Chapter 26 - Place and the Power-Geometries of Migration

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Doreen Massey was an intellectual powerhouse and feminist inspiration in so many parts of the discipline of geography and to so many people (like us). As a feminist and a Marxist, she refused the unspecified grand narratives of theory, a journey that catalysed the writing of Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984b). In the book, her careful account of the historical and material (re)making of place, and the selection of production sites based on the features of a place, had a major impact on the industrial location literature (cf. Massey 1973). Spatial Divisions of Labour came out in second edition in 1995, and was a foundational text for one author’s (Hyndman) graduate research, facilitating her “conversion” to a PhD in geography.

For the second author (Mountz), Doreen Massey’s writing offered one of her earliest encounters with feminist geography. While she discovered Massey as an undergraduate student, Massey’s geographical thinking about gender drew her into graduate study in geography. As a feminist, Massey critiqued David Harvey and Ed Soja’s influential books (The Condition of Postmodernity and Postmodern Geographies, respectively) for their high theory that subsumed patriarchy to relations of capital, thus enacting “flexible sexism”. The phrase was a reference to – and critique of – the shortcomings of emerging concepts of capitalist restructuring at the time, wedded to the term “flexibility” (e.g. Harvey’s “flexible accumulation”) but indifferent to the centrality of social difference in achieving its effects. In so doing, she reminded economic geographers who might otherwise ignore gender relations that “it is often forgotten to what extent women were the first labour-force of factory based capitalism … it was in the cotton industry around Manchester that the challenge was first laid down” (Massey 1994: 195). She also positioned her work early on as scholarship influenced by political economy, poststructuralism and feminist thinking. In this sense, she was a hybrid, expansive thinker and this was exciting. Her conception of place as produced by and productive of social, cultural, political and of course economic relations is perhaps best known and illustrative of this hybrid conceptual framing.