Aiken, S: Making Worlds

Making Worlds brings together thirty-one distinguished feminist activists, artists, and scholars to address a series of questions that resonate with increasing urgency in our current global environment: How is space imagined, represented, arranged, and distributed? What are the lived consequences of these configurations? And how are these questions affected by gender and other socially constructed categories of "difference"--race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, nationality? How are the symbolic formations of place and space marked by cultural ideologies that carry across into the places and spaces we inhabit, the boundaries and institutions we maintain? In recent years these questions have occasioned intensifying debates, but they have seldom extended beyond the boundaries of individual academic disciplines or crossed the divide that has traditionally separated the academy from the "outside" world. Making Worlds both questions and traverses those divisions by combining personal essays, activist political rhetoric, oral history, poetry, iconography, and performance art with interdisciplinary academic discourses. Representing a wide range of perspectives, Making Worlds develops a provocative conversation about gender and spatiality in the interwoven symbolic and material environments we create. The contributors engage such issues as the body as site of symbolic action, fabrication, and desire; the place and play of sexualities; the cultural implications of everyday life--home, travel, work, childbirth, food, disease, and death; technology and mass media; surveillance, confinement, and the law; the dynamics of race and ethnicity; imperialism, oppression, and resistance; the politics of urban spaces; landscape and cultural memory; the experience of time; and the nature of "Nature." For students and scholars in cultural studies, geography, literary criticism, anthropology, history, and women's studies, it offers new ways of thinking about space, place, and the spatial contexts of social thought and action. CONTENTS

Part I. Locating the Issues

Geographic Metaphors in Feminist Theory: Geraldine Pratt

Making Sense of the World: Holly Youngbear-Tibbetts

Reading Marginality: Tessie Liu

Motion, Stasis, and Resistance to Interlocked Oppressions: Maria Lugones

Jews, African Americans, and Urban Space: Constructing Progressive Alliances: Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

On Location: Caren Kaplan Part 2. Bodies Politic

The Production of Abstract Space: Mary Poovey

Codes of Law and Bodies of Color: Joan Dayan

Specular Morality, the War on Drugs, and Anxieties of Visibility: Mary Pat Brady

Bodies in Democratic Public Space: An Eighteenth-Century Perspective: Joan B. Landes

Sightings, Sites, and Speech in Women's Construction of a Nationalist Voice in Tanzania: Susan Geiger Part 3. The Place of the Letter: An Epistolary Exchange: Angelika Bammer, Minrose Gwin, Cindi Katz, and Elizabeth Meese Part 4. A Different Script: Constructing Moral Geographies

Feminist Ethics in a World of Moral Multiplicity: Dimensions and Boundaries: Janet R. Jakobsen

The View From Waist High: Nancy Mairs

A Feminine World: Pueblo Spaces: Rina Swentzell

Locked In or Locked Out or Holding Both Ends of a Slippery Pole: Confusion of Metaphors, Collaborations, and Intellectual Travesties: Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe

Silence and Subjectivity (A Position Paper): Luise White Part 5. Sites and Spectacles

Poems from Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert: Ofelia Zepeda

Confinements: The Domestic in the Discourses of Upper-Middle-Class Pregnancy: Helena Michie

Civilization, Barbarism, and Nortena Gardens: Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith

Dancing for Dollars: Lori Scheer

Reflections on Upward Mobility: Performance Spaces, Critical Practice, and the Spectacle of Flight: Mary Russo

Telling Time: Time, Metaphor, Feminism: Judith Roof