Emotional Geographies

Liz Bondi, Joyce Davidson, Joyce Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317144601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together well-established interdisciplinary scholars - including geographers Phil Hubbard, Chris Philo and Hester Parr, and sociologists Jenny Hockey, Mike Hepworth and John Urry - and a new generation of researchers, this volume presents a wide range of innovative studies of fundamentally important questions of emotion. Following an overarching introduction, three interlinked sections elaborate key intersections between emotions and spatial concepts, on which each chapter offers a particular take informed by substantive research. At the heart of the collection lies a commitment to convey how emotions always spill over from one domain to another, as well as to illuminate the multiplicity of spaces that produce and are produced by emotional life. The book demonstrates the richness that an interdisciplinary engagement with the emotionality of socio-spatial life generates.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Geography’s ‘Emotional Turn’

Liz Bondi, Joyce Davidson and Mick Smith

Clearly, our emotions matter. They affect the way we sense the substance of our past, present and future; all can seem bright, dull or darkened by our emotional outlook. Whether we crave emotional equilibrium, or adrenaline thrills, the emotional geographies of our lives are dynamic, transformed by our procession through childhood, adolescence, middle and old age, and by more immediately destabilising events such as birth or bereavement, or the start or end of a relationship. Whether joyful, heartbreaking or numbing, emotion has the power to transform the shape of our lives, expanding or contracting our horizons, creating new fissures or fixtures we never expected to find. But how do we articulate and negotiate such complex emotional landscapes?

On the surface, the discipline of geography often presents us with an emotionally barren terrain, a world devoid of passion, spaces ordered solely by rational principles and demarcated according to political, economic or technical logics (Parr forthcoming). But this apparent absence is hardly surprising since emotions are never simply surface phenomena, they are never easy to define or demarcate, and they not easily observed or mapped although they inform every aspect of our lives. Perhaps it would be better to say that geography, like many of its disciplinary siblings, has often had trouble expressing feelings. The difficulties in communicating the affective elements at play beneath the topographies of everyday life have meant that, to a greater or lesser extent, geography has tended to deny, avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional entanglements.

This is beginning to change, as the recent appearance of publications, conference sessions and courses dedicated to the subject of emotion demonstrates. A new interest in, and upsurge of, emotion is evident in writings about people and places, and surely signifies more than a passing academic fad. This emerging body of work is obviously critical of past presuppositions that emotions are not materially important. However, it also tries to recover something of those aspects of geographical and allied traditions that have implicitly, if not always explicitly, acknowledged the presence of emotions in our interpretations and understandings of the world. Thus, perhaps the recent ‘emotional turn’ in geography results as much from positive recognition that emotions already have an important place in our own and others’ work, as from any sudden appearance of a shiny new ‘object’ of study.

There is also a feeling, embodied in, for example, Kay Anderson and Susan Smith’s (2001) influential guest editorial in the journal Transactions, that emotions have an important role to play in maintaining geography’s critical edge. An academic world that is increasingly business and policy driven suffers constant pressures to quantify and make economically tangible its subject matter. Although emotions can certainly be manipulated, managed and perhaps even manufactured for commercial and political purposes (Hochschild, 1983; Mestroviç, 1997), their subterranean ebbs and flows also resist attempts to represent them simply as untapped social (or academic) resources. A genuine emotional geography cannot just deal in feelings, like a stockbroker deals in dollars, or measure policy outcomes in terms of some bureaucratically derived hedonistic calculus. It must try to express something that is ineffable in such objectifying languages, namely a sense of emotional involvement with people and places, rather than emotional detachment from them. All of the chapters in this book attempt to do this, although the methods they employ and their modes of expression differ considerably.

Our own positions as editors of this collection merit brief comment. Such accounts are never entirely straightforward, but we can point out that for various reasons, both personal and political, and in various ways, both theoretical and empirical, we have all in recent years become increasingly involved in the practice of emotional geographies. For each of us, our work is infused with and informed by emotion in complex and dynamic ways. We are, like the majority of academic researchers, emotionally committed to our work. That is to say, we care deeply about the subject(s) of our research. Additionally, for each of us, the focus of our work is, in some senses at least, emotional in nature. Whether specifically, as in spatially mediated angst and fear of places deemed threatening because they are ‘peopled’ (Davidson 2003), or environmentally ‘induced’ awe and love for a ‘natural’ world felt inherently worthy of protection and respect (Smith 2001), or for the seemingly inexhaustible ensemble of disruptive emotional experience, from concern about the success or stress of a career, to unbearable loss of and longing for a loved one, that leads many to psychotherapies whether as practitioners or recipients (Bondi 2003a; Bondi with Fewell 2003). Our various research projects are thus motivated and informed by an understanding that emotions are situated within, and co-constitutive of, our working (as well as social) lives. However, like many others it is only in recent years that we began to conceptualise our work and the connections between our interests in terms of emotional geographies.

Our coming together as editors, and our joining with contributors, to produce this collection, expresses a more widely felt interest and need. There is, as this book shows, a growing desire for and commitment to the project of placing emotions less peripherally in our research and writings, in terms of both individual projects and broader (inter)disciplinary concerns. We hope to demonstrate that a spatially engaged approach to the study of emotions is capable of bringing new insights to geographical research. Moreover, despite the superficially reductive title of the collection, we aim to undermine any rigid adherence to and defence of disciplinary boundaries that characterises much contemporary academic enterprise. The term ‘emotional geographies’ should not be understood narrowly since emotions slip through and between disciplinary borders. This is not a new sub discipline of an already established field, since we have previously remarked that geography has largely defined itself in terms that exclude the emotional. Rather, as many of the chapters gathered here illustrate, despite their disciplinary differences, there remains a common concern with the spatiality and temporality of emotions, with the way they coalesce around and within certain places. Indeed, much of the symbolic importance of these places stems from their emotional associations, the feelings they inspire of awe, dread, worry, loss or love. An emotional geography, then, attempts to understand emotion – experientially and conceptually – in terms of its socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as entirely interiorised subjective mental states.

In order to illuminate this argument, we introduce three core themes through which this volume is organised, namely the location of emotion in both bodies and places, the emotional relationality of people and environments, and representations of emotional geographies. In relation to each we identify antecedents to the emergence of emotional geographies and then introduce the chapters in the corresponding section of this volume. Many chapters engage with more than one of these themes, and our introductory overview seeks to highlight some of these cross-linkages.

The first source of inspiration we discuss stems from critical geographies of health and embodiment. Without focusing specifically on emotion, such work has illuminated where emotions are felt to reside, notably in both bodies and places. Picking up on this theme the chapters that form the first main section of this volume engage explicitly with questions of where and how emotions are located through studies that extend geographies of health and embodiment in new directions. The second source of inspiration we discuss includes geographies of identities and social relations. Again, although such work does not focus directly on emotion, it highlights how emotions are produced in relations between and among people and environments. The relationality of emotion, illustrated in the first section of this book is explored in greater depth in the second section through studies that consider the relationality of emotions across a range of spatial scales and contexts. The third source of inspiration on which we draw are theoretical perspectives that problematise and facilitate the representation of emotion. In the third section of the book we include chapters that analyse representations of emotion and that experiment with modes of emotional representation.

Our account of key antecedents of emotional geographies is necessarily partial and tentative, and we offer it to draw out what we consider to be instructive or illustrative themes and examples that are emotionally poignant and powerful, effective as well as affective, and in relation to which emotional geographies can usefully develop. In the course of this account we argue for a non-objectifying view of emotions as relational flows, fluxes or currents, in-between people and places rather than ‘things’ or ‘objects’ to be studied or measured. In so doing we hope to give the reader a feel(ing) for the spatiality of emotion elaborated in the chapters that follow.

Locating Emotion

One of the specialisms of geography that has been most willing to admit emotion into its production of knowledge is that of critical geographies of chronic illness and disability. In this field, researchers have explicitly recognised the importance of understanding and faithfully representing the emotional experiences of those they study. For example, in her study of the workplace experiences of women with multiple sclerosis (MS), Isabel Dyck (1999) highlighted individuals’ feelings of exclusion and oppression, and their sense of struggling with their impairments and symptoms. The emotionality of such experience is particularly evident in attempts to renegotiate social relations in the context of the stigmatising – disabling – attitudes often found in workplace environments. Pamela Moss (1999) has also examined the emotional turmoil of negotiating ill-health in places of work, drawing on her own experience of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), and reporting a complex range of responses including compassion and understanding from some, but dismissive, antagonistic and coercive behaviours from others, who positioned her as overly emotional, unable to handle stress, and as suffering from ‘psychosomatic’ and therefore somehow ‘unreal’ physical symptoms. In a similar vein, which she explicitly and unapologetically refers to as ‘depressing’, Vera Chouinard (1999a, 270) has documented her own and others’ experiences of disability.

Research concerned with mental ill-health has extended these pioneering engagements with emotion in additional directions. Several studies have illuminated the emotional experiences associated with symptoms of mental health conditions including agoraphobia (Bankey 2002; Davidson 2003), specific phobias (Davidson and Smith 2003), obsessive compulsive disorder (Segrott and Doel 2004) and psychotic illnesses (Parr 1999), while others have explored the complex emotional impacts of the deinstitutionalisation of medical care for the mentally ill (Milligan 1999; Parr 2000; Kearns and Gleeson 2001). In this body of literature, illnesses and symptoms interweave with caring and careless environments to produce complex and sometimes confusing emotional geographies negotiated by sufferers, carers and others. Karen Dias (2003), for example, has presented a powerful and sometimes shocking account of anorexic experience as it is narrated by its ‘owners’ in cyber-space. Cyber-space, Dias suggests, can offer a safer, less confrontational place for the expression of emotional pain and continual struggle so characteristic of eating disorders. Her respondents experience fleeting yet powerful feelings of accomplishment through (self-)denial, but are also locked into a place of loneliness, vulnerability, and desperation, rocked by desires to be ‘normal’ and understood rather than attacked by others. Their embodiment of emotion is deeply personal yet patterned and shaped by a sense of sharing with those others whose bodies are similarly placed.

In different ways, these studies locate emotions in ‘othered’ bodies, which are differently experienced in different places. But they do not suggest that emotions belong uniquely within, or are generated uniquely by, those suffering impairments, ill-health, or the burden of diagnostic categories. Thus, notwithstanding their focus on people categorised as unwell or disabled, in a variety of ways they point out that much is shared with those who are not so categorised. In some cases this is suggested through autobiographical accounts that mobilise commonalities between authors and colleagues (Chouinard 1999b; Moss 1999); in other cases accounts of ‘disordered’ emotional geographies are rendered legible through affinities to ‘normal’ everyday spatial experiences (Davidson 2003). Among such affinities are the psycho-social and material boundaries through which we differentiate ourselves from others and from our environments, and which ordinarily ‘contain’ or embody our emotions.

As geographies of embodiment have elaborated, bodily boundaries are frequently perceived and negotiated in emotionally powerful, disruptive and conflictual ways (Longhust 2001). The feelings of pride and pleasure, and/or guilt and shame bound up with dietary, exercise and cosmetic regimes reveal that our bodies are intensely emotional(ised) areas and thus an important focus for, and locus of, work on how and why, what and where we feel (Davidson and Milligan 2004; Grimshaw 1999). Responses to bodies of others considered transgressive reveal the strong feelings often provoked by fleshy boundaries. For example, Lynda Johnston (1996) found that the bodies of women bodybuilders often elicit horror and repugnancy because they are not only ‘feminine’ but also ‘built’. Bodybuilding is one of many methods used to give form to feelings (and feelings to form), and other embodied geographies show the lengths to which many of us go to control or change our bodies (and our selves) frequently through practices of consumption (Bell and Valentine 1997; Colls 2004; Crewe 2001; Garvin and Wilson 1999). These studies also emphasise how embodied emotions are intricately connected to specific sites and contexts (Domosh 2001; Mathee 2004).

Questions about how emotions are embodied and located merit further elaboration in the context of typical and less typical everyday lives. This task is taken forward by the first main section of this volume, which develops our appreciation of the interconnected location of emotions in people and places. The chapters making up this section examine ordinary and extraordinary emotional experiences in domestic and institutional settings, indoors and out of doors, in places called home and places away from home. The section begins with a chapter concerned with experiences that are simultaneously extraordinary and very ordinary indeed. Sara Morris and Carol Thomas present a deeply moving account of the significance of place for people approaching death and those with whom they share the end of their lives. Through interviews with individuals who are terminally ill and with the often intimate others who care for them, the authors illuminate how the degenerative processes of advanced cancer leave sufferers ‘infirm’, and their bodies unbounded, whether in the spaces of ‘private’ homes or ‘public’ institutions. It seems that there is no ‘right’ place for such a death, but conclusions must be reached, and the authors explore how shifting embodied, social and spatial relations inform what is always an emotionally painful process of ‘decision’.

Chapter three also engages with issues typically framed in terms of loss, but in the form of hysterectomy rather than end of life. This medical intervention is performed frequently and sometimes almost routinely on women, and yet very little is known about women’s post-operative experiences. Drawing on interviews with 20 such women, Marion Collis presents an original analysis that privileges personal rather than medical(ised) accounts of hysterectomy. She highlights the importance of the social context of women’s lives and their perceived social role for understanding the nature of their emotional responses. The narratives on which she draws are emotionally complex and fluid rather than fixed, and the chapter makes clear that the womb is not universally felt to be crucial to the ‘performance’ of femininity. By no means all women are emotionally attached to their wombs, and Collis suggests that emotional responses to hysterectomy vary according to factors such as employment – seen as a source of identity outside of motherhood – and across the life course. For example, young women tend to experience the removal of their womb as a ‘tragedy’, and grieve both for the loss of the child(ren) they might have had, and, if they are childless, for their anticipated identities as mothers. Rather than ‘mourning the loss’ older women often report that they have ‘no regrets’.

In chapter four Christine Milligan, Amanda Bingley and Anthony Gatrell continue the theme of how emotions are embodied through an exploration of the shifting nature of emotional attachment to place among older people. Older people are routinely spatially marginalised often with profoundly hurtful, isolating and restrictive consequences. In contrast to this, the authors explore older people’s positive emotional experiences of the shared community spaces of social and gardening clubs. Drawing on innovative qualitative research in these settings, they demonstrate that social spaces, and especially shared outdoor gardening activities, can play an important and constructive role in facilit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Geography's ‘Emotional Turn'
• SECTION ONE: LOCATING EMOTION
• SECTION TWO RELATING EMOTION
• SECTION THREE REPRESENTING EMOTION
• Index