The official school library at Dartmouth College has expanded their complete resource database on human geography to include a new section on “feminist geography.”
According to the guide, feminist geography places a special emphasis on perceived gender divisions around the world and seeks to challenge the impact of such divisions on the current perceptions of what is considered to be natural and legitimate in the field of geography.
“Feminist geography has thus sought to understand the relationship between gender divisions and spatial divisions, and to challenge their supposed naturalness and legitimacy,” the guide reads.
According to the guide, the historical practices and methodology of geography have been too “masculinist” in their nature, and interventions against this level of masculinity by feminist geographers need to be highlighted to increase the level of female interpretation in the field of geography.
“To that end feminist geographers have made critical interventions into the conduct of research in geography, introducing feminist epistemologies and methodologies that challenge the masculinist formulation of science as objective, neutral, and value-free, instead arguing that research always has a positionality that produces situated knowledge,” the guide continues. “They (feminist geographers) have thus highlighted the masculinist nature of fieldwork and made the case for more interpretative approaches to research that utilize qualitative methods.”
The feminist geography resource also features a number of unique books, such as Putting women in place: feminist geographers make sense of the world, which explores important questions such as “Why do women and men tend to work in different jobs, in different ways, and in different spaces?” as well as “Which is more ‘masculine’ — the city or the suburbs?”
In terms of journals for students to keep tabs on the latest groundbreaking research, the feminist geography guide recommends “The Latin American Journal of Geography and Gender,” which is dedicated to publishing scholarly research on “geography, gender, and sexualities, focusing specifically on theoretical and methodological perspectives.”
The feminist geography guide is not the only unique resource on women’s and gender studies available to students. A quick search of the library website also turn up the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies: Statistics & Research Databases, which features collections such as The Homophile Movement: Papers of Donald Stewart Lucas 1941-1976, which is listed as “an abundance of material relating to the early homosexual civil rights movement (the homophile movement).”
