fabulous, fragile feminist futures

Keywords: feminist geography, theory building, global intimate
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 3

Abstract

Feminist perspectives have emphasized the significance of multi-scalar social and spatial margins in helping make sense of and potentially reframing urban and geopolitical centers. These include works that interrogate scalar and discursive notions of the ‘center,’ analyze the importance and limitations of the urban as a site of aspiration, and present strategies deployed for world making and urban belonging. Looking within and across these ongoing practices, I show that precarious groups residing at the margins disrupt binaries as they navigate intersecting forms of ‘pressure’ whether it be capitalist, racialized, casteist, and heteronormative patriarchy, or through universalizing theories. These actions provide a window into theory building and solidarity networks, opening non-binary ways of indexing difference, with multi-sited nodes acting as an analytical entry point to identify power constellations, and formulating relational solidarity across sameness and difference. In other words, I suggest that the discursive and material building of emancipatory worlds from global margins offers provisional, yet conjectural potential for feminist futures. A dialogue across these works can bolster South-South discussions, enunciate non-metro urban centers, and more broadly provide epistemological and political possibilities that can reframe the process of knowledge production.