Approaching/departure: effacement, erasure and ‘undoing’ the fear of crime

Abstract

This paper contributes to contemporary debates about the geographies of gendered fear of crime by examining the way in which a group of young women negotiate fear of crime in public space by creating affective distance between themselves and the approaching menace of fear. These distances are presented here as lacunae that young women construct in order to promote feelings of safety in public spaces. Bringing Sara Ahmed’s work on the circulation of affect and Jacques Derrida’s notion of erasure (or sous-rature) into a dialogue with each other, and building on a Heideggerian phenomenological understanding of fear as dynamic, this paper argues that constructing lacunae enables young women to undo the approach of signifiers of fear in public space, which in turn enables them to contest dominant discourses of the gendered nature of fear of crime. Such erasure also has implications for the politics of safe-keeping. This paper complicates conventional understandings of safe-keeping by highlighting how, in the pursuit of safety, erasures based on classed, raced, or gendered ‘othering’ manifest themselves and it highlights the importance, not only of attending to silences and absences used to promote feelings of safety, but also to the politics of these in the pursuit of safe-keeping.