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 McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

In what ways are gender, identity, and geography related in a collective power struggle? And (as with any cultural landscape study) how is this relationship between the three reciprocal and interdependent? These are the major questions framing Gender, Identity, and Place. In this comprehensive and instrumental book, McDowell uses feminist approaches to walk us through the various locations of human inhabitation to prove that gender identity is both affected by and effects certain elements of a place.  She convincingly illustrates that "explicit and implicit rules and regulations about whose bodies are permitted in which spaces between them and their internal divisions" [166].  Power and resistance are integral parts of McDowell's cultural landscapes, which range from the local to the transnational (body, home, city, work, public, nation, world) as the chapters progress.  The ultimate promise of the book is the insistence that by considering gender as part of geography, not only can we conceptualize a new past (in which, e.g.. women and other minorities were not passive agents) and a new present (in which, e.g., we understand the connections between turning women into symbols or objects and foreign relations), but we can also be confident that power relations are variable and therefore open to changes.

The book is an introduction to feminist geography useful for its accessibility, its wealth of encyclopedic definitions and case studies, and its survey of related literature and research in more fields than geography.  Included with each chapter is an annotated outline of suggestions for further reading that encourages more in-depth and concentrated research.  The concluding chapter is particularly useful to the scholar as it analyzes how a feminist/alternative study might differ from more conventional/mainstream studies.  Here, McDowell presents benefits and drawbacks of each method, helping us make our own methodological choices. [S. Dangelas.]