Spatial Imagination and Feminist Political Freedom

• In Event: Gender, Desire, and Freedom

Abstract

For many feminist theorists, feminist political freedom involves imagining new social and political worlds and acting to bring those visions into reality (hooks 1984, Brown 2005, Zerilli 2006, Ferguson 2010). Yet, feminist political theorists are rarely attentive to the ways in which feminists have also imagined new material worlds–built environments conceived by their visionaries as feminist– and the relationship of these environments to feminist political freedom. This paper seeks to rectify this gap by conceptually developing the idea of feminist material space and critically examining its relationship to feminist political freedom.

First, I parse different types of feminist material spaces. Borrowing terms Sara Ahmed uses synonymously in Living a Feminist Life, I distinguish between and definitionally develop notions of “feminist dwellings,” “feminist shelters” and “feminist spaces.” Second, I survey feminist material worlds from literature, political thought, and community activism. I find that these spaces tend to be “feminist shelters” that offer reprieve from rather than engagement with the social and political world. Additionally, they are spatially distributed in similar ways and tend to be (perhaps inadvertently) trans-exclusive, racist, sexist, ableist, and politically untenable. Third, I investigate the ramifications of these findings for feminist political freedom. The prevalence of “feminist shelters’ in the feminist imaginary highlights the support they provide for some feminists working to enact different social and political worlds; their often problematic nature demonstrates a dire need for feminists to re-imagine and politically advocate for shelters that are more consistent with their feminist visions.

Author

• Sarah Brown, University of Colorado Boulder