Flexible Sexism

Abstract

Soja's Postmodern Geographies and Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity are two of the major recent works within geography addressing the debate around modernity and postmodernity. Moreover both of them, while examining the relation between ‘space and society’, are broad in scope and carry the debate beyond the confines of the geography discipline. In this paper they are examined from a feminist perspective. The arguments range across a number of issues, from the question of style and the construction of the texts, the assumption of universals which are in fact particulars, the lack of recognition of the feminist literature, to a politics in which it is assumed that the only enemy is capitalism. These arguments therefore go beyond feminism to link up with issues of other groups, most particularly ethnic minorities and those from non-Western societies. In the end, it is argued, consigning these groups to parentheses after the supposed universal of the white, male, heterosexual vitiates the projects which the two books undertake.