Seismologies of emotion: fear and activism during domestic violence

This paper explores the relation of fear to activism in private and constrained circumstances of chronic risk and anxiety. Asking how people contest domestic violence, given the intensity of the fear that it generates, the paper reframes their responses as practices of activism. It draws on qualitative research that charts the nature, experience and effects of fear over time. Using seismology as a metaphor for this process, the analysis describes complex and often hidden shifts in emotions over periods of years, as interviewees describe being simultaneously constrained by fear and actively using fear to manage and contest violence. Their practices of resistance are small scale, largely invisible to others, and have a messy and non-linear relationship with the process of leaving that some eventually undertake. Such action is only necessary in a social and political climate which continues to place more emphasis on individual than social responsibility for domestic violence. I examine what this resistance adds to recent accounts of activism, concluding that isolated actions constitute activism when they anticipate or engender collective social and political change at other scales.     

Chicago goes global: redevelopment,culture, and fear

Chicago's remarkably flexible growth machine, like their brethren across Rust Belt America, continues to aggressively press forward to build an internationally competitive city. This paper deepens our understanding of Chicago's recently changed growth machine. It focuses on its current redevelopment narrative as it is used on the South Side and chronicles two new features about it: its revamped use of fear and its re-fashioned notion of culture. I flesh out these two elements as they circulate through a now dominant redevelopment program: historic preservation. I chronicle three points in this paper. First, programs like historic preservation, like so many current city programs, have now fully shifted to being a neoliberal economic development tool to promote the “go-global Chicago” project. Second, two dominant fears recently nuanced anchor the narrative: fear of a city-destroying globalization and fear of city-subverting poor African-Americans. Third, a revamped notion of culture is used that helps provide resonance and dark appeal to the two offered fears. The culture notion is put into play as two dominant things, as the idealized and timeless glue that unifies Chicago's mainstream and as problematic values and meanings carried by black bodies which renders them civic tainting “ocular trash”.     

'Gendered Exclusions': women's fear of violence and changing relations to space

This paper examines how women's fear of violence is realised as spatial exclusions. Quantitative surveys on fear are used to show the number of women who are afraid, and the nature of the most frightening places. However, it is argued that quantitative surveys are of limited value in approaching the mental and social processes behind fear and in understanding the fear-related production of space. Qualitative research methods are used to explain the matter in more depth. It may be argued that fear is a consequence of women's unequal status, but it also contributes to perpetuating gendered inequalities. The paper reveals multiple experiences that change women's relations to space. Experiences and attempts at violence, and incidents of sexual harassment produce a space from which women are excluded on account of their gender. Social and emotional aspects, such as increased feelings of vulnerability, lack of social support, and a feeling of not having control over what is happening to oneself, have spatial consequences. These feelings often increase along with ageing, injuring, bereavement or moving to another place, as well as pregnancy and motherhood. I argue that the spatial exclusions in women's lives are a reflection of gendered power relations. Women's subjective feelings contribute to the intersubjective power-related process of producing space. Urban space is produced by gender relations, and reproduced in those everyday practices where women do not-or dare not-have a choice over their own spatial behaviour.     

Gendered meanings and everyday experiences of violence in urban Brazil

Violent acts are not random, but are infused with meaning: those intended by the perpetrators and those ascribed by others. This article explores how dominant gangs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro attempt to manipulate the meanings of violence to maintain their control of territory, presenting themselves as protectors of the community. Gangs impose violent punishment on residents who have breached their rules and behavioural norms. The messages they send out regarding the (un)acceptability of violence against women is highly ambiguous, however, which reduces women's options and increases levels of insecurity. Despite the ambiguity and unpredictability of gang rule, residents refrain from challenging gang control, preferring to moderate their own daily routines as a means to feel secure in the face of high levels of insecurity.     

Social dominance orientation,fear of terrorism and support for counter-terrorism policies

Following September 11 and the subsequent heightened fear of terrorism from more recent events, this study examines the role of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) in explaining individuals’ support for counter-terrorism policies that infringe individual liberties in pursuit of defending community security. Three hypotheses are proposed: (1) that SDO positively predicts support for ‘defensive’ counter-terrorism policies such as the maintenance of strong border protection; (2) that SDO positively predicts fear of terrorism and fear of Islamic extremism; (3) that the relationship between SDO and support for defensive policies is mediated by fear. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 1200 Australian adults, with support found for each hypothesis. Counter-terrorism policies commonly encounter trade-offs between community-wide security and individual-level liberties; pursuit of optimal security tends to require infringement of those liberties. This research demonstrates that high SDO citizens will support such policies, particularly as fear increases.     

Bursting the Bubble: Spatialising Safety for Privileged Migrant Women in Singapore

This paper develops geographical work that is attentive to, and critical of, how safety is lived and narrated. In contrast to previous work on safety that focuses on fear, the paper looks at safety as something more than aspiration for women. To do so, the paper utilises the metaphor of the “expatriate bubble” to explore how safety is constructed and experienced by privileged migrants in Singapore. Utilising research from two projects, we argue that we need to think about how gender and Othering intersect to construct safety. In doing so, we explore how we can use conceptualisations of privileged migrants to research how safety can be understood and therefore practised more widely.     

Exploring gender and fear retrospectively: stories of women’s fear during the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders

The murder of 13 women in the North of England between 1975 and 1979 by Peter Sutcliffe who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper can be viewed as a significant criminal event due to the level of fear generated and the impact on local communities more generally. Drawing upon oral history interviews carried out with individuals living in Leeds at the time of the murders, this article explores women’s accounts of their fears from the time. This offers the opportunity to explore the gender/fear nexus from the unique perspective of a clearly defined object of fear situated within a specific spatial and historical setting. Findings revealed a range of anticipated fear-related emotions and practices which confirm popular ‘high-fear’ motifs; however, narrative analysis of interviews also highlighted more nuanced articulations of resistance and fearlessness based upon class, place and biographies of violence, as well as the way in which women drew upon fear/fearlessness in their overall construction of self. It is argued that using narrative approaches is a valuable means of uncovering the complexity of fear of crime and more specifically provides renewed insight onto women’s fear.     

WHAT OBJECT IS FEAR?

This article reviews two edited volumes on fear, important contributions to the newly developing field of the history of emotions. The question at the center of Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier's volume is how fear is constituted as an object; this question is investigated in an interdisciplinary dialogue. Focusing on the twentieth century, the editors bring together psychologists, historians of science and of emotions, and specialists in literature studies, politics, and film. Taking the dialogue beyond the social sciences is certainly an exciting and necessary exercise, but it also raises the question whether both sides are really talking about the same object. Michael Laffan and Max Weiss place fear in a global history perspective. They cover a wide scope, from early modernity to the present, and geographically including the Americas and Indonesia. Taken together, both volumes not only give an impressive overview of the field of fear studies, and add to it through a number of case studies, but also raise the question “what object is fear?” in a new way. If this object is as fluid as appears from the two volumes—not only with respect to the different events that trigger fear, the different uses it was put to, and the politics it allowed, but as a felt emotion—this calls for further investigation notably into the words and concepts used to make sense of the experience.     

Playing with fear: parkour and the mobility of emotion

This article engages debates on emotional geography and non-representational theory by considering fear as a distinctly mobile engagement with our environment. Parkour, or freerunning, has exploded into public consciousness through commercial media representations and films. It is depicted as a spectacular urban sport that either can or cannot be done. Through ethnographic research with groups of parkour practitioners I consider what has been excluded from these representations: the emotions involved in trying, experimenting, and gradually learning to be in places differently. In parkour places are ‘done’ or mobilised in tentative, unsure, ungainly and unfinished ways which can be characterised by a kind of play with architecture. I argue that this play is contingent upon an array of fears, which, rather than being entirely negative, are an important way in which practitioners engage with place. Here fears can manifest differently, not only restricting mobility, but in some cases encouraging imaginative and playful forms of movement.     

‘Nothing is Certain’: Czech Post-War Literature Between the Avant-Garde and Expressionism

The Czech post-war avant-garde is split between collective enthusiasm, the adoration of the masses, and the depiction of the lone individual in crisis. Interpretations of this period have until now been based on the opposition of Literární skupina (the ‘Literary Group’, with an expressionist, individualist platform) vs. Devětsil (with an avant-gardist, collectivist platform). This study examines how understanding of the terms ‘expressionist’ and ‘avant-garde’ changed in the period in which Literární skupina and Devětsil emerged, followed by literary historical reflections on this process during the 1960s and 1970s, when Literární skupina came to be seen as distinct from the avant-garde on the basis of its espousal of expressionism. By comparing theoretical discourse and literary texts — in particular, hitherto overlooked avant-garde short prose — the present article examines the extent to which these established oppositions are valid. This article argues that expanding the analysis to include the neglected genre of the short story brings greater nuance to the underlying opposition of ‘expressionism vs. avant-garde’ (and individualism vs. collectivism), and thereby challenges standard interpretations of the era in question.