation are trapped, they are aware that this reading of space seemingly does not offer any hope for resistance to dominant cultural paradigms nor give incentive to liberating counter-narratives. And yet, they glimpse possibilities of resistance in the very quality that also circumscribes the spatio-social script: the constructedness of space. In a 1967 lecture published in French in 1984 and in English in 1986 as “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault proposes a fundamentally new reading of space. Foucault’s heterotopias break down spatial hierarchies and binaries and thus subvert the forms of knowledge and meaning that underpin the dominant power structure. Even as heterotopias are spaces set apart from everyday...