Is GIS for Women ? Re ections on the critical discourse in

Despite the progress in critical geographic information systems (GIS) research in recent years [1], geographical discourse is still dominated by dualist thinking that understands GIS largely as a tool for quantitative or empiricist spatial analysis. This dualist understanding of geographical methods—which was partly fuelled by the erce polemics between critical geographers and GIS users/researchers sparked off in the early 1990s— has represented GIS as a method antagonistic towards critical perspectives and made it diff cult for geographers to conceive a role for GIS in critical geographic research [2]. Strangely, while feminist geographers have made a signii cant contribution in refreshing our understanding of the role of quantitative methods in geographical research (e.g. little has been written to date on the possible role of GIS in feminist research. In this article, I re ect upon the implications of the critical discourse on GIS in the 1990s for feminist geographic research. I argue that the oppositional polemics of the debate have unintentionally marginalized the contribution of feminist GIS user/re-searchers and the potential of feminist perspectives for the development of feminist GIS practices. I emphasize the need to go beyond the conventional understanding of GIS as largely a quantitative practice and to recognize the potential of such realization for disrupting the rigid distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods in geographic research. Extending Gillian Rose's (2001) exposition on critical visual method-ologies to GIS-created images, I suggest that GIS may be a possible point of departure for enacting critical visual methods in feminist geography. Further, I argue that acknowledging the critical agency and subjectivities of the GIS user/researcher, and the possibility for GIS to be practiced in a more ree exive manner than we previously thought possible, would open up new discursive spaces for subverting dominant GIS practices and the power of the oppositional discourse (a ` la Gibson-Graham, 1994). While recent feminist and critical GIS literatures have explored some of these issues (e.g. epistemolo-gies and re exivity), the article foregrounds the critical insights from these literatures in the context of feminist geographic research. It calls for the engagement of feminist geographers in resisting dominant GIS practices and in reimagining alternative practices that are congenial to feminist epistemologies and politics.