Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge by Gillian Rose

Author:Gillian Rose [Rose, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

The (hetero)sexuality of the active gaze is structured as masculine in phallocentric cultures and societies, and feminists argue that it is central to the construction of sexual difference. Their arguments focus on the Oedipus/castration complex, through which boys are forced to repress their desire for their mother through the threat of castration. (This first repression forms the unconscious.) This threat marks the mother as the site of lack because she is seen as already castrated. It is important to note here how the mother comes to signify lack, because it is at this point that accusations of biological determinism are most often levelled at Freud and Lacan. Mitchell insists that ‘in and of itself, the female body neither indicates nor initiates anything’.67 She emphasizes the fictional, not biological, nature of identity: this must be an account of the formation of masculine and feminine positions; not, as in Mulvey’s polemic, of men and women. Mitchell’s remarks also stress the centrality of a certain vision to the constitution of Woman as lacking, since it is only through the sight of patriarchal law that the mother’s genitalia come to signify lack or castration. As Grosz notes, ‘the female can be construed as castrated, lacking a sexual organ, only on the information provided by vision’.68 As in the mirror stage, the look is again central to subjectivity, and the active look which sees the mother as lacking rather than simply different is phallocentric. The active look is constituted as masculine, and to be looked at is the feminine position. But this is not a coherent look: narcissistic identification with the powerful, pre-Oedipal, phallic (m)Other and voyeuristic fascination with her lack remain, and so the look ‘oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack’.69

These connections between identity and vision suggest why visual pleasure recurs in geographical discourse: it is a fundamental part of the masculine subjectivity which shapes and is constituted through that discourse. And geography’s pleasure in landscape images can be interpreted through the psychoanalytic terms across which the gaze is made – loss, lack, desire and sexual difference. One possible reading follows. It is a supplement to the argument of the previous chapter about the ambivalence of geography towards Mother Nature. It is an insistence on the disruptions of the Other in the gaze of the geographic Same; it is a sustained attempt to undermine both the anonymity of the authoritative cultural geographer and the stability of his claims to knowledge.

I will begin with the mother. Pollock notes that there is ‘a function for the image as a means to regain visual access to the lost object’, the lost object being the mother before her denial through the Oedipus/castration complex.70 Images of women, of Nature, of Mother Nature and the ‘maternal natural landscape’, to quote Sauer again, can assuage the loss of the pre-Oedipal mother because they offer plenitude, passivity, lusciousness, nurturance and incorporation: this chapter and the last have already quoted geographers celebrating all these qualities in landscape. Pleasure in

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