Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper I explore embodiment and spatiality by discussing the example of a conflict between competing representations of landscapes and the female body in the two volumes of the comic books La Frontière Invisible. This piece of fiction deals specifically and explicitly with a reassessment of the gaze in the production of knowledge by examining maps as tools of power, control, and colonisation. However, despite an apparent desire to reject reactionary political approaches, the authors seem to associate the naturalised (female) body with (naturalised) geopolitical scenarios by fetishising the body through complex discursive transcodings between women and nature. In contrast to this, in this paper I suggest considering the body as a site and space of resistance to (political) imposition. Drawing on both feminist geography and critical geopolitics, I suggest an alternative way of considering the consequences of embodied geographies for cartography by examining the links between naturalised bodies and naturalised political boundaries. The main argument is that the body, by posing an uncontrollable, unpredictable threat to regular ways of producing cartographic knowledge, entails the possibility of a counterstrategic reinscription of spatial discourses and the creation of an alternative, more ethical cartography. This ethical cartography is rooted in embodied recalcitrance to imposed inscriptions associated with hegemonic positions.

In this paper I take the example of the ‘Map of Industrialization’, a huge stone mosaic map of 1930s USSR as a point of convergence for discourses connecting Soviet propaganda and the depiction of Soviet space through cartography, the nature of maps as social constructs, the relationship between cartography and art in Soviet Russia, and the role of cartography in shaping the image of the Soviet nation-state. I trace the history of the Map and consider the Map as a work of art and as an instrument of the state, exploring these notions in the context of its history of exhibition in the USSR and overseas and of its periodic alteration. I conclude with a consideration of the changing discourses surrounding the Map in the post-Soviet era and link this discussion to broader themes of cultural memory, monuments, and the negotiation of national identity.

Haptic devices for computers and video-game consoles aim to reproduce touch and to engage the user with ‘force feedback’. Although physical touch is often associated with proximity and intimacy, technologies of touch can reproduce such sensations over a distance, allowing intricate and detailed operations to be conducted through a network such as the Internet. The ‘virtual handshake’ between Boston and London in 2002 is given as an example. This paper is therefore a critical investigation into some technologies of touch, leading to observations about the sociospatial framework in which this technological touching takes place. Haptic devices have now become routinely included with video-game consoles, and have started to be used in computer-aided design and manufacture, medical simulation, and even the cybersex industry. The implications of these new technologies are enormous, as they remould the human–computer interface from being primarily audiovisual to being more truly multisensory, and thereby enhance the sense of ‘presence’ or immersion. But the main thrust of this paper is the development of ideas of presence over a large distance, and how this is enhanced by the sense of touch. By using the results of empirical research, including interviews with key figures in haptics research and engineering and personal experience of some of the haptic technologies available, I build up a picture of how ‘presence’, ‘copresence’, and ‘immersion’, themselves paradoxically intangible properties, are guiding the design, marketing, and application of haptic devices, and the engendering and engineering of a set of feelings of interacting with virtual objects, across a range of distances.

In this paper I explore the notion that our movements in and through a place define our engagement with it and help to constitute it as a place. Concepts and concomitant interpretations of place as a ‘situated’ and contemplative experience have to date received much cultural geographical attention. In increasingly mobile societies, however, I argue that mobility should be central to the ways in which we conceptualise and understand the character and meanings of different spaces and places. Although geographical exploration has begun concerning the politics and power relations of the mobile subject, little attention has yet been paid to the experiences and spatialities generative of the body-subject in mobility. Whilst acknowledging the importance of representations in directing action, I strategically emphasise and explore the notion that we create meaning and belong in a place according to how we are in a place. Drawing upon ethnographic work with racing and touring cyclists in the United Kingdom and France, I consider how the conjoining of the person and bike and the resulting embodied rhythms and kinaesthetic sensations of the movement of cycling are constitutive of the character and meanings of particular places. Ultimately, in this paper I point to an understanding of the kinaesthetic and sensuous experiences of the hybrid subject–object (in this instance ‘the cyclist’) as fundamental in rethinking how people live, feel, and ultimately create meaningful spatial relations.

In this paper I describe how hope takes place, in order to outline an explicit theory of the more-than-rational or less-than rational in the context of the recent attunement to issues of the affectual and emotional in social and cultural geography. In the first part of the paper I outline an expansion of the more-than-rational or less-than-rational into three modalities: affect, feeling, and emotion. From this basis I question an assumption in the literature on affect that the emergence and movement of affect enable the multiplication of forms of life because they takes place ‘in excess’. In the second part of the paper I exemplify an alternative, more melancholy account through a description of the emergence of hope and hopefulness in two cases in which recorded music is used by individuals to ‘feel better’. Emergent from disruptions in various forms of diminishment, hopefulness moves bodies into contact with an ‘outside’. Becoming and being hopeful raise a set of issues for a theory of affect because of, rather than despite, the sense of tragedy that is intimate with how hope heralds the affective and emotive as always ‘not-yet become’. The conclusion, therefore, draws the two parts of the paper together by reflecting on the implications of thinking from hope for both a theory of affect and an affective cultural politics.

Speakers' Corner in London is perceived as a space in which people speak freely without state interference; it is also popularly known as a place in which eccentrics and others, without access to mainstream media, orate. In this paper I explore Speakers' Corner as a discursive space, seeking to find a way through its polarised representations as a free space of serious and important deliberation and as a degraded trivial public sphere. I do so through the concept of the comedic public, which loosely draws upon Bakhtin's work on the carnival but also differs in significant ways. At the same time I argue that Speakers' Corner should not just be read or evaluated in terms of the public speech generated; the Corner is also a place in which communities form and strangers interact with others in counternormative ways. I argue that these social dimensions, often neglected, constitute an important aspect of the Corner's practice; they are also dimensions generated and incited by the Corner's discursive qualities. To illustrate this further I consider the expression of emotion, engagement in combative debate, and heckling as junctures through which social interactions arise. Finally, I suggest the social dimension to the Corner might productively be understood through the concept of the commons.

Queer geographers have been surprisingly slow to engage with the global turn that has existed for some time in queer studies outside the discipline. This is beginning to change but the range of sites addressed is limited largely to Euro-American ones. This paper considers the ways in which queer geographers might contribute to already-existing debates over the relationship between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’ in global queer studies. The paper departs from Larry Knopp and Michael Brown's “Queer diffusions”, a paper that appeared in a special issue of Society and Space (2003, 21 461–477). Though they limit themselves to the national scale of the United States, their argument that we should destigmatize places and identities cast as ‘backward’ has obvious relevance at the global scale. Its consistencies and inconsistencies with various strands of argument within the global queer-studies literature reveal that geographers might also learn from the spatial nuance developed in these debates. Specifically, this literature review concludes that we must also destigmatize those places and identities that are cast as ‘forward’ if queer globalization is to truly be decentered.