Abstract
This expertly edited book masterfully advances critical debates surrounding the gendering of place, how this happens, and the associated meanings. In particular, the various symbolic manifestations of spatial inclusion are explored through affect theory. It is clearly aimed at OS scholars interested in the spaces and places of organizing and organizations, but it also speaks to the broader OS and management studies field, particularly to those interested in exploring the bodily capacity of affect in relation to gender in/exclusion. In fact, moving beyond OS, one of the joys of the book lies in its interdisciplinary nature; ideas from affective geography, gender and queer studies, phenomenology and work and organization studies all emerge and are explored throughout the chapters. In particular, recurring concepts draw from feminist geography (Massey, 2005; McDowell, 2011, inter alia), and this multifaceted approach is one of the key contributions from a book that encompasses a wide geographical, empirical and theoretical range.
The book is divided into three sections: Gender and attachment in places and spaces of work; Gender, disruption and unsettling spaces and places; and, finally, Place, gender identity and belonging. The structure works really well. It seems self-evident to point out that the editors present a thematic structure, but given the wide-ranging concepts covered by the authors, it has been particularly well crafted and takes us from gendered spaces to unsettling places and finally to sensations around belonging (or otherwise). It generates feelings of expansion; that is, the early chapters cleverly plant seeds that are then further explored in different places conceptually, empirically and geographically.
In the introduction, the editors show how the chapters pay attention to the affective geographical formations of attachment, disruption and belonging, leading to a gendered understanding of what it means to be in or out of place. As well as this focus on affect and a relational ontological orientation, one of the stated aims of the book is to examine situated and multiple reverberances of affect. This focus on reverberances really jumped out at me, as the editors draw in more detail from Massumi’s (2002) comparison of affect to an echo, containing atmospheric reverberations that resonate in between and within ourselves. Not only does this help us understand how affect privileges the body as a site of intensity, but it started to make me think about the relationship between affect, echo and rhythm and the ways in which echo can emphasize rhythmic patterns. This rhythmic texture is not covered in the book, but the focus on echo and affect provided much food for thought for me (building from Nash, 2020) and opened up some potential future avenues.
Part I opens with an elegantly written and somewhat elegiac essay by Nick Rumens, who discusses the ways in which his modern home conservatory, used as his art studio, evokes memories of the past that bear down on his sense of place-making in the present. He describes how the conservatory has been historically represented as charming, refined and intimate, coded as feminine domestic space, whereas the artist’s studio is historically coded as masculine and work-oriented. Rumens asks if it is an option to repudiate the femininity of place by replacing domesticity with a virile, hypermasculine studio space? Yet the affective feminine history nourishes his sense of self as a plant artist. The frustrations of domesticity arise, however, and the gendering affect can stifle – in an all-too-relatable confession, Rumens admits that he can’t work when the laundry drying rack is sitting there in full view. The affective encounters affect the experience of and enactment of place that are entangled with gendered meanings of work and non-work. Place-making is therefore shown to be layered with meanings and affective states that ebb and flow – at this point, my antenna was once again attuned to the potential relationship between (gendered) rhythms, place and affect!
Both Lewis (chapter 2) and Sheerin and Simpson (chapter 4) are concerned with finance and the particular affective relations of the City of London. Lewis uses a Foucauldian discursive methodology in order to explore how men and women constitute a leadership identity in the City of London amid the cultural location of postfeminism. Sheerin and Simpson are also concerned with gender and affective relationships, but here there is a shift from the aggressive masculine sphere of the City to the domesticated sphere of the house, with their research situated during the homeworking phases of life during the Covid-19 pandemic. Lewis reveals how gender is a felt force when moving between masculinity and feminine norms in such a hypermasculine space and how the masculine materiality of the place influences the type and amount of care given in leadership. Here, place isn’t just a location in the world but a way of knowing that world. When that world is relocated to the domestic sphere of the home, however, Sheerin and Simpson show how the mess and interruptions of the home are very different from highly gendered spatial divisions in the City. Yet, interestingly, the workers they interviewed felt disconnected from work and home. These different empirical contexts reveal the affective relationships entwined with the gendered practices of finance. In chapter 3, between these two explorations into finance, Horne anchors us once again in home, although this time in a heritage museum house, and shows how attachments of place are here defined as people’s bonds with a place or setting, and how for some of the volunteers, affective responses to the past help them carve out spaces for belonging in the present. Baker, in chapter 5, also explores how affect is shaped and supported by objects and space around people, blending reality and fantasy to allow for the creation of new identities. He offers a psychoanalytical reinterpretation of Tyler and Cohen’s (2010) exploration of workplaces as deeply social, gendered and emotionally laden, arguing that space and objects can change and transform identities and showing how we can work with and through organizational space to create change. A geographical change in chapter 6 transports us to India, where Chennangodu and Kandathil explore the production of an urban cafe in India as a women-only workspace. As with the above accounts, the focus is on gendered affect in workplaces and spaces, and here embodiment in gendered spaces is centred; the women embody the logic of efficiency, since ‘only cooking is not enough here’, as one of the participants tells us. Over lunchtimes, the women share their food and their insecurities, and an affective solidarity therefore emerges.
Following this anchoring of the relationship between gender and affect in particular places in Part I, affect and phenomenological geography takes us back to London in Part II, where Tyler explores Soho as both hegemonically masculine and hyper heteronormative, yet also critically queer, and the location of the performances of gender multiplicities. I enjoyed reflecting on how in Soho, what it means to be a woman is signified in its commercial sex industry, almost ubiquitously through the use of the colour pink. Yet it is also a place where gender conventions can be unravelled, and is a place of queer belonging and community; therefore, the affective atmosphere is fluid. She shows how Soho ‘makes trouble’ with gender (Butler, 1990), and this chapter therefore opens the section with an analysis of a disruptive and unsettling space and place of work. This unsettling atmosphere is continued in the next chapter, where Hirst and Schwabenland explore the role of affect in making places, in particular the role in making and changing borders in the context of two Palestinian refugee camps, which of course has additional resonance in 2024. They explore kitchens and gardens in order to illustrate the ‘openings’ of borders. In a poignant and piercing exploration, they draw our attention to the way that the garden, under constant attack, is constantly remade. This unsettling affect of homes that are constantly remade is also explored in chapter 10, where Kuziner discusses the affective strategies to turn public spaces and buildings into a home on the street for homeless women in St. Petersburg. Arguing that homelessness in women is overlooked in research and in the media and that the unaccommodated woman is represented as deviant, the findings discuss the order and normalization of the home space in abandoned buildings, by women, in an effort to distance themselves from a homeless identity. This theme of marginalization is also covered in chapter 9, where the notion of affect is introduced in fear of crime research. Drawing from cultural geography, Lee explores how spaces and places reproduce culture, but culture also reproduces place. Spaces and places are therefore not inert but affective, raising questions about the need to map sensory spaces as well as physical and material spaces.
This sensory turn is emphasized in the third and final section, focusing on embodied explorations of belonging. Here, we return to Australia for three of the chapters before finishing in a faded resort on the British coast. Simpson and McGuinness take us around the landscape of Bangaroo, the financial district in Sydney that is built for (as well as by) finance, and as such is both curated and affective in that it impacts the bodies who occupy, or are excluded from, the space. Arguing that financial atmospheres both facilitate and restrict various practices, the chapter draws attention to the absences present, for example, the absences of history and of structural gender inequalities, as well as the erasures of regeneration. I particularly liked the contradiction that they highlight in relation to the ever-present glass, in that it is both transparent and functions as a boundary that erases all shadows. In chapter 12, Robertson also explores movement and erasure, dealing with fluidity, freedom, liminality and loss, by recounting the spatial movement of queer bodies in attempting to locate spaces of community and belonging. In chapter 13, Hill et al. also deal with queer displacement, illustrating how narratives of isolation, marginalization and discrimination become a self-fulfilling prophecy through the metronormative discourse that dominates LGBTIQA+ narratives of belonging. The empirical context is a small town in Australia, where the authors explore positive connections between place and belonging in order to affectively transform the perception of rural areas as damaging and hostile for queer youth. Some of the stories of hopeful moments and positive encounters are really beautiful and affirmative. In the final chapter, Simpson and Morgan return to the nostalgic atmosphere of place that we saw in chapter 1; here, in a marginal and deprived British seaside town, the focus is on the gendering of landscape and the association with affective experiences of belonging. The authors show how class, race and gender have a crucial role to play in understanding the complex connections between place, affect and belonging. Throughout, we are reminded that changes in the environment make all states of belonging continually fragile, precarious and incomplete.
The editors present a valuable summary of the chapters and themes in the Conclusion, reminding us of the bodily capacity of affect. For me, the standout chapters are those that engage all the senses and evoke nostalgic emotions in the analysis, in particular those by Rumens, Hill et al., and Simpson and Morgan, but throughout the entire book, a panoramic view emerges that allows us to recognize the fluidity, affectivity and plurality of spaces and (gendered) subjectivities.
