Janice Monk, executive director of the Southwest Institute for Research on Women, said yesterday that specific geographic locations help women find their identities.
In a speech titled "Gender, Place and Identity," Monk focused primarily on female authors whose works involved women discovering their identity in relation to geography. She discussed women in Australia, New England and the southwestern United States.
Monk, who is also an adjunct professor of geography at the University of Arizona, said connections to location and environment were more important to those women who were searching for a female identity.
"I hope to question whether our spatial metaphors have salience for all women," Monk said, "or whether they resonate more strongly for women who are in that place in life where they wish to break out."
Many minority women, Monk said, "share responses to the land." Monk said Native American and Hispanic writers in the Southwest often identify with "the desert as a woman who defies stereotypical roles."
In her presentation, Monk played clips from the documentary, "The Desert Is No Lady," of which she was the executive producer. The film featured interviews with minority authors who wrote about the desert.
"Ultimately," Monk said, "the desert offers survival" for the writers.
"We see it across an array of" southwestern female writers, Monk said, but the connection is not only with the desert. "The urban environment can provide" an identity for women as well, Monk said.
Women in Australia, Monk said, are mistakenly raised with a national identity connected to stereotypical rural men of the Outback.
Although she connected women's identities with their natural environments, Monk said Australian women were more closely linked with cities and suburbs.
Monk described several female Australian authors who had flourished in "cities that were open to the natural world of harbor, riverside and the nearby hill country."
The authors connected to the earth through gardens and coastal views rather than through the largely rural landscape that makes up much of Australia, she said.
She also discussed the importance of identifying with the environment to all women, which she said was necessary "to root people in communities and produce differences in women."
In her discussion of women in New England, Monk mentioned studies of various communities in Worcester, Mass., which showed that occupational and societal divisions were based on identities defined by location.
The separations based on geographical communities, Monk said, demonstrated the presence of a "rootedness of life and identity" connected to location.
Monk spoke to an audience of approximately 45 people in the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences.
