Space, Place and Gender

by DOREEN MASSEY, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1994, viii + 280 pp, cloth us$44.95 (ISBN 0-8166-2616-2); paper us$19.95 (ISBN 0-81662617-0)

The presence of 'space', 'place', and 'gender' all in one title and in a book written by Doreen Massey certainly piqued my interest. This was followed, quickly, by disappointment, when I discovered that the text consisted in large part of a selection of her previously published essays. Closer inspection and some introspection has yielded vet another and more positive reaction.

Massey begins by stating:'The central thread Iinking the papers is the attempt to formulate concepts of space and place in terms of social relations', and indeed, the book is constructed on that basis. As well as a general introduction, a more specific discussion provides an entree to each of the text's three sections. In this way, Massey helps the reader understand the dimensions and stages of her own thinking, moving from a focus on 'Space and Social Relations' to `Place and Identity' to `Space, Place and Gender'. By carefully placing each aspect of her argument in a context and by establishing connections between one set of arguments and the others, Massey also succeeds in integrating the collection and making it much more than the sum of its parts. In each section, the articles span about a five- to ten-year period, with Part I containing the earliest, now classic, 'Industrial Structuring versus the Cities' (written with Richard Meegan, 1978). Generally, though, the articles are quite recent, with most written between 1988 and 1993.

The crisscrossing and intersecting layers of Massey's thinking...