Gender Geography

The Gender Geography or the geography of the kind is a tendency of the contemporary Géographie which aims at bringing a new vision of the geography by introducing there the concept of kind (sex).

Genesis

This geography is born within the postmodern current, namely here at the beginning of the Années 1980. This one develops in particular in the Anglo-Saxon world, thanks to the feminist movements which take then starting from the Années 1970 more and more of importance, pulled by a favorable context of Women's Liberation.

Concept

Indeed, they intend to bring a new vision of the geography by introducing within this discipline the concept of kind. To explain that, the Feminist Studies leave the principle which the social life is based above all on the sexual identities which forcing will found an order of being able and unequal access to the material resources and symbolic systems of our modern societies.

To be clear, appearance of this geography to for origin a observation, namely the awakening of the existence of a science dominated too a long time by the male sphere. The vision of the world, of the ratio Man/Medium, would thus have been distorted, or all at least truncated, since this one was centered on the male universe. The term gender is in the absolute difficult to define since there does not exist French equivalence except the approximate concept of kind.

One can say that it is a way of thinking which is based on the famous assertion of Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born woman but it is become. ”

The kind takes into account the fact that there exist social processes which will transform the biological characteristics of social categories.

Feminism, to quote Susan Hanson, president of the American association of the geographers in 1992, “was the principal investigator of this term of kind within the Anglo-Saxon geography by looking at the World through the filter of the kind but also while simultaneously seeking to build a world in which the kind is not any more one essential dimension from which, the possibilities of the life are defined and the allocated resources. ”

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