Masters of the universe

Feminist scholars, urban and otherwise, have painstakingly illustrated the way in which how we know is intimately related to what we can know, and that these knoweldges are always socially, institutionally, and geographically situated. The making and traveling of these knowledges is itself political, as are the vantage points purported to be achieved in various epistemological frameworks. The emergence of the planetary urbanization thesis takes on a particular and interesting valence when read against this body of feminist work and scholarship. In this commentary, I argue that the planetary urbanization thesis inverts the feminist intervention, coopting feminist conceptions of relationality and hybridity while evacuating them of their political – and, crucially, their epistemological – force.