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[22/11/2024]
Feminist critique(s)
and the View from Above
In the 1990s, one significant line of critique has scrutinized masculinist and positivist underpinnings as a general and indispensable part of Remote Sensing and GIS.02 The extreme distance of their perspective made the satellite’s perspective the masculinist gaze per se. Some positions in the 1990s (with notable theoretical borrowings from post-Heideggerian as well as eco-feminist thought) have stressed that through whole Earth imagery we would arrive at managerial, controlling, and detached views of the planet03, at times resembling a voyeuristic view.04 This would result in nothing but a “distancing flavor”. 05
From there on, it is striking that within three decades, the role of distance seems to have obtained a different ‘flavor’ – in fact, one that is to a certain degree more in line with feminist critiques. A multiplicity of factors play into this: the explicit critique of feminist critiques of GIS and RS around the 2000s, or, the question of critique between epistemology and practice-orientation; the impact of feminism in geography and discourses on fieldwork; the rising interest of feminist critiques in technology; as well as the imbrication of remote technologies in our everyday lives and their massive use in detecting environmental and humanitarian crises. In these widely ranging factors, the role of distance has (also) been rendered productive for feminist concerns. Researchers see problematics of masculinism also in the context of unquestioned access (to the field) and re-evaluate physical distance in its productive relationship to access and care.
Feminist approaches to remote sensing increasingly undermine an assumed division of labor between masculine knowing-from-distance and feminine caring-in-proximity.06 How criticism of remote sensing and GIS has been integrated into its practices is particularly visible in feminist data visualization in GIS;07 critical mapping practices that experiment with ‘feminist ways of looking’, alternative geographies, and DIY tools;08 in mapped relationships between, for example, gender, employment, and childcare availabilities;09 or numerous other co-developments of gender identity and embodiment in the uses of digital geographies.10 Especially after the 2000s, feminist critiques show that geographical distance is not the only, and at times not the decisive factor when it comes to care(-lessness) from both near and far.11 Feminist critique has notably reappropriated the concept of distance, and technologically mediated remote sensing has become an increasing factor through which feminist concerns can be approached.
For further reading, see:
Kroth, Lilian. ‘Remote Sensing and Feminist Critique: Reappropriations of Sensing across Distance’. Environment and Planning F (2024), pre-print online. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825241283838.
Notes on the image:
Still from Satellite Séance, 2020; Video by open-weather in collaboration with Matthew Philips, Hanna Rullmann and Jol Thoms. Description of open-weather, see the project’s website: “Open-weather is a feminist experiment in imaging and imagining the earth and its weather systems using DIY tools. We weave speculative storytelling with low cost hardware and open-source software to transform our relations to a planet in climate crisis.” Imagery such as that of projects like open-weather cover integrate satellite technologies and feminist fieldwork methodologies, especially when they ‘plug in’ (in this case, NOAA-19 weather satellite). The image/ film still captures the imbrication of satellite imagery and ‘grounding’ remote data in a form of juxtaposition, while maintaining an openness to imaginative and interpretive aspects (of distance).
Notes
- Lilian Kroth, ‘Remote Sensing and Feminist Critique: Reappropriations of Sensing across Distance’, Environment and Planning F (2024) pre-print online, https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825241283838.
- Susan M. Roberts and Richard H. Schein, ‘Earth Shattering: Global Imagery and GIS’, in Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems, ed. John Pickles (New York, London: Guilford Press, 1995), 171–95; Michael R. Curry, ‘Geographic Information Systems and the Inevitability of Ethical Inconsistency’, in Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems, ed. John Pickles (New York, London: Guilford Press, 1995), 68–87; Yaakov Jerome Garb, ‘Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings of Contemporary Earth Imagery’, in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (Sierra Club Books, 1990), 264–78; L. Bondi and M. Domosh, ‘Other Figures in Other Places: On Feminism, Postmodernism and Geography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, no. 2 (1992): 199–213, https://doi.org/10.1068/d100199.
- Roberts and Schein, ‘Earth Shattering: Global Imagery and GIS’, 183.
- Roberts and Schein, 189.
- Garb, ‘Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings of Contemporary Earth Imagery’, 266–67.
- Karen T. Litfin, ‘The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites’, Frontiers (Boulder) 18, no. 2 (1997): 26–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/3346964.
- Mei-Po Kwan, ‘Feminist Visualization: Re-Envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic Research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 4 (2002): 645–61, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.00309; LaDona Knigge and Meghan Cope, ‘Grounded Visualization: Integrating the Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data through Grounded Theory and Visualization’, Environment and Planning. A 38, no. 11 (2006): 2021–37, https://doi.org/10.1068/a37327.
- Sasha Engelmann et al., ‘Open-Weather: Speculative-Feminist Propositions for Planetary Images in an Era of Climate Crisis’, Geoforum 137 (2022): 237–47.
- Marianna Pavlovskaya and Kevin St Martin, ‘Feminism and Geographic Information Systems: From a Missing Object to a Mapping Subject: Feminism and Geographic Information Systems’, Geography Compass 1, no. 3 (2007): 583–606, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00028.x; Gillian Rose, ‘“Everyone’s Cuddled up and It Just Looks Really Nice”: An Emotional Geography of Some Mums and Their Family Photos’, Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 4 (2004): 549–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936042000317695.
- Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski, ‘Feminist Digital Geographies’, Gender, Place & Culture 25, no. 5 (2018): 629–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1465396; Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood, ‘Feminist Geographies of New Spatial Media’, Canadian Geographies / Géographies Canadiennes 59, no. 1 (2015): 12–28, https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12093; Monica Stephens, ‘Gender and the GeoWeb: Divisions in the Production of User-Generated Cartographic Information’, GeoJournal 78, no. 6 (2013): 981–96.
- Nadine Schuurman, ‘Women and Technology in Geography: A Cyborg Manifesto for GIS’, Canadian Geographer 46, no. 3 (2002): 261–62, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2002.tb00748.x.