Space, Place, and Gender: Simplified!

Okay, this is going to be the most serious blog on this page.

I would be lying if I said I understood most of the general introduction chapter of Space, Place, and Gender. I could be alone in this, and perhaps I should have read over everything a fourth time, but I could not wrap my head around some of the sentences. For most of the beginning of the excerpt, I just stared blankly at my screen, wondering if one summer had really damaged my brain capacity this significantly. At first, I found the Massey’s sentences very choppy, often using repetitive phrases and unnecessary wording. It felt that she wrote it under certain guidelines, with no creativity in sentence structure. On page 7, she writes,

Moreover, many feminists have argued against such ways of thinking,

such definitions of identity. The argument is that we need to have the

courage to abandon such defensive - yet designed for dominance –

means of definition. Many feminists have argued for 'thinking in terms

of relations'. It is the strategy adopted here, in very general terms, for

rethinking the concepts of space and place.

I am in no position to critique a published writer’s work, but I read this thinking it could have been written so much simpler. No matter how interested I was, it felt that I could not grasp any of the main concepts at first. Massey is obviously well-educated and knows how to write—that much I can understand—but it felt that I had to stop myself after every paragraph and think to myself, what did I just read? Some sentences actually transported my train of thought into interesting topics. When reading about how space and time were connected, I somehow ended on the tangent of whether a really small organism or a really large organism would ever feel the motion of the earth moving. The answer is most likely neither, but that’s where my mind traveled as my eyes went on.

When the sentences became more concise, it was much easier for me to understand the concepts. Generally, it might be more professional to use more intelligent words, but sometimes one can overcomplicate a sentence that would otherwise be easily understood. I value understanding the information, especially in a non-fiction piece, more than being in awe of someone’s vast vocabulary. That being said, if it were a fictional story, and the author is her own thesaurus, I’d say go for it. The most significant tool for me to understand the latter portion of the excerpt was Massey’s uses of examples. On page 12, I was excited, because her incorporation of the discussion of feminism and the differences between masculinity and femininity helped me conceptualize how space and place were being divided. Part of the reason why the beginning of the reading was hard for me to comprehend could be that this whole chapter was an introduction, and Massey did not want to necessarily get into all the fun stuff she wanted to talk about later.