Feminism Essay

How can assumptions about gender and registers of gender difference, as well as nature/culture dichotomies, inform meaning and the production of geographical knowledge.

Geographers use poststructuralist and feminist ideas in order to study human environment, society and geogrpahical space. Feminism and poststructuralism encourage us to question the set of assumptions and socially constructed meanings that give rise to knowledge claims. Poststructuralism is a popular critique that challenges our representation between relationship and reality and is a direct response to the percieved ridgeties and certanties that are the main characteristics of strutualism. The main contributors to the poststructuralist critique were Jacques Derrida and Michel Faucault. In Geography poststructuralists adopt a critical stance towards all knowledge claims, and expose the conceptual scoffolding upon which knowledge claims rest. It states that meaning is created by discourse in that a specific series of representations through which meanings are produced generate knowledge, they insist that knowledge is situated and limited they have recognised and been honest about the contingency of geographical claims while they consider they way they ahv e been socialised to view the world and realise that knowledge is based on experience.

Feminism similarly has a profound impact on how assumptions can influence opinions or perspective on gender binaries and nature/culture dichotomies. Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing and defending equal political, economical and social rights for women. Feminism focuses on the distinctions society holds between genders and in particular on the discrimination of women in society. The feminist theory aims to develop the understanding of gender inequality. Feminist Geographers have challenged the exclusion of women in society “the assumption held by many male geographers that women that women should not