The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time

The Global and Intimate: Feminism in Our Time, edited by Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 325 pp. US29. 50 (paper), ISBN: 978-0-2311-5449-9 Feminist geographers' investigations of everyday intimacies of embodied subjects have been used to critique, intervene in, and retheorize abstract narratives of global processes and relations. With Elspeth Probyn, We might call this a feminist attunement to little details so crucial to adequately understanding big picture (p. 75). In their new collection, The Global and Intimate: Feminism in Our Time, Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner bring together feminist scholars from various disciplines concerned with this relationship between and global. Cultural geographers will not only find this conceptual pairing fruitful for upending hegemonic notions of scale and space, but will find in each chapter examples of how an epistemological commitment to intimacy can be productively incorporated into academic research and writing. In their introduction, Pratt and Rosner problematize the intimate and the global, reviewing use of these concepts in feminist thought. Crucially, they insist that intertwining global and is an ethical move attentive to specificity and broader global contexts simultaneously, and they highlight importance of materiality (the tastes, smells, and touch of everyday life) in following fifteen chapters (p. 19). Chapter One in first of four thematically organized sections, Ara Wilson's contribution acts as a second introduction to collection, tracing use of intimacy as a critical concept, and suggesting that its analytical value lies in its emphasis on relationality and linkages and its resistance to fixed definition. That most authors are not geographers is one of book's strengths, particularly for cultural geographers, who will certainly appreciate diversity of methods and cultural theories applied to important geographic themes. For example, for those interested in literature, Agnese Fidecaro's piece offers a critical reading of Jamaica Kincaid's My Garden (Book), arguing that it challenges a reification of to domestic or private, and that it reveals relationship of intimacy to global histories and forces. Geographers less interested in analyses of literature, film, or art installation will still find chapters by Fidecaro, Mieke Bal, Marianne Hirsch, and Tsung-Yi Michelle Huang and Chi-She Li compelling for their concern with physical and emotional borders, exploration of tensions between intimacy and global forces, and attention to how objects and practices do (and do not) produce intimacy through processes of place and displacement. …