Book. As we mark the return to the place of living, working or learning, the start of the school year can be an opportunity to question anew the relationships we maintain in everyday spaces. And to note that, on the playground, boys often occupy the centre of the space practising sports activities, while girls are relegated to the margins of the field; that the temperature of air-conditioned offices is adapted to male physiology; that, on public transport, some take up less space than others; that, on the street, they are always on the move: the static occupation of public space is a male privilege.
It is precisely this differentiated relationship between genres and space that Nepthys Zwer, historian of visual culture, focuses on. For a spatial feminism. From space to the map(La Découverte, 216 pages, 22 euros). The author first attempts to draw up a broad inventory and to highlight how “The rules of the space game are detrimental to women”before highlighting the multiple channels through which women are conditioned to accept and respect this unequal distribution of space, even to consider it natural – in particular the fact that “the language and geographical knowledge thus produced depend on a male point of view”.
“The symbolic space of the map”
If, out of a desire for education, this synthesis sometimes allows itself to be overwhelmed by its subject, it becomes more precise when Nepthys Zwer traces the contribution of feminist criticism to the understanding of space, from the American philosopher Donna Haraway to the French geographer Camille Schmoll.
So what can be done to change the patriarchal arrangement of space? In addition to many other modes of struggle, the author argues in the last part in favour of the practice of counter-mapping, that is, the production of alternative maps intended to reveal and challenge power structures.
Informed both by historical knowledge of its activist and feminist uses and by her own experience (the author regularly leads collective mapping workshops), she explains how this subversion of the power of maps can help participants understand their everyday practices and reveal new spatial information that would otherwise be difficult to objectify and contribute to the formulation of effective counter-discourses. “Entering the symbolic space of the letter is to force self-recognition, it is to exist for others” :Women and minorities, long since erased from the map, have everything to gain by taking advantage of this tool.
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