女性主义地理学观及其思想史意义

论文从本体论、认识论和方法论3个层面讨论了女性主义地理学观的建构,并说明了女性主义地理学对更新地理学观的意义,以及对当代主流人文地理学思潮的潜在影响。在本体论层面上,女性主义地理学一直直面西方传统社会文化思想中的等级制性别化二元论,建构了主张女性和男性在建构社会及社会空间中具有交互性关系的本体论。在认识论和方法论层面上,女性主义地理学证明了女性及其空间在西方社会中处于弱势的认识论和方法论根源,动摇了实证主义地理学认识论和方法论中永恒性、普遍性、客观性的预设,阐释了地理学认知过程中情感等主观因素的可靠性,并建构了“去中心化”的认识论和方法论框架。无论在本体论还是在认识论和方法论层面上,当前的女性主义地理学主流思潮都有一定的中和性色彩,这一倾向使女性主义地理学在地理学观演进,以及以人文地理学思想为代表的地理学思想演进中,都具有重要的位置。西方女性主义地理学的兴盛,与其直面西方的社会文化思想根源问题不无关联。在中国女性主义地理学开始发展的当下,注重分析中国女性及其空间问题产生的社会文化思想根源,将有助于中国女性主义地理学的发展,并提升其潜在的价值。

Feminist views on geography and its role in disciplinary intellectual history

Since the 1970s, the issue of gender has overlapped with the flowering of humanistic/Marxist/structuralist geographies and subsequent post-colonial/post-human/post-humanistic geographies. Furthermore, it has been increasingly foregrounded in geography. This article traces the connections between gender, discipline, and intellective history from a critical perspective. It discusses how critical and multiple voices in geography have not only developed critical discourses that made women visible as "objects" within and beyond geography, but also shared a commitment to situating knowledge, highlighted the myth of objective and value-free research, and emphasized the partial, context-specific, and interpretive nature of knowledge production in geography. Because of these, feminist geographies should not be seen solely as a separate sub-discipline, but as a critical perspective useful to all sub-disciplines in geography. "Women" was placed in the transitional zone of simultaneously gendered and hierarchical dualisms from nature/matter sensibility to spirit/culture reason in mainstream social thoughts. Thus, critical reflections on ontology, epistemology, and methodology from a gender perspective make feminist geographies visible to many post-modern approaches in (human) geography, and post-human/ethnical/indigenous/post-humanistic/post-colonial geographies were some of the sub-disciplines that chose to engage with feminist geographies. Finally, western feminist geographies help illuminate that, if feminist geographies in China can enhance their role within and beyond geography, they must be used in Chinese historical and current social and cultural contexts. These contexts must be examined from a gender perspective, preferably at present.