Negotiation and Navigation: Emotional Maps

Abstract

This chapter focuses on respondents’ sense of place and their relations to the often undervalued territories that they inhabit, suggesting that space is constitutive of identity in terms of where it places people, both materially and emotionally (Reay and Lucey, 2000; Sibley, 1995; Thrift, 1997). ‘Movements’ through space are fractured by homophobia, as Valentine (1995) points out, but they are also mediated by classed dis/comforts. By re-claiming working-class territories as positive sites of self-identification the women I interviewed challenge the authoritative devaluations of their communities; their struggles for recognition and esteem both within and outwith their localities mirrors, yet differs from, other analysis on the importance of space and place in the reproduction of class (Charlesworth, 2000; Howarth, 2002; Nayak, 2003b). For interviewees, it was the spatialised intersection between class and sexuality which made their occupations in and exclusions from space both painful and pleasurable.