Embracing Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse (Contributions in Women's Studies)

While there is a predominant celebration of mobility and instability metaphors in contemporary feminist discourse, concepts of home, rest or dwelling are frequently left unproblematized and perceived as simple, static and lacking in development potential. This study finds that despite the countless geographic and ideological overlappings in feminist thought, two basic positions may be discerned. There is a fashionable celebration of what the author calls a resisting or bracing space, a site of resistance of constant travel where all comforts of home, unity and dwelling are programmatically to be withstood. Instead of privileging travel in a divisively dualistic gesture, the author proposes that both travel and dwelling metaphors be radically and fruitfully deconstructed and reconstructed, and visualizes a parabolic travel-in-dwelling concept of embracing space. While feminism's hypertransgressive movement metaphors may be fuelled by fantasies of reaching a new kind of masculinizing, transcendent dream of everywhere which denies material limitations and functions and which continues to undervalue femininity, the embracing varieties of space, according to this study, are both more promising and more necessary today.