Carte du pays de Tendre 
M.me de Scudéry 1654
The sudden spoon is the same in no size.
The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision.
Malachite in Tender Buttons
Geography as a room of one’s own
An Intimate Map
Fashioning G Gender and Geography
“Taking Place”: from salon to Gardens
Introduction: Why Commons?
At least since the Zapatistas took over the Zócalo in San Cristobal de las Casas on December 31, 1993 to protest legislation dissolving the ejidal lands of Mexico, the concept of ‘the commons’ has been gaining popularity among the radical left internationally and in the U.S., appearing as a basis for convergence among anarchists, Marxists, socialists, ecologists, and ecofeminists.(…) The new enclosures’ have also made visible a world of communal properties and relations that many had believed to be extinct or had not valued until threatened with privatization.
(…) In this context the idea of the common/s has offered a logical and historical alternative to both the state and the private property and the state and the market, enabling us to reject the fiction that they are mutually exclusive and exhaustive of our political possibilities.
from Feminism and the Politics of the Commons in an Era of Primitive Accumulation
(…) markets too, the argument goes, depend on the existence of nonmonetary relations like confidence, trust, and gift giving. In brief, capital is learning about the virtues of the common good.
We must be very carefull, then, not to craft the discourse on the commons in such a way as to allow a crisis-ridden capitalist class to revive itself, for instance, as the environmental guardian of the planet.
from Global Commons, World Bank Commons
One factor that encourages women’s role as custodians of the land and communal wealth is their greater role in preserving and transmitting traditional knowledge. As tejedoras de memoria, weavers of memory, as Mexican theorist/activist Mina Navarro puts it, they form an important instrument of resistance, because the knowledge they sustain and share produces a stronger collective identity and cohesion in the face of dispossession* The participation in the new movements of indigenous women, who bring with them a vision of the future shaped by a connection with the past and a strong sense of the continuity between human being and nature, is crucial in this context. With the reference to the ‘cosmovision’ that typify indigenous cultures in Latin America some feminists have coined the term ‘communitarian feminism’, where the concept of the commons is understood to express a specific conception of space, time, life, and the human body.
*Mina Navarro, Luchas por lo común:Antagonismo social contra el despojo capitalista de los bienes naturales en Mexico (Puebla:Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2015), 248-264.
from Women’s Struggles for Land and the Common Good in Latin America
A further sign of rising feminist consciousness is the emergence of a new critical stance among indigenous women who are questioning the patriarchal structures that govern their communities, especially the transmission of land, which often occurs in a patrilineal fashion. This differential inclusion has major consequences, as Gladys Tzul Tzul, an indigenous scholar/activist from Totonicapán area of Guatemala, points out, as it affects “the registration of the family’s property, the guardianship pf the children, and the symbolic meaning of having children outside of marriage”
from Women’s Struggles for Land and the Common Good in Latin America
Women’s travel writing
As the italian feminist critic Paola Melchiori , a passionate nomad, observes dislocation has always marked the terrain of the female traveler. Analyzing the literature of travel as a site of sexual difference, she writes: Reading women’s travel writing, one notices an absence of the past. Women who leave are not nostalgic. They desire what they have not had, and they look for it in the future. The desire does not take shape as “return” but rather as “voyage”. Nostalgia is substituted by dislocation*. Thinking as a voyageuse can trigger a relation to dwelling that is much more transitive than the fixity of oikos, and a cartography that is errant. Wandering defines this cartography, which is guided by a fundamental remapping of dwelling. A constant redrafting of sites, rather than the circularity of origin and return, ensures that spatial attachment does not become a desire to possess. In the words of Rosi Braidotti, “the nomad has a sharpened sense of territory but no possessiveness about it**”.
*Paola Melchiori, “Un sentimento senza oggetto”, Lapis no.19, September 1993, p.22
**Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects:Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Thought, New York:Columbia University Press, 1994, pp.35-36
from Gender Nomadism: The Journey of Dwelling