Australian Women's Book Review: Online

Hecate's
Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434
Editor:  Barbara Brook
Contributing Assistant Editor:  Katie Hughes
Photomontage:  Set in Stone, Adele Flood

Volume 12, 2000

Travelling feminisms

PLACEBOUND: Australian Feminist Geographies by Louise Johnson (with Jackie Huggins and Jane Jacobs), Oxford University Press, 2000, 222 pages, $29.95.

Reviewed by Mirjana Lozanovska

Placebound is a useful book for an ordered and structured account of the intersections between Geography and Feminism and the kinds of changes such disciplines have undergone in recent years. Its objective as a text for students is accomplished through its clear division of topics which are framed by a comprehensive introduction, and a section of glossary and further reading at the end. In this sense it is also a contribution to academics installed in the current climate of tertiary education in Australia and the kinds of teaching that this directs. Students would benefit from its accessibility and guided journey through the places of meetings between feminisms and geography. It is sometimes thought that this requires a reduction and simplification of thoughts and theories, Johnson's text though, exemplified through some specific geographic/urban sites offers some close and detailed readings of such meetings.

The context of the book is held within anglo-feminist traditions and this defines both its strengths and the limits to the scope of the book. Its content page reads like a chronological history of the theoretical positioning of anglo-feminism: liberal feminism, socialist feminism, radical, postmodern, postcolonial. Though the author and readers know that these are (at best) co-existing theories and (at worst) isolated moments specific to one cultural tradition, it reads as a progressive story of anglo-feminism. How this feminism might grow to be more “inclusive” as it is challenged by the theories of the end of modernity and theories of the “other” not as an abstract term, but the “other non-anglo-celtic woman” and how it might address its loss of a once “unified women's movement” are concerns particular to this tradition. Many might argue there never was a unified women's movement. The anglo-feminist tradition here is faced with a dilemma. It has an objective to spell things out, to have a clarity of data, to be accessible, to have an organised and clear structure. In fact, at times, it aims to make digestible the seemingly indigestible texts of other authors - confronted with a particular teaching role, that is quite different to French feminist authors which seem from this culturally specific position, all too messy. The danger with this role is that it can seem as though everything is well known rather than everything is actually in question and that we need to invariably rethink known territories. Contradictory and non-homogenous feminisms are smoothed out. One would have expected the “politics of difference”, a politics in which feminism, culture and the production of literature are crossed, especially in its specific Australian context be given a more validated place in the book. Gaps of content, such as psychoanalytic feminist theories, within this kind of clear structure become all too exposed. This is not however to say that other texts fulfil such a daunting “inclusive” task, but that they do not set out to.

Louise Johnson, however, is too well read an author to simply follow this tradition to the letter. In the chapter on “Postcolonial Feminist Geographies” she takes an innovative stride and stages a conversation between Jackie Huggins, “an Aboriginal historian” and Jane Jacobs, “an Anglo-Celtic cultural geographer with a special interest in the Aboriginal sacred”, about the same place, Kooramindanjie Place or Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland. While this misses the opportunity for a three-way conversation in which would be included a “migrant” or NESB voice, a conversation that academics in Australia seem to miss at every opportunity, the staging propels the book into a different style and method. This in itself provides for the reflective tone and a different sense of its silences, not as missing information, but as necessary questions within what we might call the “critical theory” of the discipline of geography. Recognising that women are privileged in that they “inhabit more than one sociological dimension” the text moves towards a cultural geography that is contingent on partial histories and partial cultural positions.

The other context of the book is its agenda to theorise the relations between space and culture through a geographical paradigm. This overlaps with my own field of architectural and urban theory and I am aware of the difficulties and risks of such attempts. Johnson's method includes maps, diagrams, photographs and visual descriptions of sites and this gives the text a parallel agenda, a parallel spatial or site-oriented agenda. It is one that enriches the reading, through an active role of the reader, looking from text to image, and thereby weaving the text with the images and the reader's real and imagined sites. The reader's own subjectivity comes into play in this process and makes for a book that is read critically and reflectively. The book opens with questions about gender and space, its movement through such questions from different feminist positions, finds itself in the end with the question of the same gender, same place. Certain intricacies are highlighted through the spatial methodology, sites become the locus where differential forces cross, and there is not the same sliding into a general overview which some survey style texts suffer from.

An intricate and discursive content is somewhat hidden by a structure and format that seems all too neat, and one might say that the look of the contents page belies a much more interesting text. Spaces are indeed gendered as the book proposes in its introduction, but more importantly they are also en-gendered across several cultural forces, as the book exemplifies at the end. This book would appeal to students, of course, but also to the academic and general reader. I recommend anyone who is keen to have something both clearly set out and accessible and yet engaging and critically astute, buy and read this book.

Dr. Mirjana Lozanovska is an architect and architectural academic. She has taught design, history and theory units at the American University of Beirut and now teaches at the School of Architecture and Building, Deakin University.

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434		Editor: Barbara Brook Contributing Assistant Editor: Katie Hughes *Photomontage: Set in Stone, Adele Flood*
Volume 12, 2000

Travelling feminisms PLACEBOUND: Australian Feminist Geographies by Louise Johnson (with Jackie Huggins and Jane Jacobs), Oxford University Press, 2000, 222 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Mirjana Lozanovska Placebound is a useful book for an ordered and structured account of the intersections between Geography and Feminism and the kinds of changes such disciplines have undergone in recent years. Its objective as a text for students is accomplished through its clear division of topics which are framed by a comprehensive introduction, and a section of glossary and further reading at the end. In this sense it is also a contribution to academics installed in the current climate of tertiary education in Australia and the kinds of teaching that this directs. Students would benefit from its accessibility and guided journey through the places of meetings between feminisms and geography. It is sometimes thought that this requires a reduction and simplification of thoughts and theories, Johnson's text though, exemplified through some specific geographic/urban sites offers some close and detailed readings of such meetings. The context of the book is held within anglo-feminist traditions and this defines both its strengths and the limits to the scope of the book. Its content page reads like a chronological history of the theoretical positioning of anglo-feminism: liberal feminism, socialist feminism, radical, postmodern, postcolonial. Though the author and readers know that these are (at best) co-existing theories and (at worst) isolated moments specific to one cultural tradition, it reads as a progressive story of anglo-feminism. How this feminism might grow to be more “inclusive” as it is challenged by the theories of the end of modernity and theories of the “other” not as an abstract term, but the “other non-anglo-celtic woman” and how it might address its loss of a once “unified women's movement” are concerns particular to this tradition. Many might argue there never was a unified women's movement. The anglo-feminist tradition here is faced with a dilemma. It has an objective to spell things out, to have a clarity of data, to be accessible, to have an organised and clear structure. In fact, at times, it aims to make digestible the seemingly indigestible texts of other authors - confronted with a particular teaching role, that is quite different to French feminist authors which seem from this culturally specific position, all too messy. The danger with this role is that it can seem as though everything is well known rather than everything is actually in question and that we need to invariably rethink known territories. Contradictory and non-homogenous feminisms are smoothed out. One would have expected the “politics of difference”, a politics in which feminism, culture and the production of literature are crossed, especially in its specific Australian context be given a more validated place in the book. Gaps of content, such as psychoanalytic feminist theories, within this kind of clear structure become all too exposed. This is not however to say that other texts fulfil such a daunting “inclusive” task, but that they do not set out to. Louise Johnson, however, is too well read an author to simply follow this tradition to the letter. In the chapter on “Postcolonial Feminist Geographies” she takes an innovative stride and stages a conversation between Jackie Huggins, “an Aboriginal historian” and Jane Jacobs, “an Anglo-Celtic cultural geographer with a special interest in the Aboriginal sacred”, about the same place, Kooramindanjie Place or Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland. While this misses the opportunity for a three-way conversation in which would be included a “migrant” or NESB voice, a conversation that academics in Australia seem to miss at every opportunity, the staging propels the book into a different style and method. This in itself provides for the reflective tone and a different sense of its silences, not as missing information, but as necessary questions within what we might call the “critical theory” of the discipline of geography. Recognising that women are privileged in that they “inhabit more than one sociological dimension” the text moves towards a cultural geography that is contingent on partial histories and partial cultural positions. The other context of the book is its agenda to theorise the relations between space and culture through a geographical paradigm. This overlaps with my own field of architectural and urban theory and I am aware of the difficulties and risks of such attempts. Johnson's method includes maps, diagrams, photographs and visual descriptions of sites and this gives the text a parallel agenda, a parallel spatial or site-oriented agenda. It is one that enriches the reading, through an active role of the reader, looking from text to image, and thereby weaving the text with the images and the reader's real and imagined sites. The reader's own subjectivity comes into play in this process and makes for a book that is read critically and reflectively. The book opens with questions about gender and space, its movement through such questions from different feminist positions, finds itself in the end with the question of the same gender, same place. Certain intricacies are highlighted through the spatial methodology, sites become the locus where differential forces cross, and there is not the same sliding into a general overview which some survey style texts suffer from. An intricate and discursive content is somewhat hidden by a structure and format that seems all too neat, and one might say that the look of the contents page belies a much more interesting text. Spaces are indeed gendered as the book proposes in its introduction, but more importantly they are also en-gendered across several cultural forces, as the book exemplifies at the end. This book would appeal to students, of course, but also to the academic and general reader. I recommend anyone who is keen to have something both clearly set out and accessible and yet engaging and critically astute, buy and read this book. Dr. Mirjana Lozanovska is an architect and architectural academic. She has taught design, history and theory units at the American University of Beirut and now teaches at the School of Architecture and Building, Deakin University.