space invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place
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I am standing in the administrators’ office in the philosophy department. The department has one female and two male administrative assistants. Even though one of the male assistants is looking directly and attentively at a student making an enquiry, this student wants to engage my attention, though I am clearly otherwise occupied. This student expects and wants me to be the administrator. I am a female professor in an administrative space, standing alongside a male administrator in an administrative space. Yet the student sees only one of these two bodies as being the ‘appropriate’ one to help, to ‘serve’, and to attend to his needs. Entering a lift, a ‘black’ parliamentarian is mistaken for cleaning or catering staff by one of his (‘white’) colleagues: ‘only Members [of Parliament] can go in the lift’ his helpful colleague volunteers (p. 42). What underlies these cases of mistaken identity? What do these occurrences tell us about bodies and spaces and belonging, and about the notion of ‘bodies out of place’? This beautifully written and evocative book succeeds in articulating a clear and convincing account of what grounds these common and – at least for those being ‘mis-identified’ – psychically exhausting encounters. Nirmal Puwar masterfully brings together a range of recent feminist, political and ‘race’-studies theories and couples these with fascinating and original empirical research. The ‘neutrality’ of the human body has been thoroughly criticized by feminists and others. The human body, it has been shown, does not exist except as a questionable theoretical entity. Bodies are constructed through a variety of social and political practices as sexed, ‘raced’, ‘disabled’, ‘abnormal’, and so on; and these practices have a history that impacts upon everyday habits, behaviour and actions. None of this is news, of course, to those who are on the receiving end of the assumptions and habituated reflexes of ‘elite’ identities and their comfortable occupation of those spaces to which they feel entitled. However, one of the extraordinary achievements of this book is the manner in which it repositions the gaze of the social analyst to make visible ‘whiteness’ and masculinity and the ‘fit’ of some identities with certain privileged spaces. In this respect, Space Invaders deserves a place alongside other path-breaking works such as Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract and Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract. Puwar builds upon this very important research and combines it with recent work on the politics of space, place and belonging. Her thesis, in short, is that space is no less neutral than ‘the body’. ‘[S]ocial spaces are not blank and open for any body to occupy’ (p. 8). No less than the body, spaces are socially and politically constructed, and they have a history that will effect the meaning of that (particular) body occupying this (particular) space. Space Invaders offers 162
feminist review 87 2007
book reviews
many examples of the mismatch between certain bodies and certain spaces, or situations where bodies
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