Queering code/space: the co-production of socio-sexual codes and digital technologies

The mutual production of space by sexuality and technology has been differently addressed in the often-disparate disciplinary pursuits of queer geographies and critical studies of technology in geography. Building on Dodge and Kitchin’s ‘code/space,’ we highlight how studies of technology in geography are already concerned with questions of sexuality through the examination of biopolitics and the regulation of bodies, together with the (re-)establishment of new and old lines between the public and the private. The immanence of sexuality in code/space foregrounds the importance of spatial processes characterised by their difference and normativity in the geographies of technology. Queer geographies critically examine such different experiences and processes of differentiation through space in their nuanced conceptualisations of spatial regulation and transgression. We illustrate how these two bodies of geographical scholarship might be synthesised by outlining three approaches for studies of ‘queer code/space.’ To show how there are a variety of relationships between sexuality, code, and space, we play on the double entendre of ‘code’ as a set of social rules and norms, and ‘code’ as the set of algorithmic instructions underlying software systems. In both senses, codes constrain forms of intimate life, but can also transgress, disrupt, and distribute the norm. To queer code/space is to emphasise the complexities of difference and normativity in living with technologies, where technologies might both proliferate and regulate socio-spatial experience.     

Affective nationalism: Banalities of belonging in Azerbaijan

While Michael Billig’s ‘banal nationalism’ points to the significance of the trivial reproduction of national representations in everyday routines, feminist political geographers have highlighted how the nation is brought into being through embodied and emotional practices. Building upon and extending these notions of the nation as represented and embodied, the paper argues that the nation also takes shape through bodily encounters and joyful as well as painful affections. In what we call ‘affective nationalism’, the nation emerges in moments of encounter between different bodies and objects through embodying, sharing, enjoying or disliking what feels national. We combine a Deleuzian reading of affect that discloses the mechanisms of material becomings with feminist scholarship sensitive to how bodies affect and are affected differently by materially produced nationalisms. Based on ethnographic field research in Azerbaijan, which we present in three vignettes, we untangle the affective becoming of national bodies, objects and places during a publicly staged ceremony of the collective remembrance of martyr and the celebration of a national holiday within the realm of a family. The paper makes two contributions to researching affective nationalism. First, it enquires into how people identify with Azerbaijan through their capacities to affect and to be affected by what feels national and, second, it explores how affective nationalism can be captured through vignettes of affective writing.     

Choreographing pumping: remaking the ‘ideal’ worker through maternal embodiment in the workplace

The negotiation of employed mothers’ identities as mothers and workers has often been theorized through separation, where women perform their maternal and professional identities differently and distinctly in the home and workplace. However, milk expression in the workplace, as a form of maternal embodiment at work, challenges this separation and the ‘ideal’ worker dedicated entirely to the goals and desires of the firm. This study analyzes how mother-workers negotiate milk expression to suggest that identity practice in the workplace is a choreography between co-workers and supervisors that have the potential to produce hybrid subjectivities outside of the logic of the ‘ideal’ worker or the separation of spheres. Critical moments of performance occur in the movement between spaces within the workplace when maternal and professional work occur simultaneously or maternal embodiment becomes visible to co-workers and supervisors. This paper extends the conversation about gendered organizations to suggest that working mothers are already engaging in the production of hybrid subjectivities in the workplace that have the potential to remake the ‘ideal’ worker.     

The role of recruitment agencies in imagining and producing the ‘good’ migrant

This paper focuses on representations of labour migrants and interrogates how such imaginaries shape migrant recruitment and employment regimes. The recruitment and employment of labour migrants inevitably involves a range of knowledge practices that affect who is recruited, from where and for what purposes. In particular, this paper seeks to advance understandings of how images of ‘bodily goodness’ are represented graphically and how perceptions of migrant workers influence the recruitment of workers to the UK from Latvia. The research described in this paper is based on interviews with recruitment agencies, employers and policy makers carried out in Latvia in 2011. The analysis results in a schema of the ‘filtering’ processes that are enacted to ‘produce’ the ‘ideal’ migrant worker. An important original contribution of this paper is that it details how recruitment agencies, in not only engaging in the spatially selective recruitment of labour from certain places but also drawing socially constructed boundaries around migrant bodies, play a key part in shaping migration geographies both in sending and destination countries.     

Wearable cameras,in-visible breasts: intimate spatialities of feminist research with wearable camcorders in Istanbul

Abstract

Video-based wearable technology such as actioncams and optical head mount devices lead to various kinds of visualities and interrelations between camera vision, bodily visibility, immersive viewing and public visibility of the body-wearing-the-camera. These interrelations are not neutral and in order to claim wearable visual technology's potential for critical, feminist research, it is essential to problematise the contexts and frictions that precede and/or surface during and after the bodily experience of shooting with a wearable device in a research context. In this article, I problematise the common approaches to video-based wearable research technology by engaging participants' particular ethical, emotional, political positions and embodiment of camera's prosthetic vision during mobile visual research in Istanbul. This work was realised as part of the ongoing study on memories of violence and wellbeing in Istanbul and the specific questions that guide my discussion are: what wearable camcorders as mobile research tool do to bodies; how they co-constitute the norms of visibility, movement and gender of particular bodies and what practices and emotional responses emerge from these intersections. A major aim, therefore, is to situate the camera experience as in physical and social relations of moving, seeing and be seen as gendered bodies in specific (research) settings. Drawing on ‘the embodied nature of all vision’, the article provides a close-up, chest-specific analysis of the implications of doing wearable visual research and presents breast-space as an emergent research site in my Istanbul study.     

Tracing Indian girls’ embodied orientations towards public life

Abstract

Contemporary figurations of the ‘the Indian Woman’ over recent years have been heavily influenced by national and international media coverage focused on high profile, gruesome and brutal cases of rape and sexual assault of women in public. The suffering involved in such cases notwithstanding, we argue that investment in such representations runs the risk of limiting our understanding of the varied experiences of female bodies in public life. Most significantly, the bodies of younger girls and how they relate to public life is mostly assumed rather than studied. Drawing on a sub-sample of ethnographies of younger children aged 6–8 living in the city of Hyderabad, India and employing the phenomenological concept of ‘orientation’, the article explores young girls’ everyday embodied orientation towards public life, with an intersectional framework. The paper considers three case studies from different spatial/cultural contexts and the empirical material is organised around the themes of the male gaze in a public space, orienting bodies in a schooled space, and the lived body in a domestic space.     

Losing it in Hawai‘i: Weight Watchers and the paradoxical nature of weight gain and loss

In Hawai‘i, bodies may be big, successful, widely accepted, and revered by their public, yet some subjects may simultaneously be seeking a thinner body even with what appears to be ‘fat acceptance’ by many state residents. This article analyses weight and weight loss narratives of two prominent public and nonwhite men, Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole and Sam Choy. We connect these narratives to Weight Watchers International discourses of slimming as these apply to ‘nonwhite’ subjects in Hawai‘i. We suggest that Weight Watchers normalizes thinness through discourses of whiteness inherent in particular foods. Hawai‘i's regional cuisine known as ‘Local Food’ is framed as ‘exotic,’ which is distinct from what the organization proposes is ‘good’ food that produces ‘healthy’ bodies. Weight Watchers narrates slim bodies and health while normalizing ‘white’ cuisine and the bodies who consume it thereby excluding Local brown bodies in Hawai‘i.     

Selling Shame: Feminine Hygiene Advertising and the Boundaries of Permissiveness in 1970s Britain

This article uses a 1972 television advertising campaign for Femfresh vaginal deodorants and the backlash against it to explore how women grappled with the permissive society in their bathrooms and living rooms. It uses women's magazines and the business archives of Femfresh to trace the popularity of vaginal deodorants in the early 1970s and show how advertising for the product played on women's fears of undesirability and shame about their bodies during a period of changing sexual mores. It details how feminist campaigners Women in Media (WiM) constructed a campaign against vaginal deodorants and how adverts for the product became linked in press coverage to trial television adverts for Lil-lets tampons, before analysing complaints made about both product categories collected by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. The contested terrain of feminine hygiene advertising adds nuance to historical understandings of debates around ‘permissiveness’, suggesting that, for some women, frank discussions of bodily functions were not inherently ‘indecent’, but rather had a correct time and place. WiM's campaign and the complaints collected illustrate how women of varying political leanings utilised conceptions of shame to exert limited control over the extent to which feminine bodies were up for public consumption in 1970s Britain.     

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.     

Dirty dancing: the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv

This paper examines the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv, Israel. The nightclub is considered to be a space of sexual liberation and hosted the Friendly Freedom Friday party. Yet, the space of the nightclub is also divided by gender and sexuality. We draw on individual in-depth interviews and participant observations to examine the tensions that arise from, and between, gay men, transwomen and club spaces. A number of paradoxes are present in the club. We argue that the fluidity of subjectivity—espoused by queer theorists—evaporates when confronted with the materiality of actual sweating bodies. We are interested in the visceral geographies of how and where sweat, and other body fluids, becomes matter out of place or ‘dirty.’ Three points structure our discussion. First, we outline the theoretical debates about body fluids and fluid subjectivities. Second, we examine gay men's and transwomen's bodily preparations that occur prior to attending the nightclub. The spatial, gendered and sexed dimensions of participants’ subjectivities are embedded in desires to attend the club. Finally, we argue that the spaces gay, partially clothed and sweating male bodies occupy are distinct from, and in opposition to, transwomen's clothed and non-sweating bodies.     

Ceramics,clothing and other bodies: affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters

This paper provides a new approach to the geographies of cruising and public homosex. For some time, social scientists have contended that, in those semi-public spaces where men meet each other for sex, actions speak louder than words and men's competency in using the space is more important that the (sexual) identities they claim in other aspects of their lives. This paper extends that argument in a new direction through an engagement with recent theorizations of affective geographies and more-than-representational approaches to spatial practices. Through a series of short vignettes of cruising encounters on city streets, in public toilets and in urban green spaces, this paper examines how public homosex is enacted and performed in relation to both human and non-human bodies, objects and the environment in which it takes place. The encounters described in the paper draw attention to the complex choreography of gestures through which cruising is performed and sexual engagement is negotiated ethically. I contend that the site-specific, performative nature of these sexual encounters suggests a more contingent sexuality arising from the interaction of bodies in specific environments and exceeding the boundaries of reified sexual identities.     

‘It's called Girl Scouts,not, like,Woman Scouts’: emotional labour and girls' bodies

A key part of the American Girl Scouts organization is their iconic annual cookie sale, which is promoted as providing girls with invaluable business and leadership skills. We argue that it also trains girls in the gendered practice of emotional labour. By learning how to suppress or express certain feelings in public spaces in order to net more profit, girls are socialized to not only regulate their emotions, but also their bodies. This becomes complicated as girls become teens, as they receive mixed messages regarding their bodies. No longer considered to be ‘cute girls’, teens' bodies occupy a space between adolescence and adulthood, which often creates tension in public space. We explore this tension and teens' responses.     

(Im)Mobilization and hegemony: ‘hill tribe’ subjects and the ‘Thai’ state

In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon ‘hill tribe’ people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new ‘Thai hill tribe’ subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside—the ‘non-Thai hill tribe’. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its ‘others’ are redefined.     

Masculine hegemony,the state and the incorporation of gender equity discourse: The case of Australian sport

Although the impact of affirmative action, equal opportunity and gender equity programs on the lives of Australian women have been explored in a number of areas, state interventions related to sport have received scant attention from public policy analysts. This paper examines how the Australian Sports Commission has framed its gender equity policy in the mutually reinforcing hegemonic discourses of masculinity and corporate managerialism. It is argued that the Commission's articulation of gender equity policy in terms of ‘market‐oriented individualism’ is both constituted by, and constitutive of, the shift from a ‘patriarchal‐welfare state’ to a ‘patriarchal‐managerial state’ in Australia. The paper also provides an example of the tensions between bureaucratic and feminist discourses in the state sphere.     

Thinking race through corporeal feminist theory: divisions and intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers' Market

Race is, in part, made and remade through the practices of growing, selling, purchasing and eating food. Consequently, some food practices are also ‘racial practices’. Drawing on a study in progress of the Minneapolis Farmers' Market, the paper covers two sub-themes of embodiment: racial division and intimacy. The corporeal feminist theory of Elizabeth Grosz offers the view that the body has explanatory power. This framework enables a discussion of the materiality of race rather than its representation or performance. Race emerges through the movement, clustering and encounter of phenotypically differentiated bodies. Through small segregations in which bodies move toward some vegetables and not others and through attractions that propel bodies to touch bitter melon and talk with growers, bodies shape the Market's meaning. This reflection on tendencies connecting phenotype, space and leaves is meant as a step toward a politics of bodily practice.     

他者的身体实践与城市公共空间融入研究——以“麦宿者”为例

“身体”是管窥和解读社会文化现象的重要视角。基于身体地理学,探讨他者身体与城市空间之关系,可为理解边缘群体与城市公共空间融入提供有益视角。文章以长期夜宿于麦当劳餐厅的“麦宿者”为例,探讨其身体实践与城市公共空间之相互作用,以剖析边缘群体对城市公共空间融入的过程机制。研究发现：麦宿者身体特征具有鲜明的他者性,并主要通过物质性和非物质性的身体实践来与饮食空间开展协商,通过在特定时空下的弱化他者性,来实现饮食空间的融入。文章建立了他者身体与城市公共空间相互作用的理论框架,在身体实践方面对身体地理学的相关理论进行了补充。     

Elemental mobilities: atmospheres,matter and cycling amid the weather-world

Abstract

Everyday experiences of movement have become a central concern for social and cultural geography in recent years. Work here has begun to unpack the specific meanings, imaginaries and experiences that come to be bound up with mobile bodies and their practices. However, it has been suggested that more could be done to examine the material, elementary, molecular and physical aspects of movement which are significant to the experience of being on the move. Therefore, this paper explores the experience of cycling amid such turbulent ‘elemental’ materialities. Such ‘matters’ matter to cycling in the way that they (re)make both mobile environments and mobile subjectivities. Cyclists come to have quite immediate and intimate relationships with the material and ‘elementary’ aspects of the environments they move through given their relatively unmediated encounters with them. This paper draws on video-interview based research with 24 commuter cyclists in Plymouth, UK to consider cyclists’ experience of atmospheric conditions in terms of air’s force and air quality. From this, the paper reflects on how the experience of such ‘elemental’ matters might be significant to future research on and planning for cycling.     

BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat,female bodies

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do.