Feminism and Geographic Information Systems: From a Missing Object to a Mapping Subject

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.