Embracing Space, Vol. 176

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.

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.

Booknews

Shands (English, University College of Southern Stockholm) analyzes feminist metaphors of space and movement. After a brief exposition of methodology and some remarks on the spatiality of metaphor itself, she touches on views of space from philosophy, proxemics, and theoretical physics that have bearing on an analysis of feminism's spatial metaphors. She looks at the female body as a material and symbolic site, and brings in examples of spatial re-conceptualization from some critical works within feminist literary criticism. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

KERSTIN W. SHANDS is an Associate Professor of English at the University College of South Stockholm.