The Geographies of Everyday Life: Critical Inquiry in Marxist and Feminist Literature

The Geographies of Everyday Life: Critical Inquiry in Marxist and Feminist Literature Abstract In this paper I trace how a focus on the geographies of everyday life is used in Marxist and Feminist literature in order to exhibit the power of this focus in critical geographical inquiry – enabling the geographer to thoroughly and reflectively study topics that greatly affect people’s lives. I explore how everyday life is both the site of study within which geographical phenomena unfolds as well as a vital ontological and epistemological position for the geographer to undertake during research. Starting with the work of Henri Lefebvre, I trace this focus on the geographies of everyday life through Marxist and Feminist literature, highlighting the latter with the works of Doreen Massey and Cindi Katz among others, for truly revolutionizing the everyday by bringing into view people, places and experiences often sidelined and misrepresented in geographical thinking.

Everyday Life in Geography In Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction, Tim Cresswell draws inspiration from the Greek geographer Strabo of Amasia to present Geography as a profound discipline due to its focused inquiry on questions of everyday life. This “everydayness of geographical concerns” contains inherent profundity and knowledge that is evident when met with the act of geographical inquiry (Cresswell 2013, 2). As we investigate geographical phenomena, the material arenas within which these unfold, percolating in and out of lived experiences, imaginations, and representations is what I am identifying as the geographies of everyday life. The knowledge power of everyday life, present regardless of our presence, is found when we critically position ourselves within the everyday with a reciprocal mindset (Sayer 2015), through tuning in, thinking, inquiring, and wholeheartedly immersing ourselves within it.

This however needs further questioning on the positionality of the geographer as well as the nature of the everyday we wish to engage with, which I aim to do in this paper by asking - what does it mean to critically position oneself within the geographies of everyday life?

Positioning oneself in the everydayness of geographical concerns faces some challenges as the familiar day to day unfolding in repeated patterns in recognized places may not at first seem valuable (Hall 2020, Highmore 2002). But Highmore (2002) asks, what happens when that familiar world is disturbed and disrupted by the unfamiliar? He asserts that the unfamiliar everyday, a constant effect of modernity, is often more present than the familiar everyday. This is especially pertinent for the lives that bear marks of everyday oppression and resistance within these most familiar activities and places (Harvey 2019).

The appearance of the everyday as mundane and banal is the alienation capacity of modernity at work, Sneha Sumanth | GEOG 5000 Review Essay

through such things as the standardization of time, the assembly line, and the culture of waiting (Highmore 2002). This homogeneous mask guises the contradictions of everyday life where an everyday act can at times provide pleasure and at others be an oppressive routine, where an everyday place can be for some a sanctuary and for others a prison (Highmore 2002).

Everyday life is instead a dynamic site where power struggles, inequalities, and social difference play out in the daily experiences of people and is a terrain of study that provides the geographer with moments of penetrating insight (Hall 2020). Gardiner (2000b) discusses how studying the everyday lives of people reveals the remarkable abilities of human beings as they cope with daily disruptions and challenges. He considers the study of everyday life as a countertradition, an evincing of knowledge that was pushed aside in 20th century social theory, but in recent decades has seen a rapid expansion of interest in the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies (Gardiner 2000b, Rankin 2003). A powerful move against the unconscious reproduction of overarching social and cultural structures in the academic world, this growing interest in the sphere of everyday life is enough to consider it an epistemic shift, bringing to the forefront bodily knowledge, practical experiences, and lived time and space (Gardiner 2000b).

Everyday life is a tool to challenge the allisions of modernity – be it globalized capitalism, neoliberal politics, privatization, or social disinvestment - and a rich terrain that can be, and has often been, an area of great social and political struggles (Gardiner 2000b, Highmore 2002). In this paper, I will explore the engagement of Marxist and Feminist literature with the geographies of everyday life – both as a site of materialization for the dynamics of power and oppression as well as resistance and transformation, and as an ontological and epistemological geographical pursuit. I aim to show that forming this critical relationship with everyday life helps us meaningfully tackle geographical inquiry - with respect and reflectivity towards what and whom we study (Hall 2020). In this paper I will explore how geographers have placed themselves within this position to counteract to the dominant push and pulls of power systems and structures and raise everyday life to the level of critical knowledge - to problematize it and change it. I highlight how geographers place charge into everyday geographies as sites of resistance, revolution, and transformation (Highmore 2002, Flint 2002), bringing it alive as a rich arena of critical geographical focus.

Everyday Life as Ontology and Epistemology In the works studied, everyday life is both the material world that immerses the geographer and a mindset for inquiry that drives geographical thinking. In this sense, the geographies of everyday life can Sneha Sumanth | GEOG 5000 Review Essay

become an immersive methodology for both ontological thinking and epistemological process (Hall 2020). A common thread I draw from the literature is the implicit and explicit ways geographers question the familiar, obscured and taken for granted aspects of everyday life. Another uniting factor in the literature is the refusal to assume the everyday is unproblematic. Through this analysis, I will exhibit how geographers actively bring notice to everyday sites of social, political, and cultural discourse and reveal the specific materializations of larger systems and structures in people’s lives (Flint 2002, Harvey 2019).

I aim for a meta-method approach by highlighting how the geographies of everyday life are utilized ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically to strengthen geographical inquiry. I begin with the work of Henri Lefebvre as a launching off point, as he brings everyday urban life into view as a landscape of constant social charge (Trebitsch 2014). I then review Marxist and Feminist literature that critically harnesses everyday life to trace how this focus took root and has grown to today. Finally, I explore two pivotal concepts – Power Geometry by Doreen Massey (1993, 1994) and Counter Topographies by Cindi Katz (2001a, 2001b, 2008) - to highlight how Feminist geography has revolutionized and enriched the geographical focus on everyday life by harnessing it as a tool to provide power to those typically stripped of it (Hall 2020). Both works plug into ongoing theorizations of globalization and time-space compression but do so by going down into the weeds of everyday life, transgressing boundaries of identity, scale, place, space, and time (Rankin 2003).

There are some key themes and approaches employed in the literature which I wish to call attention to.

First, there is a spirited call for an opening of bounded concepts of place, identity, space, and time to understand direct and intimate connections that may otherwise be cut off by geographical boundaries and compartmentalized domains of inquiry. Second, scale is seen as non-hierarchical and an interscalar understanding of local and global relationships manifesting in place based political struggles is crucial to the examined works. Third, there is a motion to reveal the skewed power balances at play in the push and pull of dominant power structures as witnessed in moments of oppression and resistance in the spaces of everyday life. Finally, there is no single day in ‘everyday’, the very word tells us as geographers to go back, again and again, into the web of ideas to witness different negotiations and juxtapositions of the same (or new) space-time-place-scale-identity narratives.

Lefebvre and the Critique of Everyday Life Dwelling in everyday life was a foundational project for Lefebvre (Wilson 2013), and his work is often considered a timeless origin point for a lineage of Marxist and Feminist literature that posits starting at Sneha Sumanth | GEOG 5000 Review Essay

everyday life in order to lead to the revolution of everyday life (Trebitsch 2014, Harvey 2019). Lefebvre’s emphasis on everyday life was a raison d’etre, laced into preceding and following works in different forms, such as his 1970 book Urban Revolution on revolution in urban society, and his 1991 book The Production of Space which an explicitly spatial focus of everyday life (Anderson 2020). Through all of these, Lefebvre brings the urban everyday life into critical view and looks to it as both the site of evident alienation due to modernity and as a site for potential resistance and transformation (Highmore 2002, Harvey 2019). Lefebvre regards everyday life as a fertile ground that often goes overlooked as we walk on it, one that holds endless mysteries and substantial answers to the great questions of urban society (Trebitsch 2014).

Placing his finger on the concreteness of everyday life as a common ground and the space of individual and collective action (Gardiner 2000a), throughout his life and work, he holds out radical hope that the organizing and mobilizing capacity present in everyday life can challenge domineering structural forces, capitalist or otherwise (Anderson 2020). Any abstractions of this potential of everyday life are a symptom of modernity where powerful socio-spatial obscurations are produced by institutions of the state and capital (Wilson 2013). Lefebvre calls one manifestation of this ‘abstract space’, and its effectiveness lies in the constant ability of meaningless space to be concretely produced and reproduced in contradiction to how real everyday space is actually lived in and experienced (Wilson 2013, Anderson 2020). These abstractions are unevenly distributed across space and time, but between its cracks and avenues, the potential for revolution is an essential and visible thread in the fabric of everyday life (Gardiner 2000a). Lefebvre’s radical hope is contagious and tireless, and it is this visible thread that I attempt to draw and trace in the following Marxist and Feminist works.

Everyday Life in Marxist and Feminist Geographical Works There is a rich train of geographical thinking in Marxist and Feminist literature that engages in varying degrees and methods with the conceptions of everyday life as I have explored thus far – both as a site of study and as a mindset of geographical inquiry. These works problematize and theorize everyday urban public, private, and community realms. They place weight on the ability of the individual and the collective to challenge dominant social conditions and transform their own lives.

Dwelling on everyday intersubjectivity Ruddick (1996) explores the use of public space as a common ground for negotiating racial, gendered, and class difference. She exposes how intersecting identities of race, gender and class collide in everyday life and fundamentally contribute to the construction of social identities of individuals and groups as they navigate one another in place. These experiences, while Sneha Sumanth | GEOG 5000 Review Essay

occurring locally are intricately tied to ongoing global phenomena. In a similar vein, Valentine (2007) looks at how negotiating difference through everyday encounters can be used to create civic culture.

Reviewing literature that studies everyday encounters, she portrays examples of solidarity and kindness as well as experiences of tension and aggression between various social identities and minority groups.

She concludes that everyday encounters do not necessarily result in a meaningful respect for difference and calls for an urban political discourse that both celebrates diversity and confronts inequality as real everyday experiences.

Swyngedouw and Kaika (2008) narrate the entanglements of cities and nature, harkening to the idea of natural cities by Christopher Alexander ([1965] 1996), where the playful disorder of difference and heterogeneity witnessed in the unfolding of everyday city life represents of the freedom of nature itself.

Though cities are planned with rigidity and order, humans and non-humans informally transform its spaces with constant socioecological and metabolic processes that form ‘new natures’. Finding a similar spirit in Toronto’s sea of concrete high rises, Ghosh (2014) explores the dynamic transformation that Bangladeshi residents brings to the otherwise sterile and regimented towers that many newcomers and immigrants to Toronto call home. Through interviews and observations, Ghosh explores the complexity of the residents’ everyday lives in homemaking and placemaking as they transform the rigid spaces of the high rise into crucial social and cultural lifelines: spaces that provide the safety of community and gathering amidst the surrounding exclusivity of a city that segregates them through racial, class and gendered boundaries.

Pratt and Yeoh (2003) take inspiration from Katz (2001) and provide a feminist critique of transnationalism to push transnational geographies deeper into the ‘stuff of everyday life’, bringing experiences of women into view to counteract masculinist assumptions about transnationalism. Unlike their male counterparts, women are often subject to ‘spatial stickiness’, trapped within gendered disciplinary frameworks from both home and host nations that heavily restrict their mobility. This can only be revealed by tracing their everyday bodily experiences and movements through transnational time and space. The power of bringing attention to women’s experiences is also navigated by Dyck (2005) who discusses how a focus on the everyday remains critical to feminist geographers to bring and keep attention to spaces and experiences that might otherwise slip to the background of a more commandeering masculinist discourse. She calls for ‘taking a route’ through the routine and using ethnographic methods to capture how women and men’s undermined work of care is a powerful source of placemaking.

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The Everyday Evidence of Power-Geometry Massey’s concept of power-geometry (1993, 1994) shows us how the world is connected through colliding trajectories of people, places, objects, and ideas, that cast an ever-moving web of networks and nodes across the uneven and differentiated spaces of the globe (Gregory et al. 2009). Critiquing the dominantly masculinist and economistic narrations of time-space compression, she uses narratives of everyday life to lace in gender, ethnicity, and various other capacities that position people within a global power dynamic (Massey 1994). One of the most remarkable aspects of her work is her ability to show you what she means instead of just telling you how things work. Consider this excerpt for example: “Imagine for a moment that you are on a satellite, further out and beyond all actual satellites; you can see 'planet earth' from a distance….Look in closer and there are ships and trains, steam trains slogging laboriously up hills somewhere in Asia. Look in closer still and…on down further, somewhere in subSaharan Africa, there's a woman- amongst many women- on foot, who still spends hours a day collecting water.”

Massey uses the geographies of everyday life as an implicit literary and ontological tool to depict specific scenarios of power-geometry, forging a network of narratives out of the strong connective tissues between people and places as they undergo stark power differences around the world. Her work is rich with stories that transgress boundaries of place, time, scale, space, and identity. The use of these narratives both illustrate what she means by power geometry, and in a way are the crux of power geometry – experiences of the “throwntogetherness” of everyday life (Valentine 2007). Massey’s goal is to convey how different individuals and groups are positioned in unique ways amidst the networks and nodes of power interactions, and how their everyday lives are enabled or disabled to flow in relation to these flows of power (Massey 1994). The freedom of mobility through space-time reveals an individual or groups’ relationship to power, where those at the privileged end of race, gender, and class identities have liberty of movement in the world, at times are even in control of it, while just as easily imprisoning other identities into restricted patterns of movement (Massey 1993).

Places become open, porous, and unbounded to the collisions of everyday global activity, engaging with one another in “a power-geometry of intersecting trajectories” Massey (1993). For Massey, this does not reduce the specificity of place, instead each place is a distinct mixture of both wider and more local social relations juxtaposed in specific, changing ways, and is always interacting with its own accumulated history (Massey 1993). In this way, she draws together and then stretches out these juxtapositions of economic, political, and cultural social relations across the globe, scaling up and down, zooming in and Sneha Sumanth | GEOG 5000 Review Essay

out, identifying forces of freedom, mobility, and power along the way. The everyday life of power geometry is a simultaneous comprehension of what is here and there, near and far, travelling through multiple intersecting scales to always present something in its wider geographical context (Rankin 2003, Gregory et al. 2009).

Massey calls for analytical rigor and conceptual depth in the way these differentiated positions of power are understood (Massey 1993). Everyday life is the pallet she draws from to make evident the extremely varied ways in which people are positioned in time and space. I would like to point out that the narratives Massey uses are not major events or occasional occurrences. They happen daily to different people across the globe as they live their lives in the web of power geometry. Massey’s use of these everyday narratives is fundamental to understanding inequality in place with respect to global phenomena. They instill in us as researchers and social thinkers, an instinct to question our own relative mobility, and the power dynamics we are caught in that contribute to the social and spatial imprisonment of others.

Counter Topographies and Everyday Social Reproduction In a different, yet parallel manner to Massey, Katz’s work takes place through situating herself in the detailed unfolding of everyday life in specific places. Everyday life is both the inspiration and the canvas for her profound strokes of work on the necessity of social reproduction in contemporary society. Katz (2001b) describes social reproduction as “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” (711), the structured forces of social formations that encompass daily and long-term reproduction. She uses the idea of topography to connect the distinct and unique material qualities of places around the world as they undergo a shared relationship to broader organized processes such as capitalist production and globalized privatization (Katz 2001a). Investigating how these broader processes manifest in people’s everyday lives is of crucial importance as “social reproduction takes place somewhere, and the environments for its enactment are integral to its outcomes” (Katz 2001b, 715).

Topography is often used as a tool of imperialism and capitalism, producing material descriptions of places in support of them, so Katz proposes that same tool be appropriated to counter their forces, calling this a “noninnocent topography of globalization” (Katz 2001a, 1215). Katz also mobilizes topography because the process of its production situates a place’s material layers within broader global contexts and scales (Nagar and Swarr 2004, Katz 2001a). She makes clear that this is not a prioritization of the local over the global nor a romanticization of the local as the realm of answers. Establishing scale as a horizontal ontology, she uses topographies to simultaneously derive a situatedness in place and a Sneha Sumanth | GEOG 5000 Review Essay

scale-jumping political response (Katz 2001a). She narrates the profound changes globalization has riddled on everyday material social practices in Howa, Sudan, both in local relations and in their place in the world. While time-space compression might be rummaging around other parts of the world, Howa is experiencing a ‘time space expansion’, where traditional practices of agriculture and forestry are being carried out over even larger geographical areas, taking longer periods of time to attend to, in order to be viable against the velocities of capital induced production in the remainder of the world (Katz 2001a).

Katz translates the way in which topographic maps use contour lines to connect sites of equal elevation through a landscape as a metaphor to draw similar contour lines that connect the material evidence of global processes on specific places around the world (Katz 2001a, 2001b, 2008). Calling the result of this ‘counter topographies’, she brings together disparate places and people through their shared struggles and acts of resistance under broader political, social, economic or cultural processes (Katz 2001a, 2008).

There is an intentionality in the way Katz connects different places; a focused draw on observations of heterogenous everyday experiences that she brings from having spent long periods of time deeply engaged with these places (Katz 2001b). This positionality is important as it speaks to the ongoing relationship Katz develops as a geographer with the places whose everyday life she engages with. The result is a thorough understanding of how hostile privatism and neoliberal capitalism concretize in place and ‘close off and narrow possibilities in the spaces of everyday life.” (Katz 2008, 16).

Thinking with counter-topographies makes clear how central yet often dismissed social reproduction is to the vitality of everyday life, especially in circumstances where daily recovery and restoration is imperative to the sustenance of a society (Katz 2008). Studying the experiences of young people as they grapple with the impacts of state disinvestments and retreats from the social wage in two locations that have long held her interest – Harlem, New York, and Howa, Sudan, she observes how people in both locations have organized to confront and resist several repercussions of these oppressive conditions facing their youth (Katz 2001a). The result of any real change is sustained by everyday practices of collective resilience among members of both communities. Situations of crisis provide opportunities to people to reinvent their material social reproductions of everyday life and create lasting change in the social formations and institutions through which they define themselves (Katz 2008). Katz’s work aims to reinforce and strengthen the everyday life of collective action and social practices that people use for resistance, transformation, and self-empowerment (Katz 2008, Pratt and Yeoh 2003).

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Conclusion This paper has traced the presence of everyday life in geographical literature as both a site of study and as a lens of the inquirer. Harnessed explicitly or utilized implicitly, everyday life is a fundamental aspect of Marxist and Feminist works invested in theorizing the materializations of oppressive forces and the collective mobilization of people and places to resist them. Feminist geographies have especially grabbed the reigns of everyday life as the terrain that bears evidence of gendered, racialized, and classbased struggle, and continues to sow this critical seed as a crucial geographical focus in the globalized place-based struggles we see today. Thinking through the geographies of everyday life is also important due to the onus it places on the geographer to pay attention and deeply engage with the detailed unfolding of geographical phenomena in people’s lives. Though it comes in many forms as we have seen, this approach operates from the ground up of starting from lived experiences as opposed to a top-down approach of applying theoretical ideas to lived experiences. It ensures that geographical research is first and foremost addressing how various power relations, inequalities and differences are played and experienced in order to understand and theorize them.

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