The Next Generation: Can There Be a Feminist Geography without Gender?

After the first wave of feminist geographical research, which focused on the spatiality of women’s lives, feminist geography began to concern itself with issues of equity in the discipline, the ways in which geographical knowledge is conceptualized, and how gender and other social differences interrelate. In this paper I consider how the current generation of women graduate students, students who came of age professionally in an era where feminism is often taken for granted and in which sex is considered but one of a multiplicity of social differences, negotiate the intersection of feminism and their scholarly lives. I am interested specifically in the role that feminism and feminist methodologies might have in the research agendas of those who are not explicitly studying women. Through these theoretical explorations, an autobiographical narrative, and an informal roundtable discussion with other women graduate students, I ask whether it is possible, today, to conduct a kind of feminist geography without undertaking a substantive study of gender.