What More Do Bodies Know? Moving with the Gendered Affects of Place

Abstract

This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. We started with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This led us to focus on the body, corporeality and movement in improvisational dance workshops. By slowing down and speeding up video footage from the workshops, we notice movement patterns and speculate about how traces of gender body-movement practices developed within mining communities over time become actualised in girls’ habitual movement repertoires. Inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Erin Manning, a series of cameos are presented: room dancing; the hold; the wiggle; the leap and the dance of the not-yet. We speculate about relations between the actual movements we could see, the in-act infused with the history of place, and the virtual potential of movement.

What else can a crush become: working with arts-methods to address sexual harassment in pre-teen romantic relationship cultures

“…However, from a feminist new materialist perspective, the more important question is how the relationships, and socio-political contexts in which they are lived, fix or expand the capacities of bodies involved in them (e.g. Ivinson and Renold 2021).…”

“…Furthermore, we propose that the minor gestural movements in the processes of making art and crafts allowed for changes in the girls' somatic archives (Paasonen 2013), understood as temporally accumulating, corporeal-affective capacities, which enabled them to assert both desire and damage more effectively in relation to boys. Overall, we draw on feminist new materialist research and activism concerning young people's sexual cultures Pihkala, Huuki, and Sunnari 2019;Ivinson and Renold 2021;Renold 2018;Renold and Ringrose 2019;Strom et al 2019). In this framework, bodies are understood as continuously becoming and transforming through their affective relations with other human and non-human entities, material objects, spaces, histories, and discourses (e.g.…”

Emplaced activism: what-if environmental education attuned to young people’s entanglements with post-industrial landscapes?

“…Women developed routines to make mundane work bearable and in so doing formed collective habits of sociality, such as, sweeping front steps, washing clothes and baking on specific days of the week (Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2012). We have referred to these patterns, rhythms and routines of community life as a community beat (Ivinson & Renold, 2021).…”

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“…Like Iris Marion Young (2005), we noticed that some girls hesitate on the edge of movement. We became aware of specific kinds of gestures such as repetitive stroking of hair and as they folded their arms protectively around their bellies (Ivinson & Renold, 2020, 2021. We imagine the values attributed to the male labouring body as a virtual immanence, which infiltrates girls' corporeal movements as they are forming.…”