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28 The Body

  • Sydney Calkin and Cordelia Freeman
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Abstract

For feminist political geographers, the body is absolutely essential: it’s an animating force that underpins the work of the subdiscipline. Recognizing the breadth of literature on the topic, in this chapter our engagement with feminist political geography work on the body is limited to a few themes. The chapter opens with an overview of the body (or its absence) in political geography and the subsequent debates advanced by feminists about its importance for political geography analysis. Feminists think about the body in different ways, which we outline briefly. The remainder of the chapter explores the feminist political geography of the body in two ways: first, through reproductive bodies and struggles over the control and meaning of reproduction and, second, through bodies and borders, where bordering practices work to govern bodies and their movement, but also position bodies as border sites themselves. We conclude with some reflections on future directions for research.

Abstract

For feminist political geographers, the body is absolutely essential: it’s an animating force that underpins the work of the subdiscipline. Recognizing the breadth of literature on the topic, in this chapter our engagement with feminist political geography work on the body is limited to a few themes. The chapter opens with an overview of the body (or its absence) in political geography and the subsequent debates advanced by feminists about its importance for political geography analysis. Feminists think about the body in different ways, which we outline briefly. The remainder of the chapter explores the feminist political geography of the body in two ways: first, through reproductive bodies and struggles over the control and meaning of reproduction and, second, through bodies and borders, where bordering practices work to govern bodies and their movement, but also position bodies as border sites themselves. We conclude with some reflections on future directions for research.

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