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doi: 10.1068/d160387pmid: N/A
Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.
doi: 10.1068/d160401pmid: N/A
The body has become a major focus of attention—both theoretically and politically—over the past twenty years. In much of this literature it is presumed that the body is some kind of social construct at the same time as it is a locus and a measure of both the material and the social world we inhabit. The author situates this idea against the background of Marx's representations—too often by-passed in recent literature—in order to show how Marx's concept of variable capital contains a theory of body formation under capitalism at the same time as it lays the groundwork for understanding how political persons act as moral agents to try to change the conditions under which laboring occurs. The struggle for a living wage in Baltimore is then used as a concrete example of how this form of body politics operates under contemporary conditions, illustrating how the body that is to be the measure of all things is itself a site of political-economic contestation over the very forces that create it.
doi: 10.1068/d160423pmid: N/A
Recent media and political events illustrate some links between consumption and production. The author explores these links through the concept of commodity chains. This concept has been partially developed in the literature, and an attempt is made to specify this further by means of the illustration of gold. The message is that the ‘geographies of consumption’ literature is insufficient by itself but becomes stronger when joined with a materialist commodity-chain analysis. The author moves from a deconstruction of the images of men and women in gold advertisements, at the consumption end, to the various places of production, beginning with Italian gold jewelry factories, then South African gold mines and apartheid, and third Lesotho, where Basotho men migrate to South African gold mines leaving behind ‘gold widows‘. The material reality of these gold widows stands in contrast to the ‘gold windows' of Tiffany's and the images of women and men in advertisements for gold. The author opines that this sort of analysis necessitates a politics of consumption in which the two ends are reconnected; and that this could lead to a new ‘commercial geography‘.
doi: 10.1068/d160439pmid: N/A
Research undertaken in the Oaxacan (Mexican) indigenous community of Santa Cruz indicates that gender differences in technology acquisition derive in part from locally unique gendered patterns of labor participation. Previous studies have identified constraints on women's adoption of technology which stem from women's relative resource poverty and mode of insertion into the labor process. In the present comparative gender analysis labor-process theory is extended to argue that Santa Cruz men's engagement with communal labor (from which women are spatially and socially excluded) provides men with: (1) gender-specific sociocultural tools transferable to value-added-commodity production, and (2) a social space for discourse on labor-organization technology. Santa Cruz women's (socially constructed) involvement with household production, by contrast, isolates women, fragmenting the social space necessary for reworking labor-organization technologies. Women, however, contest men's advantages: the social organization of production which excludes women also empowers. Over the eight-year course of a men's cooperative production project, women creatively and successfully utilized their control over key steps in the household labor process to exact concessions collectively from men and to create a separate space for a women's production co-op. Nevertheless, women continued to confront workplace-organizational problems as a result of their village-structured experience. Initiatives designed to promote women's technology acquisition must not depend on the assumption of workplace-organizational tools in either men or women, but must identify and address gender disparities in workplace-organizational technology.
doi: 10.1068/d160459pmid: N/A
During the last decade, discussions of geographical scale and its social production have proliferated. Building upon this literature, in particular the writings of Lefebvre and Harvey, I investigate the implications of the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital—between capital's necessary dependence on territory or place and its space-annihilating tendencies—for the production of spatial scale under capitalism. I elaborate the notion of a ‘scalar fix’ to theorize the multiscalar configurations of territorial organization within, upon, and through which each round of capital circulation is successively territorialized, deterritorialized, and reterritorialized. These multiscalar configurations of territorial organization position geographical scales within determinate, hierarchical patterns of interdependence and thereby constitute a relatively fixed and immobile geographical infrastructure for each round of capital circulation. Drawing upon Lefebvre's neglected work De l'État, I argue that the scalar structures both of cities and of territorial states have been molded ever more directly by the contradiction between fixity and motion in the circulation of capital since the late 19th century, when a ‘second nature’ of socially produced sociospatial configurations was consolidated on a world scale. On this basis a schematic historical geography of scalar fixes since the late 19th century is elaborated that highlights the key role of the territorial state at once as a form of territorialization for capital and as an institutional mediator of uneven geographical development on differential, overlapping spatial scales. From this perspective, the current round of globalization can be interpreted as a multidimensional process of re-scaling in which both cities and states are being reterritorialized in the conflictual search for ‘glocal’ scalar fixes.
doi: 10.1068/d160483pmid: N/A
In this paper I analyse some emerging socioeconomic applications of information and communications technologies and explore how they support technological systems which increasingly blend surveillance with simulation. In the first part of the paper I explore the technological shifts supporting blended ‘surveillant simulation’ and review how the emerging links between surveillance, simulation, and material geographies have been addressed in recent debates on society, space, and cultural change. In the second part I go on to explore four examples in detail where widespread electronic surveillance systems are providing the captured data and images to produce electronic simulations of the ‘real world’ in near ‘real time’—virtual banking, retailing and ‘reality’, crime control and electronic tagging, road transport telematics, and ‘smart’ utility systems. Attention is focused on how such simulations of the real world are then used to support new spatial practices based on the fine-grained allocation of goods and services, and intimate patterns of attempted social control, in real time, through the time–space fabric of material geographies. I conclude by analysing the implications of surveillant simulation for theories of technology, space, and place, for social polarisation in cities, and for considering opportunities for resisting the spatial practices of dominant organisations.
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