Digital Cartography and Feminist Geocriticism in Literary Studies A Proposal (original) (raw)
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Digital Cartography and Feminist Geocriticism in Literary Studies
Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, 2021
This paper attempts a brief literature review through the history of literary maps to recent digital mappings, exploring geocriticism as an emerging literary theory in spatial humanities. The paper investigates the ways in which digital literary maps could be used in feminist criticism as feminist geocriticism to develop new ways in reading and analysing feminist texts. It also aims to propose "feminist geocriticism" as a methodology by which this intersection can be effectively utilized to identify and analyze the relations between the different socio-cultural female identities ("intersectionality" of Kimberley Crenshaw [4]) and space.
In Passage: The International Journal of Writing and Mobility, 2022
Following the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and her emphasis on geography within her cartographic imagination (Edelman and Bishop; Hollister; Murthy; Thoss), I develop a methodological approach as a critical mapping process, which is consistent with the post-representational turn in cartography (Kitchin and Dodge). What I consider "poetic mapping" follows a close reading of Bishop‘s poetry, including "The Map" and "Brazil, January 1, 1502" within the scope of literary cartography and geocriticism (Tally Jr.). I argue that Elizabeth Bishop‘s poems already provide a post-representational turn, process-derived mapping methodology, that offers a feminist reading of place and movement. This methodology values the geography of bodies as their own political, social, and historical spaces, as influenced by Donna Haraway‘s feminist objectivity, situated knowledges, acknowledging both the political and ontological processes of mapping, particularly as Bishop moves through the various macro and micro power constructions and relations within personal, geographical, and historical spaces.
Geocriticism, Gender, and Genre: Literary Geographies and Female Narrative Strategies
When Shari Benstock's cornerstone critical work Women of the Left Bank appeared in 1986, it was the first developed criticism to undertake the importance of geography in the corpus of works grouped together under the nickname of women's « Left Bank » writing 1 . Benstock explicitly states: « This study examines the lives and works of these women in the Paris context. Of primary significance is the experience of being a woman in this time and place » 2 . Finally, someone was asking what the rive gauche was contributing to the literature, both in concrete geographic terms regarding the proximity of writers' homes and in more symbolic ways, as Paris was presented as a liberating space. In the first unnumbered pages of her volume, Benstock equally proposes her own literary cartography of « Expatriate Paris » by including a map of the same title. The addresses of women writers' homes and selected publishers are indicated on the map, promoting the idea of an artistic synergy as the result of a shared geography. Benstock's argument hinges on how the women of the Left Bank shared the Parisian spaces of their homes, neighborhoods, and salons, and how those shared experiences were reproduced in the literature, replicating a system of shared codes accessible to the female readers in the know. The three parts of her analysis « Discoveries », « Settlements », and « Crossroads » scrutinize, author by author, the place of each within the Parisian context as well as her use thereof. Ultimately, Benstock concludes that the women of the Left Bank use Parisian geography differently than their male counterparts:
Feminism and Geographic Information Systems: From a Missing Object to a Mapping Subject
Geography Compass, 2007
Although feminism and the field of geographic information systems and science (GIS) have only recently begun speaking to each other, the feminist mapping subject is emerging across a variety of sites -academic, professional, and lay. However, it is most articulated in the work of critical GIS scholars. Both male and female, they are committed to nonpositivist practices of knowledge production and are sensitive to gender and other power hierarchies that produce social, economic, and cultural difference. These scholars have been creating 'feminist cartographies', practicing 'feminist visualization', and developing new mapping alternatives to mainstream cartographic and GIS representations. We begin by briefly re-reading the history of women in cartography and GIS as a first step toward reclaiming mapping as a critical practice. We then review feminist theorizations of visual representation and geography that move beyond critique and posit a feminist deployment of such technologies. Finally, we reflect on explicitly feminist engagements with cartography and GIS and their implication for the discipline of geography and contemporary mapping practices in general. Throughout, we trace the evolution of a feminist mapping subject and her or his potential to disrupt the traditions of mapping and reclaim the power of maps and GIS-based spatial analysis for critical intervention.
The Map and the Text The Geo-Literary Spatial Encounters in Literary Theory
مجلة بحوث کلیة الآداب . جامعة المنوفیة, 2019
Geography and literature are impressed by their respective disciplinary cultures. However, they witness the emergence of contact zones that subvert the boundaries caused by the cultural divide between these two discrete disciplines. The paper discusses five encounters emerged in the wake of the spatial turn in the 1990s: geography's literature, narrative cartography, geocriticism, geo-poetics, and eco-criticism. The-the map and the text‖ is a spatial trope that becomes a diegetic paradigm, a structuring agent, and a signifying element in literary theory. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to illuminate the methods, objectives, divergences and convergences of these interdisciplinary encounters. Author's Bio-Note Wael M. Mustafa lectures in Literary Theory at Fayoum University, Egypt. His main research interests are in postmodern literary theory; postcolonial translation studies; literary journalism; eco-criticism; spatial literary theory; and Postpostmodern literary theory. Recent publications include a book entitled The Politics of Subversion (2010).
Feminist historical geographies: doing and being
Gender, Place and Culture, 2019
As part of GPC’s 25-year anniversary celebrations, this article explores possibilities and prospects for feminist historical geographies and geographers. Here I define feminist historical geography as scholarship which asks geographical questions of historical material and is informed by feminist theories, approaches and methodologies. Its empirical subject matter is necessarily expansive and diverse, but often has a particular focus on the lives of women and other marginalized groups, and on the ways gender and space were co-constituted. This essay interrogates recent developments within this broad terrain, specifically articles and books published in the period from around 2000 onwards and either appearing in geography journals or written by those self-identifying as geographers. The main exception is work by historians and archaeologists interested in gender, space and place, which is cited here in an attempt to open up new research directions for feminist historical geographers. In what follows, we shuttle across spaces and between scales, roaming from the sites of empire to the intimate geographies of the home, from landscapes and buildings to personal possessions like clothes and letters. Doing so is a deliberate act intended both to demonstrate the liveliness of feminist historical geographies broadly conceived and to counter hierarchical readings of space, society and history with their inherent danger of privileging the public over the private, and the exceptional over the everyday and mundane.
Other Figures in Other Places: On Feminism, Postmodernism and Geography
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1992
In a recent paper entitled “Travels in the postmodern”, Elspeth Probyn uses the metaphors of local, locale, and location to open up a political dialogue between feminism and postmodernism, providing a particularly explicit example of a more general use of spatial figures in contemporary theoretical debate. These spatial references are not entirely figurative, but allude to our positioning within particular contexts, which both frame and are constructed by our texts. Thus, Probyn's dialogue inevitably raises geographical questions. Moreover, geography is not merely a passive, unnamed party through which Probyn's dialogue is conducted; it is not immune from or in any way ‘outside’ the situatedness its terminology is employed to articulate. In this context, the metaphorical maps Probyn uses to find her way between the differing terrains of feminism and postmodernism are far from neutral, truthful, transparent representations. In this paper an extension of Probyn's travels a...
2020
This paper set out to investigate physical geography as represented in online cartographies and asked whether<br> they relay all that we need to know about the humanity of space as described in literary narrations. Using<br> critical reading approaches to digital geospatiality, it argues that digital treatments of space are narrowed<br> down only to their virtual essentials but say little about space as a spiritual value in terms of intuitive<br> knowledge, and in the light of space as human time, as well as space as passage of volume, as a literary<br> "affect." This gives the reader to appreciate the concept of literature as not only "scripted" but also oral and<br> experienced. Space is not just a physical representation on a physical screen or on the printed page of a map; it<br> is also a literary narrative and a colonial and postcolonial habitus of (hi)story. Just like literature, it is not<br> created in a va...
Feminist visualization: Re-envisioning GIS as a method in feminist geographic research
Despite considerable progress in recent GIS research (especially on public participation GIS), the critical discourse on GIS in the 1990s did not seem to have impacted upon GIS practices in geographic research in significant ways. Development in critical GIS practice has been quite limited to date, and GIS and critical geographies remain two separate, if not overtly antagonistic, worlds. This suggests that critical engagement that seeks to conceive and materialize the critical potential of GIS for geographic research is still sorely needed. In this paper, I explore the possibilities for this kind of critical engagement through revisiting some of the central arguments in the critical discourse from feminist perspectives. I examine whether GIS methods are inherently incompatible with feminist epistemologies through interrogating their connection with positivist scientific practices and visualization technologies. Bearing in mind the limitations of current GIS, I explore several ways in which GIS methods may be used to enrich feminist geographic research. I propose to re-imagine GIS as a method in feminist geography and describe feminist visualization as a possible critical practice in feminist research. I argue that GIS can be re-envisioned and used in feminist geography in ways that are congenial to feminist epistemologies and politics. These alternative practices represent a new kind of critical engagement with GIS that is grounded on the critical agency of the GIS user/researcher.