(Article)
a Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Texas at Austin, CLA 3.306, A3100, 305 E 23rd Street, Austin, TX, United States
b Geography Department, Centre for Critical Development Studies, University of Toronto, Social Sciences Building, MW 371 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON, Canada
b Geography Department, Centre for Critical Development Studies, University of Toronto, Social Sciences Building, MW 371 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON, Canada
Abstract
Feminist geographic commonsense suggests that power shapes knowledge production, prompting the long-standing reflexive turn. Yet, often such reflexivity fixes racial power and elides more nuanced operations of difference – moves feminist scholars have, in fact, long problematized. To counter this, we revisit Kobayashi's (1994) ‘Coloring the Field’ [‘Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race”, and the Politics of Fieldwork,’ Professional Geographer 46 (1): 73–90]. Twenty years on, and grounded in our fieldwork in South Sudan and Honduras, we highlight how colonial and gender ideologies are interwoven through emotion. Decentering a concern with guilt, we focus on the way whiteness may inspire awe while scholars of color evoke disdain among participants. Conversely, bodies associated with colonizing pasts or presents can prompt suspicion, an emotive reaction to whiteness not always fixed to white bodies. These feelings have significant repercussions for the authority, legitimacy, and access afforded to researchers. Our efforts thus disrupt notions that we, as researchers, always wield power over our participants. Instead we argue that the positioning of ‘subjects of color’ in the global south, racially and in their relationships with us, is historically produced and socioculturally and geographically contingent. Rethinking the field in this way, as a site of messy, affective, and contingent racialized power, demonstrates the insights offered by bringing together feminist postcolonial and emotional geographies. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
Author keywords
Emotion; Feminist methodology; Postcolonial geography; Race; Whiteness
Indexed keywords
GEOBASE Subject Index: feminism; gender issue; methodology; post-colonialism; psychology; race
ISSN: 0966369XSource Type: Journal Original language: English
DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2014.958065Document Type: Article
Publisher: Routledge
