Gender, Place and CultureVol. 11, No. 1, March 2004

ISSN 0966–369X (print)/ISSN 1360–0524 (online)/04/010003–13 © 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/0966369042000188521

10th Anniversary Address For a Feminist Geography of Ambivalence

LIZ BONDIGeography, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

ABSTRACT This article argues for and invokes an ambivalent feminist spatiality. Drawing on theidea that the position of feminist academic is a contradiction in terms, together with my ambivalenceabout presenting the Gender, Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture, I illustrate ways in whichfeminists successfully inhabit unresolved tensions about academic authority. I then explore fourthemes in feminist politics—equality, autonomy, difference and deconstruction—showing how eachcontains internal tensions that are held as ambivalences through the spatialities to which they appeal.The two sections of the essay deploy different voices with a view to generating space for ambivalence.

Introduction

In 1992 I signed a contract through which I became founding editor of the journalGender, Place and Culture, the first issue of which appeared in 1994. I continuedto serve as editor until 1999, initially alongside Mona Domosh and then alongsideLynn Staeheli. When Gender, Place and Culture first came into existence I did not,as far as I can recall, give a thought to the moment when I would see ten volumeslined up on a library bookshelf. And if by chance the thought did cross my mind, Iam sure that I would have chased the idea away as a bit of grandiose day-dreaming.At that time, my horizons were a great deal closer. I worried about whether thejournal would attract sufficient good-quality submissions to fill the first issue, letalone ten volumes. I worried about whether the journal would reach the sales targetneeded to retain the commitment of our publisher, and about how the journal wouldbe received academically. And I kept such worries under control, in part, by attend-ing to the practical necessities my first co-editor Mona Domosh and I needed toaddress, such as how we would handle manuscripts, and how we would work withreferees, authors, editorial board members and the publishers.

Looking back to those early days, one of the things that strikes me is thatalthough we (Mona and I) felt that we made it up as we went along, in the sensethat we did not have available to us templates, models or mentors for how to setabout being academic journal editors, let alone feminist academic journal editors,we actually proceeded along a pretty well-trodden path with no more than minordeviations. Indeed, sometimes this was explicit. For example, I remember earlydiscussions in which we gravitated towards the view that we might most effectively

Correspondence: Liz Bondi, Institute of Geography, School of Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh,Edinburgh, Scotland, UK EH8 9XP; e-mail: liz.bondi@ed.ac.uk

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create a space dedicated to feminist scholarship by sticking fairly closely to someof the established conventions of academic journals. We felt that breaking withsome academic traditions in order to foster feminist scholarship might be best facil-itated by adhering closely to other academic traditions. And so, at a time when somejournals were moving towards open review processes, we instituted a system offully anonymous refereeing, arguing that this traditional approach to peer review,in which both authors and referees are anonymised, was the most likely to securerespect for a new, upstart feminist journal (also see Bondi, 1998, 2001). Similarly,Mona and I positioned ourselves in relation to authors and referees in ways thatdrew on the conventional idea that editors exercise independent judgement,informed, but not bound, by referees' commentaries. We were, contradictorily, alsodeeply critical of claims to neutrality associated with such ideas (Bondi & Domosh1992), but we wanted to ensure that the journal, and the journal's authors, had thebest possible chance of accruing institutional respect—that is, that publishing inGender, Place and Culture would benefit and not detract from contributors' CVs—as well as fostering innovative feminist interventions. It therefore seemed to us thatwe needed to work within some academic norms that would give the journal author-ity at the same time as making clear that we welcomed submissions that would chal-lenge such norms. Putting this another way, we sought to embed within the journala contradictory relationship to academic traditions.

Feminist academics constantly confront questions about which bits of academictraditions to use and thereby reproduce, and which to avoid, discard, discredit orotherwise attempt to get away from. Questions about how to design a manuscriptreview process for a feminist journal exemplify how this operates within the acad-emy, but exactly the same dilemmas confront us in relation to the larger context ofour work, for example in the notion of ‘serving society’, which was one of the corethemes of the 2003 Annual Conference Royal Geographical Society—Institute ofBritish Geographers, where the first version of this paper was presented. Broadlyspeaking, feminists seek to ‘serve’ societies by working to counter inequalities andoppressions, and our efforts necessarily deploy less than ideal tools and resources.So, for example, we might appeal to liberal notions of human rights in order tochallenge violence against women, thereby perpetuating problematic notions ofpeople as bearers of individual rights, as well as leaving the category ‘women’unquestioned, at the same time as addressing vital feminist political concerns(Cornell, 1991). Such choices are never innocent and never unproblematic in theireffects. Hard-won and important achievements may, simultaneously, entrenchways of seeing the world that impede other interventions. Moreover, interventionsthat make use of our positions as feminist academics, whether we understand ouractivism in terms of putting ideas into circulation—for example by questioningtaken-for-granted assumptions about gender categories—or in terms of more prac-tical interventions, are always also about our own careers, whether beneficially ordetrimentally. I am not arguing that feminists are ultimately careerist, only that,within the deeply individualistic institutions in which we operate, our interventionsare inevitably about our individualised selves as well as about others.

I have suggested that, in a variety of ways, feminist academics confrontdilemmas, and that we often find ourselves in contradictory positions. Indeed,Susan Friedman (1985) (among others) has described the position of the feminist

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academic as a contradiction in terms, in the sense that being an academic isimpossible without compromising feminist principles, and being a feminist isimpossible without compromising academic principles. We cannot undertakefeminist academic work without colluding in practices of which we are also criti-cal. My intention in this essay is to reflect on how we collectively inhabit thecontradictoriness of feminist academic work. More specifically, I argue for apolitics of ambivalence, and I will endeavour to show that such a politics is notabout ‘sitting on the fence’, but about creating spaces in which tensions, contra-dictions and paradoxes can be negotiated fruitfully and dynamically. I want to dothis in part by acknowledging and not resolving something of the contradictori-ness of this essay. To that end I trouble my own authority as knowledge-producer, focusing on my enactment of the role of presenter of the Gender,Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture, at the same time as using academicauthority in conventional—untroubled—ways to advance my argument about aspatialised politics of ambivalence.

Confessions of an Ambivalent Speaker

I approached the task of delivering the Gender, Place and Culture 10th Anniver-sary Lecture with considerable ambivalence. It was, of course, a great honour, butI approached the event with anxiety, even dread, as well as pleasure. When I wasfirst asked to give the lecture, I was delighted, both because the event itself struckme as a wonderfully celebratory idea, and because being asked to present it wasclearly an honour that expressed appreciation of my contribution to Gender, Placeand Culture. And so, without hesitation, I said ‘yes’. Why, in that case, was I in theleast bit ambivalent? At one level the answer is obvious. Many of you will sharewith me numerous experiences of having said ‘yes’ to something many monthsahead, thinking ‘that will be great’, only to find yourselves approaching the dead-line wondering what on earth you could have thinking about and when you are evergoing to learn to say ‘no’. But in the case of this lecture, I never felt that I shouldhave said ‘no’. And yet I also felt more intensely than with many other commit-ments that I wished I could have said ‘no’ or otherwise avoided it, at the same timeas knowing that there was no way I would deprive myself of the honour, or renegeon my commitment. So why did it fill me with such dread (and that is not too stronga word to capture one aspect of my ambivalence) as well as delight? The problemlay, I think, in my sense of what is expected at an event of this nature. Rightly orwrongly, I felt called upon to occupy a particular kind of position, a bit differentfrom other kinds of conference presentations. In the academic tradition with whichI am familiar, journal lectures are typically relatively sweeping in purview, andauthoritative in voice and substance. They step back from specific research agen-das and aim to speak more broadly about directions, trajectories, visions, themesand so on. But feminists are deeply critical of claims to authority that warrant theright to speak in such ways (e.g. Haraway, 1988). So this kind of event accentuatesa more pervasive dilemma, namely how can feminists fulfil the contradictoryrequirement to take up a position of authority at the same time as acknowledgingthe fraudulence of claims to such a position? Putting this more personally, how canI sustain the contradiction between my need to feel authorised to speak and my

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recognition of the problematic politics of any such authorisation? The intensifica-tion of that familiar conundrum was, at least in part, responsible for my disquietabout what I had let myself in for.

The contradictoriness of the event in which this essay originated was evident inother ways as well, that are also reflected in feminist academic work more gener-ally. Unlike other journal events at the 2003 Annual Conference Royal Geograph-ical Society—Institute of British Geographers (including the Antipode lecture andthe Progress in Human Geography lecture) the Gender, Place and Culture 10thAnniversary Lecture was not in fact a plenary lecture but was scheduled within theparallel sessions. This highlights another tension that feminist academics routinelynegotiate. The conference itself did not take ownership of this event as a core partof the programme, positioning it instead within the domain of the specialist ratherthan the discipline-wide1. And, while that might have relieved me of some anxietyabout the kind of expectations attaching to it, it generated other kinds of ambiva-lence about processes of marginalisation. More widely, to what extent can feministacademics challenge the dynamics of marginalisation by insinuating ourselves intomore central positions, or by inscribing marginality with new significance (Hooks,1984)? These are certainly not either/or choices, but all our work is situated bothwithin and against the conventions of academic authority, simultaneously repro-ducing it and opening up possibilities for reshaping it in undecidable ways.

I would argue that we do this routinely in our interactions with students,colleagues, research participants and so on. As I have already suggested our pres-ence as feminist geographers and feminist academics can be thought of—and expe-rienced—as a contradiction, which we necessarily, and in many ways successfully,inhabit. In so doing we both reproduce and reshape academic authority in ways thatgo far beyond our awareness. For example, many of you will share with me theexperience of occasionally receiving feedback, years after the event, about howsomething I said influenced a student's subsequent direction. Some of them tell mehow I unwittingly helped them to take one step that turned into a highly successfulcareer in, perhaps, the diplomatic service—hardly my most radical moment youmight think—while others—more comfortingly—realised that it might be possibleand useful to combine political commitment with academic research. The impos-sibility of knowing what comment or action might generate which kind ofresponse, and, that the same comment or action might actually generate both, iswhat I mean by undecidability.

Against the background of this process of working—often unwittingly andundecidably—both within and against academic authority, in the next section Iengage with the contradictoriness from another angle by thinking about the spati-alities of themes in feminist politics, which have informed a good deal what wehave been doing over the past decade or so in the name of feminist geography.

Four Perspectives on the Ambivalent Spatial Politics of Gender

The contradictoriness I have described calls upon feminist geographers (amongothers) to occupy two mutually exclusive positions at once, within but alsosufficiently outside to work against academic traditions and conventions. And so,taking myself as an example, what I needed as I struggled to prepare for the

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Gender, Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture was an imaginative geogra-phy within which that kind of contradiction is made possible. Gillian Rose (1993,p. 141) has described such a geography as a ‘paradoxical spatiality’. This influen-tial formulation is a useful start, but it does not provide any easy solutions to thedifficulties feminist academics face. In my own case, I knew that I wanted to holdonto my academic authority at the same time and in the same place as calling it intoquestion, and I could just about glimpse such a possibility, but I also felt that possi-bility to be always just out of my reach (see Bondi & Davidson 2004). To elaboratethis problem further, I draw on Judith Butler (1990) who has reminded us that what‘is’ is performatively constituted, thereby suggesting that we might be able to ‘do’gender, authority, and much else besides, differently. Her argument about theperformativity of identities has been widely taken up in feminist geography (but fora critical review see Nelson, 1999), and Gillian Rose (1999) has argued for anunderstanding of space itself as performative. But Butler (1997) has also remindedus that there is no escape from the regulatory regimes we inhabit because theseregimes sustain our sense of agency—our sense of being able to make a differ-ence—as well as the subject's subordination. Caroline Desbiens (1999, p. 182) haselaborated this kind of conundrum in her critique of paradoxical space arguing thatRose's conceptualisation of paradoxical space invokes ‘a utopian space “else-where”’, which is more problematic than Rose concedes because it implies thepossibility of escaping those inescapable regulatory regimes. As Desbiens (1999,p. 183) argued, this underestimates the need for an ‘elsewhere within’ capable ofacting as a ‘bridge’ from what ‘is’ to some place ‘beyond’. This accuratelydescribes my experience: the idea of paradoxical space held out to me the possibil-ity of occupying mutually exclusive positions in relation to authority, but I stillcould not reach it. Stepping back from my own particular struggles, a task for femi-nism in general and feminist geography in particular therefore entails expandingthe room available for manoeuvre in the form of an ‘elsewhere within’ in which tomobilise ambivalence to erode or subvert the boundary (or barrier) between whatis and what might be.

It is in an attempt to contribute to such a project that this essay draws on twodifferent ‘voices’, one more personalised and one more conventionally authorita-tive (compare Rose, 1996), through which to offer two different ‘takes’ on ambiv-alence. I have described feminist geographers as routinely working both within andagainst the authority invested in us often with undecidable effects. Completing ashift in voice initiated in the preceding paragraph, I seek to expand the space avail-able for such work by arguing that feminism, or, more accurately, feminisms, drawon particular conceptualisations of space as well as gender, generating distinctivespatialities that can be understood as ways of holding ambivalence. My analysis isunderpinned by an understanding of these conceptualisations as ways of ‘doing’both space and gender, and therefore as embodying political commitments (Rose,1999). I elaborate my argument using a fourfold categorisation of feministapproaches, namely equality, autonomy, difference and deconstruction, which Ihave used elsewhere for other purposes in work co-authored with Joyce Davidson(Bondi & Davidson, 2003). While the four approaches on which I focus are some-times presented chronologically, with one succeeding another (e.g. Warner, 2000),I think that this fabricates progress too unquestioningly, and diverts attention away

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from potentially productive tensions between them. I would argue that equality,autonomy, difference and deconstruction are more usefully considered as co-exis-tent, concurrent and deeply interwoven themes, sometimes mutually reinforcingeach other and sometimes operating more contradictorily (Hirsch & Keller, 1990)2.My purpose here is to strengthen that case by showing how, in different ways, eachapproach in itself fosters spaces of ambivalence that need to be mobilised ratherthan resolved or foreclosed. Albeit very briefly, I argue that equality spatialisesambivalence by relocating gender from one ‘place’ to another; that autonomyspatialises ambivalence by conceptualising gender and space as inseparable; thatdifference spatialises ambivalence by focusing on and troubling movementbetween positions; and that deconstruction spatialises ambivalence by focusing onand troubling boundaries. In one sense, my argument is, ironically, a classic exam-ple of a sweeping overview of a very rich and complex field, and it rides roughshodover many important nuances. For example, it risks misrepresenting feminist poli-tics as always concerned primarily with gender. However, the purpose is less togenerate a robust analysis of different feminist political strategies, and more todraw to attention, and to value, spaces that enable ambivalence to be exploredrather than resolved.

Equality

The idea of equality is a very familiar theme within feminist politics. It assumesthat membership of the category ‘human’ is far more significant than membershipof particular sub-divisions such as those ‘women’ and ‘men’. In other words, simi-larity, including similarity between the genders, trumps differences, which aredeemed superficial. Within Western Anglophone intellectual traditions, thisperspective is often traced to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking ofMary Wollstonecraft (1792/1975), who sought to challenge the androcentrism ofliberal humanist thinking. In so doing she helped to set in train an approach that hasgenerated numerous demands for equal rights—legal, political, economic, socialand so on—on the part of oppressed and disadvantaged groups, including, but notlimited to, women (Whelehan, 1995).

A deep-seated tension—or contradiction—within a feminist strategy of equalityis its continuing reliance on, and reproduction of, the binary construct of gender itdescribes as a superfluous and unnecessary distraction from the reality of thehuman condition. The unproblematic attribution of human beings to the category‘women’ or the category ‘men’ is repeated over and over within a politics of equal-ity because it is the means by which gender inequalities are identified andcontested. The same applies to claims for equal rights made by other oppressed anddisadvantaged groups. And the contradictoriness exemplifies the process of work-ing within and against conventions that I have already described. By drawing outthe spatiality of gender equality I want to explore how this tension is negotiated.

The emphasis on similarity associated with the idea of equality suggests that thesources of gender, also often termed masculinity and femininity, are sociallyproduced rather than biologically given (Oakley, 1972). This formulation situatesgender as separable from, preceding, and external to the human individuals whoare allocated to one of two mutually exclusive gender categories, at, before, or

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occasionally soon after, birth (Stoller, 1968; Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Subsequentreassignment may be possible but is hotly contested by some feminists, who arguethat the notion of a mismatch between outward appearance and inner experiencemistakenly locates gender as something inherent or interior when it should beunderstood as constructed, superficial and external (Shapiro, 1991; Cream, 1995).This argument appeals to an important feature of the spatiality of gender equality,namely its insistence that gender is located outside, rather than inside, human indi-viduals, and becomes attached to human surfaces or outward appearances, but doesnot reside deeper in. This spatiality is, therefore, also one in which that differenti-ation between inside and outside is taken-for-granted rather than questioned.

The idea of equality has spawned concerted efforts to enable women to gainaccess to opportunities on equal terms to men. More often than not this has meantentering spaces previously dominated by men—spaces associated, for example,with work and employment, with politics and policy-making, with justice andlegislation. Barriers to women's entry have generally been understood to reside inoutmoded attitudes, behaviours, rules and criteria for access, and feminist geogra-phers have drawn attention to the spatial character of these exclusionary mecha-nisms (Spain, 1992). A feminist strategy of equality, therefore, does not restcontent with the insistence that gender is located outside human individuals, butalso contests these external geographies. The gendering of spaces is deemed assuperficial, unnecessary and expendable as the gendering of human bodies.

Interventions associated with gender equality mobilise a vision of spatial inte-gration between members of two groups whose similarities outweigh their differ-ences (Spain, 1992). The spatiality of gender equality can be described as one ofspatial de-differentiation, in which the externalisation of gender, and the definitionof interiors as gender-free, is a first step towards a degendering of space. Space isconceptualised in a particular way within this strategy—as transparent, unmarked,contentless and fundamentally gender-free (cf. Rose, 1993). However problematicthis conceptualisation may be, my key point is a different one. What I want toemphasise is that a feminist strategy of equality rests on the externalisation ofgender, that is, on it being located outside rather than inside human beings, andoutside rather than integral to the spaces and places within which women and menwork, play and live. It is by means of this process of relocating gender conceptu-ally—from human interiors to human surfaces to specific spaces to somewhereelse— that the contradiction between mobilising and dismantling binary gendercategories is negotiated. Space, or, more precisely, a particular conceptualisationof space, is the medium through which the contradictoriness of a feminist strategyof equality is inhabited. It is a strategy for holding the ambivalence between chal-lenging and reproducing the inegalitarian effects of a binary construct of gender.

Autonomy

Turning next to the idea of autonomy this also has a long heritage within feministpolitics. In some contexts, autonomy goes hand-in-hand with equality because thecapacity for self-determination operates as a pre-requisite for the capacity toexercise equal rights (de Beauvior, 1949/1997). However, the idea of autonomydoes not necessarily bear any relation to the pursuit of equality, and is sometimes

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mobilised to rather different ends, namely the pursuit of independence, and sepa-rateness (Morgan, 1970). Thus a key tension within a feminist strategy of auton-omy lies in the issue of whether it is regarded as a means to an end or an end initself.

A feminist strategy of autonomy attaches considerable importance to thecreation of spaces for and by oppressed and disadvantaged groups, perhaps theclassic example being women-focused, women-friendly or women-only spaces(Valentine, 1997; Taylor, 1998). Rather than seeking access to spaces previouslydominated by men, the pursuit of autonomy suggests that spaces acquire genderedattributes and associations, which need to be understood, fostered and revalued.Gender—as an attribute of people and of space—is conceptualised as profound andpervasive rather than as superficial or expendable. Herein lies its contrast with thespatiality of equality. As many feminists acknowledge, the pursuit of equality risksunwittingly demanding that women become more like men, and spatial integrationrisks leaving the gendering of space undisclosed so that women's access turns outto be on men's terms. In other words, apparently neutral or unmarked attributestogether with supposedly gender inclusive spaces often conceal gendered assump-tions that reflect or express men's interests. Creating women-centred spaces is akey means through which a strategy of autonomy seeks to counter the devaluationand denigration of women and the feminine.

The idea of autonomy refuses to separate gender from space: space is understoodto be saturated with gender, or gendered through and through. The spatiality of astrategy of autonomy is therefore one in which gender and space are mutuallyconstituted, produced or performed (Jardine, 1985; Rose, 1999). It is through thisspatiality that a strategy of autonomy negotiates the tension between its status asmeans or ends. Consider, for example, how feminist geographers have sought toinfluence the practices and agendas of geography through the development ofwomen-centred, and sometimes women-only, groups, networks, meetings, textsand so on (Women and Geography Study Group, 1984). Are these activities under-stood as relatively short-term tactics, which will, in due course, secure full equalityand fall away, or are they expressions of commitment to independence and sepa-rateness? Most of us, I think, prefer to embrace this tension and sustain our ambiv-alence, rather than choosing between these possibilities. The spatiality of autonomyhelps us to get on with the task of producing feminist geographies, without resolv-ing the question of whether women-centred spaces constitute means or ends.

Difference

The idea of autonomy emphasises gender as a source of difference, and in so doingfocuses attention on women, women's experiences, and women's spaces. But, asmany commentators have argued, gender is just one among a multitude of politicallysignificant differences (Ramazanoglu, 1989; Collins, 1990; Skeggs, 1997). Differ-ences among women, for which the term diversity is sometimes preferred, havetherefore been an important, and often contentious, idea within feminist politics.

The idea of difference is closely linked to the politics of identity, that is, to formsof political mobilisation that draw on the recognition of similarities within groups,and differences from other groups (Bondi, 1993). The category ‘women’ is an

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inadequate basis for such mobilisation because it is fractured by numerous salientdifferences, such as race, class, sexuality, age, forms of embodiment and so on(Spelman, 1990). But herein lies a contradiction for a feminist politics of differ-ence: acknowledging a multiplicity of differences risks inviting a debilitating trendtowards the fragmentation of feminist politics.

I want to suggest, however, that a politics of difference is also a politics ofmobility, and that this spatiality, including impediments to mobility, is the meansby which the contradiction between foregrounding diversity and working togetherpolitically is productively negotiated. To elaborate, the idea of difference—of aplethora of differences—animates the field of feminist politics in important waysprecisely because it acknowledges these risks of fragmentation. There would be nomobilisation around ‘hyphenated identities’ in the absence of keenly felt frustra-tions around efforts to work across differences (Ramazanoglu, 1989; Fine, 1994).Thus, as well as foregrounding issues of identity, the idea of difference also drawsattention to the possibility, at the very least, of forging connections that are notbased on presumed similarities: recognition of difference is often an importantelement within efforts to foster alliances around non-identical but neverthelessoverlapping interests and affinities (Pratt, 1984).

I am not suggesting that alliances are easily built. Indeed feminist geographershave drawn attention to the intensely geographical constraints that go hand-in-handwith processes of globalisation which sometimes appear to facilitate movement(Massey, 1994). As Geraldine Pratt and Susan Hanson (1994, p. 25) have argued‘there is a stickiness to identity that is grounded in the fact that many women's livesare lived locally’. This often leads to a strong sense of differences between women,which mask interdependencies and commonalities. Building alliances thereforerequires consideration of women's social, economic and political geographies. Ifdifferences literally keep women apart, alliances cannot be forged. Working toenable movement across space and between positions is integral to the possibilityof working together and working politically (Pratt & Hanson, 1994). But the spati-ality invoked by a feminist politics of difference is not one of free, frictionlessmovement. On this account, space is neither gender-free nor gender-saturated.Rather it is characterised by striations, fractures and fragmentations that simulta-neously disrupt and precipitate movement and connectedness, and it is the meansby which the contradictoriness of, and ambivalence towards, different differences,is negotiated.

Deconstruction

The idea that gender categories are constructs is as fundamental to feminism as theideas of equality, autonomy and difference. It is expressed, for example, in the sex-gender distinction (itself a core feature of the idea of gender equality) betweenwhat is socially created—gender—and what is biologically given—sex. But thesex-gender distinction leaves intact the binary structure of both sex and gender.Indeed it draws on dualistic thinking to set up sex and gender as expressions ofanother binary opposition, namely biology and culture. The strategy of deconstruc-tion addresses and seeks to undo the binary framework on which dominant under-standings of sex, gender and the sex-gender distinction depend.

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Whereas the idea of difference prompts us to think in terms of the proliferationof versions of femininity and masculinity, the idea of deconstruction draws intoquestion the stability and coherence of all such identities (Butler, 1990). Moreover,it highlights instabilities at the interface between many other distinctions—between self and other, between subject and space, between person and environ-ment (Kirby, 1996; Davidson, 2003). The contradiction for feminist politics is thedirect counterpart to that associated with equality. If gender categories are incoher-ent, unstable constructs, how is the subject of feminism to be defined (Rose, 1995),and how are the interests of those subjected to (and by) the category ‘women’ to beaddressed? We need boundaries but we need to unbound ourselves too. The tensionis played out vividly and sometimes vociferously in relation to gender reassign-ment (Taylor, 1998). Does transsexuality disrupt, subvert, bend, queer and decon-struct binary gender categories, or is it inextricably bound up with the policing ofa rigid gender dichotomy (Shapiro, 1991; Stone, 1991)? Is transsexuality aboutopening up spaces for gender ambiguity, whether understood as hybrid identities,queer identities or third genders, or is it yet another way of shoring up a fiction ofgender coherence within a dichotomous, either/or model?

If we remain bound by the terms of these questions we are stuck with highlypolarised positions—we have to come down on one side or the other without roomto sit on the fence. However, if we take deconstruction seriously then the polarisa-tion itself needs to be problematised, and we can open up space for ambivalentresponses, which might enable us to develop analyses that move beyond either/oranswers3. I would therefore suggest that a strategy of deconstruction sustainsambivalence through a spatiality characterised by troubling boundaries and bound-ary troubles. This spatiality does not banish boundaries but persistently questionsthem, fostering a politics in which boundaries are negotiated as processes ratherthan givens. Deconstruction is, paradoxically, just as vigilant about boundaries asfoundationalism, but whereas foundationalism seeks to stabilise boundaries,deconstructive efforts are devoted to destabilising them. A strategy of deconstruc-tion troubles the boundaries between mutually exclusive opposites of many kinds,including decisive responses to either/or questions, as well as binary constructs likegender. In so doing, it invites us, for example, to remain ambivalent about thegender politics of transsexuality, and invokes a spatiality of instabilities, undecid-abilities, fictional cartographies and subversive forms of creativity.

Conclusion

In this article I have offered an outline analysis of the spatialities implicit in femi-nist politics, showing how four different feminist strategies contain internaltensions that are held as ambivalences through the spatialities to which they appeal.As my summary suggests, and as numerous other feminist geographers have noted,feminist politics entail rich spatial imaginaries. My discussion of these feministspatial imaginaries flowed from a search for space within which to inhabit contra-dictions associated with the position of feminist academic. The effect has been toconstruct a essay that consists of two rather different parts, characterised by twodifferent voices. In so doing my intention is to create something of the ambivalentspatiality about which I have sought to communicate. So, having begun with a first

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person account that troubled its own coherence and authority, I moved to a positionin which that diffident first person voice became subdued and gave way to a moreconventionally authoritative one. Or did it? Might it actually be that the voice thatlays claim to diffidence in a conference lecture or a journal article is in fact themore deeply authoritative (Fleischman, 1998)? Might that apparently diffident,self-questioning first-person voice be the more authoritative voice because of allthat accretes to my peculiar and privileged position as presenter of the Gender,Place and Culture 10th Anniversary Lecture and author of the ensuing essay? Doesmy attempt to trouble my own recruitment into a position of academic authority,presuppose and enact a certain security in that recruitment? Using Jane Gallop's(1995, p. 16) formulation, both voices can be understood as ‘im-personations’ thatoperate within a ‘knot of pretense and reality’. In one I claim a position of self-doubt; in the other I enter into academic authority unproblematically. Neither voiceis true or false, authentic or inauthentic; moreover, each voice reverberates throughand frames the other.

My intention in juxtaposing these voices is to help to expose, and to play with,their constructedness. This playing draws attention to the way in which feministcritiques of academic authority (and much else besides) are always self-directed aswell as other-directed or, to borrow a description offered by Vicki Kirby (2002, p.268) in another context, ‘this mode of argumentation is parasitic, a re-animation ofthe host argument’. But this is a process which intensifies my ambivalence. On onehand, the play of impersonation may be productive in efforts to call academicauthority into question; on the other hand, it may be no more than an all-too famil-iar self-indulgent cleverness. For me, as author, that remains undecidable, althoughyou, as readers, may choose to decide.

Acknowledgements

This essay has its origins in a lecture delivered at the 2003 Annual ConferenceRoyal Geographical Society—Institute of British Geographers to celebrate the10th anniversary year of Gender, Place and Culture. My thanks to Linda Peakeand Gill Valentine for the invitation to present the lecture, and to all those whoattended for participating in the celebrations as well as for their questions andfeedback on the paper. I am very grateful to Andrea Nightingale for her generosityin commenting on multiple drafts, and to Joyce Davidson, Mona Domosh and thecurrent journal editors for their feedback on the draft prepared for publication.

ABSTRACT TRANSLATION

Este ensayo argumenta a favor de e invoca una espacialidad feminista ambivalente.Partiendo de la idea de que la posición de académica feminista es un contrasentido,junto con mi ambivalencia acerca de presentar la Conferencia del Décimo Aniver-sario de Gender, Place and Culture, ilustro maneras en que feministas ocupan conéxito las tensiones no resueltas sobre la autoridad académica. Luego exploro cuatrotemas en la política feminista—la igualdad, la autonomía, la diferencia y la decon-strucción—demostrando como cada uno contiene tensiones internas que sesostienen como ambivalencias a través de las espacialidades a las cuáles recurren.

14 L. Bondi

Las dos partes del ensayo utilizan voces distintas con el propósito de generar unespacio para la ambivalencia.

Notes

1. I am not suggesting that this was an active decision on the part of the Conference organisers. The impressionI gleaned indirectly was that this positioning was the outcome of processes that could be ‘read’ in a varietyof ways.

2. Notwithstanding this claim, I have retained a conventional ordering within this essay, thereby reproducingthe chronology, and have not undertaken the (considerable and complex) work of articulating the conceptualdistinctions at issue completely afresh. My decision to do this—to remain within the framing at the same timeas claiming to distance myself from it—is another example of contradictoriness.

3. My thanks to Angie Fee for helping me to think—ambivalently—about this example.

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