Hi everyone


I thought the concern about accepting a simple gender analysis of disclosures 
was appropriate - especially since Lawrence intends to expose these discussions 
to analysis and a different public...Of course some women may feel nervous about
the exposure, as Pam suggested, because of being women and because of the things
they do because they are women, as might some men (who, if I recall correctly 
some messages, seem to have no problems letting us know they are off to do 
childcare etc...!!).

And for many people, being new and young-ish is always difficult to reconcile 
with the endless public performances that our work requires. And all that 
football stuff did make me think (quite erroneously, since plenty of women 
geographers are into football...) that this felt like a (British) boy's game...

Whatever, I enjoyed reading the disclosures - term time backlogs meant I read 
them all in one sitting, and found quite a few people who I wanted to contact 
and was very pleased to learn about - and some people who I was reminded to 
contact, which was nice...so thank you everyone who has disclosed.

Busy-ness is also an issue - and I do notice some kind of relationship between 
when term hots up and the number of communications...

To try and get my head around who I am and what I do...in the midst of teaching 
all sorts of things...

Until two years ago I taught in Durban, South Africa, which is my home and which
I love and miss enormously. Now that I am working in London, negotiating that 
relationship is absorbing my thoughts, as is the experience of transition in 
South Africa's cities, which is both an inspiring process of new things arriving
to surprise us, and some old things carrying on in ways which are at times 
alarming. I have written in the past about the spatiality of urban 
administration in South Africa - how segregated African townships emerged as a 
technology for political control and administration. More recently I have 
revisited an analysis of the administrators responsible for these and other 
areas, and found a post-colonial interrogation of apartheid rule to be rather 
disruptive of these easy claims about "control" and "domination", especially 
considering the example of women housing managers in coloured townships, who 
tried to befriend, rather than control, tennants...

And now I am writing a bit about ideas of gender and space in Julia Kristeva's 
work and am hoping to do some empirical work on the international constitution 
of discourses of urban development in poorer countries. I have begun with a 
historical example of an Empire Exhibition in SA. Then there is the question of 
space and the transition of SA cities...lots of great things to think about!

Hope someone found that useful - I did...

Jenny Robinson





______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: query and disclosure
Author:  [log in to unmask] at :external_mail
Date:    19/02/98 18:29


The suggestion that the lack of women 'disclosing' can now be used 
for a kind of gender analysis of 'disclosure', makes me want to 
disclose forthwith.
Is it possible to know what the ins and outs of people not 
'disclosing' really are? Is it a significant choice? Have we just 
been otherwise occupied? Is it a trait of gender, class, 
temperament, habit, star-sign, generally being tardy.... who knows.
     
For anyone still interested, I'm just finishing my PhD on 
contemporary welfare discourses ('underclass', Stakeholding, Welfare 
to Work) and their spaces of representation; contemporary 
socialist-feminist politics; and personal-political ways of writing 
about those things. I'd welcome exchanges.
     
Chris Haylett



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