Embracing Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse Contributions in Women's Studies

While there is a predominant celebration of mobility and instability metaphors in contemporary feminist discourse, concepts of home, rest, or dwelling are frequently left unproblematized and perceived as simple, static, and lacking in development potential. This study finds that despite the countless geographic and ideological overlappings in feminist thought, two basic positions may be discerned.

There is a fashionable celebration of what the author calls a resisting of "bracing" space, a "site of resistance" of constant travel where all comforts of home, unity, and dwelling are programmatically to be withstood. Instead of privileging travel over dwelling in a divisively dualistic gesture, the author proposes that both travel and dwelling metaphors be radically and fruitfully deconstructed and reconstructed, and visualizes a parabolic travel-in-dwelling concept of "embracing" space.

While feminism's hypertransgressive movement metaphors may be fueled by fantasies of reaching a new kind of masculinizing, transcendent dream of everywhere, which denies material limitations and functions and which continues to undervalue femininity, the "embracing" varieties of space are both more promising and more, according to this study. necessary today.