Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
isguidedandshapedinwaysthataresociallyinclusive,self-affirming,evenpleasurable
(Dean 1994; Hook 2007; Rose 1990).
The chapter thus has two aims. First, we want to outline a critical approach to place
identity that transcends the politics of inclusion-exclusion, and second we want to ac-
knowledge the subjective and affective aspects of privilege that ground place identity
in places, bodies, and performance as well as in everyday discourse. To this end, we
shall consider how gender privilege operates in the context of heterosexual bar and club
culture. Rather than being unwelcome or excluded from these spaces, the presence of
women is celebrated and guaranteed in practices that favor women, such as allowing
women free entry, free drinks, ladies night, priority access, and, ostensibly, put women
at center stage. We will argue that privilege does not operate via practices of exclusion,
but through the engineering of affect and in the production of women as the subjects of
male consumption.
Our interest in affect is derived from nonrepresentational human geography which,
during the past decade, has sought to investigate the “
how of different emotional rela-
tions”
(Anderson and Harrison 2006, 334; emphasis in original). This emerging tradi-
tion does not signal a retrogressive return to a humanist phenomenology of emotions.
Like discursive social psychologists, nonrepresentational geographers view emotions as
ultimately unknowable; that is, in the psychological sense of interior “feelings” exper-
ienced and expressed by the autonomous individual. They are instead concerned with
the “genealogies, conditionalities, potentialities and materialities” of affect, and in the
“emergence of subjectivities from more or less unwilled affectual and emotional as-
semblages” (Anderson and Harrison 2006, 334). This is a Foucaultian project in the
sense that it proposesnopreexisting subject whoseagency isgroundedinuntrammelled
thought and feeling. It resonates with Butler's (1990) view of the subject, which sugges-
ted that “there is no 'being' behind doing, acting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction
imposed on the doing—the doing itself is everything” (25).
In this model, affect can be defined as “the property of an active outcome of an en-
counter [which] takes the form of an increase or decrease in the ability of the body and
mind alike to act” (Thrift 2004, 62). The source of emotions is thus outside of indi-
viduals, arising within settings that choreograph trajectories for bodies and shape the
nature of social encounters and exchanges. For example, aggression can be marshaled
and channeled “through various forms of military training such as drill” and result in
outcomes such as increased firing and higher kill ratios (Thrift 2004, 64). Similarly,
whenDurrheimandDixon(2005b)interviewedholidaymakerswhowerelyingandsun
tanning on Scottburgh beach, they all reported “feeling relaxed.” These emotions had
theirplaceinaspecific arrangement ofeventsandthings,times, places, andpeople.Be-
ing relaxed was a form of subjectivity produced through participation in the ritual of
