Home/Bodies: Geographies of Self, Place, and Space
Home/Bodies: Geographies of Self, Place, and Space
Geographies of Self, Place, and Space

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making and co-author of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1

The 11 articles in this volume grew out of the 2001 conference on the
“Lived Environments of Girls and Women” sponsored by the Women’s
Studies Research Unit of the University of Saskatchewan. Although the
geographical metaphor used to shape the volume sometimes seems a little
strained, the research—much of it constructed around survey, focus
group, interview, and ethnographical methodology—is well-grounded,
mostly in Western Canadian spaces. The geographic exception is J. Maria
Pedersen’s article on Australian Kimberly Aboriginal women, which
explores issues of race and gender, and urges Aboriginal women (and
presumably women generally) not to confuse freedom with maintenance of
the status quo. The remaining articles focus on the complicated
negotiation of female Muslim identities in Canada; transgendered
perspectives on the evolving sex-gender system; the pressure on women to
give their babies up for adoption in the 1960s and 1970s; the role of
the Internet in defining beauty and consumption for adolescent girls;
the impact on women of the emphasis on familial settings for palliative
care; female activism in support of industrial forestry in British
Columbia; friendships among women involved in a group calling itself
Intercultural Grandmothers Uniting (IGU); a support group of six female
psychologists who coupled mentoring, mutual support, and quilt-making to
good effect; sexual health among young women in Regina; and the
Saskatoon Kids in Motion Dance Program among children confined to
wheelchairs. Overall, the researchers exhibit a healthy ability to look
at the world and their own research critically and are careful to let
the voices of their informants be heard.

These studies offer an accessible and wonderfully diverse sampling of
the topics currently inspiring feminist researchers. We are told in the
introduction by Wendy Schissel (whose editorial skills no doubt account
for the cohesiveness of the content), that many of the articles were
written by young feminists, scholars, and activists, but the
contributors are not identified other than by name.