In their book Companion to Feminist Geography, Seager and Johnson argue that gender is only a narrow-minded approach to understanding the oppression of women throughout the decades of colonial history.
[2] As such, understanding the geography of women requires a critical approach to questions of the dimensions of age, class, ethnicity, orientation and other socio-economic factors.
[3] In 2004, theorist Edward Said critiqued the idea of geographical spaces in such a context where actions on gendered practices of representation are fabricated through dominant ideological beliefs.
Judith Butler's concept of "citationality"[8] explores the lack of agency surrounding the facilitation of the presence of women within the discipline of geography.
In this approach, feminist geographers emphasize the study of micro-geographies of body, mobile identities, distance, separation and place, imagined geographies, colonialism and post-colonialism, and environment or nature.
Secondly, to gain a better understanding of how gender relations and identities are formed and assumed, feminist geographers have drawn upon a broader extent of social theory and culture.
Critical human geography is defined as "a diverse and rapidly changing set of ideas and practices within human geography linked by a shared commitment to emancipatory politics within and beyond the discipline, to the promotion of progressive social change and to the development of a broad range of critical theories and their application in geographical research and political practice.
Examples of areas of focus include: Feminist geographers are also deeply impacted by and respondent to contemporary globalization and neoliberal discourses that are manifested transnationally and translocally.
This geographic masculinization includes traditions of writing landscapes as feminine spaces—and thus as subordinate to male geographers—and subsequent assumptions of a separation between mind and body.
Thus while geography is unusual in its spanning of the natural and social sciences and in focusing on the interrelations between people and their environments, it is still assumed that the two are distinct and one acts on the other.
Geography, like all of the social sciences, has been built upon a particular conception of mind and body which sees them as separate, apart and acting on each other (Johnston, 1989, cited in Longhurst, 1997, p. 492)' Thus, too, feminist work has sought to transform approaches to the study of landscape by relating it to the way that it is represented ('appreciated' so to speak), in ways that are analogous to the heterosexual male gaze directed towards the female body (Nash 1996).
[21] Feminist geographers draw upon a broad range of social and cultural theory, including psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, to develop a fuller understanding of how gender relations and identities are shaped and assumed.
The focus on multiple identifications and the influence of post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theories has allowed feminist geographers to enter into dialogue with other strands of critical geography.
[10] In 2018, a leading journal in feminist geography entitled Gender, Place and Culture was subject to a scholarly publishing hoax known as the Grievance studies affair.
James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose disingenuously submitted a paper titled "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.