Feminist City
A Field Guide
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Leslie Kern wants your city to be feminist. An intrepid feminist geographer, Kern combines memoir, theory, pop culture, and geography in this collection of essays that invites the reader to think differently about city spaces and city life.
From the geography of rape culture to the politics of snow removal, the city is an ongoing site of gendered struggle. Yet the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping new social relations based around care and justice.
Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and pathways towards different urban futures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful scholarly work, Kern (Sex and the Revitalized City), a professor of geography and environment at Mount Allison University, uses the framework of "feminist geography" to explore how women interact with and are affected by urban spaces. Contending that the structural realities and power dynamics of cities privilege white males, Kern shares her personal experiences as a college student "perform acts of safety and precaution" with female friends in Toronto, and as a stroller-pushing, multitasking mother attempting to navigate London's public transportation system. She acknowledges that the space she inhabits as a white, able-bodied woman holds inherent privilege in relation to the experiences of women of color and disabled people, and notes that many things that make affluent white women feel safer, such as avoiding "dangerous" areas and increased policing, negatively impact the lives of sex workers, immigrants, queer people, and minorities, while doing nothing to abolish the patriarchy. Kern defends women's experiences of fear as rational reactions to the urban environment, and hopes that increased representation among urban planners and policy makers will result in more inclusive cityscapes. Her mix of the personal and the academic reveals the nature of the problem, but offers few concrete answers. This provocative analysis will resonate with theoretically minded feminists.
