Embodied Emotions in the Geographies of Sexualities

Abstract

AbstractThis commentary responds to the papers comprising the themed issue ‘Geographies of Sexualities: Bodies, Spatial Encounters and Emotions’. I position the themed issue at the intersection of geographies of sexualities, embodied geographies and emotional geographies, and suggest how the papers collectively contribute to geographies of sexualities and to human geography more broadly. The themed issue entwines the themes of ‘the body’ and ‘emotions’ to advance understandings of embodied emotions in geographies of sexualities and beyond. I identify three ways in which embodied emotions are taken forward in geographical thinking. First, the capacity for emotionally embodied fieldwork generates insights into collective embodiment and communities of practice, at the same time contesting masculinist objectivity and detachment in knowledge production. Second, new spaces of encounter – such as online forums and social media – are not distinct from everyday geographies, but instead are part of a virtual‐physical emotional landscape that extends embodiment across material and digital environments. Third, the innovative combination of different elements of feminist geographical thinking – such as intersectionality, the body and emotion and affect – generates new understandings of inequality across and between social identities.