"Situating" Geopolitics: A Feminist Approach

In the realm of feminist thought, geopolitical space becomes situated not only within the wide context of the global, but widens understanding to position the personal as political. Turning from the object of the state to that of the household exposes the politics on the ground and further questions the disembodied matter of geopolitics. Feminist enquiry engages with lived experience, supporting an embodied conception of knowledge; moving away from a top-down approach to knowledge creation. This enables a renegotiation of politicised landscapes highlighting the often subtle transformations of power occurring at the local level. Through an engagement with the educational geopolitical landscape in a Muslim country context, this study seeks to politicise access to education and issues of gender, mobility and security within that.
Using the context of the ‘Education for All’ project in Morocco, this paper repositions the geopolitical as characterised by a relational research ethic fostering a space of mutual understanding and empathy. Emerging local subjectivities guide the embodied account of educational discourses, acknowledging education’s powerful role in the politicisation of local space and gender relations within that. The school as an institutional space becomes entwined with national political culture and the global agenda on education, further intersecting with gendered household politics and the underlying constitution of values and beliefs. As such, the gendered subjectivities that form part of the politics of everyday life are no longer rendered absent in geopolitical debates and the wider asymmetries this creates in predominantly male dominated societies. Rather, this study seeks to engage in geopolitical debates by adopting a feminist lens to understand the unfolding of political life from a grassroots level, studying the grammar of politics governing community life.