Topographies

One argument Pratt & Yeoh make in Transnational (Counter) Topographies is that there is a desperate need for researchers to look much closer at the lived experiences (the interactions, the transactions, the movement or migration) of women within and across space. It is in these finer details (i.e. minute details as opposed to ‘better’) that the researcher and seeker can come to see the complexities and contradictions that burden women’s abilities to ‘choose’ alternative paths that actually allow them to live out a better or more emancipated way of life. Of course, as Pratt & Yeoh explain, choice is rarely an option for women, and what is even more disheartening is that decisions tend to do little more than simply shift the topography of one’s landscape. And perhaps this is the cruelest part: despite the shifting landscapes, women most frequently exist in a purgatory of relations in which things ‘change,’ but they never really change. Instead, aspects of their lives are constantly traded and negotiated within a market where the only form of currency is race, class, gender, and nationality. Women can migrate, but it is often encumbered by their ties and the symbiotic relations they have with family members and community; they move to realize greater financial possibility, only to turn around and send their surplus back to their families; women gain some independence from the patriarchal relations with their husbands or fathers only to find themselves weighed down with even more responsibility, labour, and/or financial burden.

So, things shift and change, but the relations of power and the structural confines remain quite static. This does not necessarily mean that power dynamics cannot change or do not change, for all social constructions can be altered. However, contesting and altering the socially constructed confinements require an enormous amount sustained effort, deliberate, and communal action. And as many of the scholars we have read this semester have demonstrated, the survival of the poor woman requires an amazingly pragmatic negotiation of the bars that cage her as well as a resourceful willingness to use what she’s got to get by.