This paper concerns the ways in which a Canadian feminist organization, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), has negotiated and contested the boundaries dividing a masculinist public sphere from the personal lives of women in contemporary Canada. NAC has highlighted the material effects on women of the metaphorical but masculinist boundaries to national public life in the modern state. In its struggle against free trade, NAC demonstrated how a feminist organization could overcome such boundaries and intervene to shape a national public debate by highlighting how trade liberalization and neoliberal restructuring would affect the personal lives of Canadian women. Likewise, with its interventions into the constitutional debates, NAC has shown how attention to women's experience and oppression can serve to displace the ‘big-picture’ politics of nation-framing. These interventions have served to thematize the gendering of geopolitics in a particularly practical way, a way that displaces a solely representational and identitarian understanding of academic critical geopolitics. Furthermore, they indicate how, in contrast to the pretended purity of an academic poetics of metaphorical space, negotiations of the metaphorical/material spaces of the modern nation by feminist activists involve difficult on-going negotiations with structures and spaces of exclusionary violence.