GY316      Half Unit
Gender, Space and Power

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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Building on geographic approaches, this class will examine a range of spaces and processes through which gender is imagined and produced. These will include 1) empire and race; 2) nation and mobility; 3) city and property; 4) factory and labour; 5) market and consumption; 6) home and reproduction; 7) body and sexuality; 8) media and identity; and 9) nature and ecology. Through each topic, students will engage with feminist theory—as well as a range of contemporary case studies from across the globe—to better understand how power and resistance operate through the geographies of gender.

15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

In the Department of Geography and Environment, teaching will be delivered through a combination of classes/seminars, pre-recorded lectures, live online lectures and other supplementary interactive live activities.

The formative coursework will consist of a paper outline and bibliography due mid-term, through which students begin designing their final essays. This assignment will be marked with written feedback attached before the end of WT in order to help students prepare for the essay.

• Carney, J. A. (2002). Converting the wetlands, engendering the environment: The intersection of gender with agrarian change in Gambia. In Liberation Ecologies (pp. 177-199). Routledge.
• Gilmore, R. W. (1999) “You have dislodged a boulder”: Mothers and prisoners in the post-Keynesian California landscape. Transforming Anthropology, 8(1/2), 12–38.
• Hays-Mitchell, M. (2002). Resisting austerity: A gendered perspective on neo-liberal restructuring in Peru. Gender & Development, 10(3), 71-81.
• Kobayashi, A. (1994) For the sake of the children: Japanese/Canadian workers/mothers. In A. Kobayashi (ed.), Women, Work, and Place. Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press.
• Livermon, X. (2014). Soweto nights: Making black queer space in post-apartheid South Africa. Gender, Place & Culture, 21(4), 508-525.
• Meth, P. (2009). Marginalised men’s emotions: Politics and place. Geoforum, 40(5), 853-863.
• Mohammad, R. (2013). Making gender ma(r)king place: Youthful British Pakistani Muslim women's narratives of urban space. Environment and Planning A, 45(8), 1802-1822.
• Pulido, L. (2009). Immigration politics and motherhood. Amerasia Journal, 35(1), 168-178.
• Smith, S. (2012). Intimate geopolitics: Religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in Leh, Ladakh. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(6), 1511-1528.
• Wright, M. W. (2011). Necropolitics, narcopolitics, and femicide: Gendered violence on the Mexico-US border. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36(3), 707-731.

Presentation (30%)

Essay (70%, 2500 words)