Intimate distances : geographies of gender and emotion in Shetland

• Main Author: Thien, Deborah
• Published: University of Edinburgh 2005
• Subjects: 306
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.662835

This thesis examines the emotional well-being of women in the Shetland Isles, Scotland. The research seeks to articulate the gendered spatialities of emotion by intertwining post-structural feminist theories of gender; psychoanalytic insights into issues of subjectivity, identity, and relationality; and geographical understandings of social places and spaces to appraise the emotional narratives of a selection of Shetland women. These narratives were gathered during two fieldwork periods in Shetland and are augmented by ethnographic fieldnotes. While some research has explored how women experience rural spaces, and more recently, geographies of mental health have been a subject for study, the particular dimensions of women’s emotional health experiences in isolated geographies has yet to be fully understood or documented. This thesis explores this gap, offering an enhanced understanding of the spatial and gendered practices of emotional wellbeing in a non-urban context. Chapter One introduces the rationale for focusing on how women who live remotely define, develop and use strategies for maintaining emotional wellbeing. Chapter Two reviews_, relevant bodies of literature on emotion, gender and place. Chapter Three details the research design of the thesis and reflects on dilemmas of feminist fieldwork such as issues of power and naming. Chapter Four examines the intersection of place, gender, and emotion in Shetland. The placing and gendering of the particular Shetland context is discussed via interview accounts and participant observation at an annual festival. Chapter Five identifies and deconstructs spatial discourses of intimacy and demonstrates how such discourses are bound up in senses of emotional wellbeing. Chapter Six examines the emotional subject as it is evoked through processes of narration: techniques of self-narration, socially organized and gendered strategies for narrating the subject, and therapeutic tactics. In these ways, subjectivities are placed through different kinds of stories and through expressions of emotion. The thesis concludes by suggesting that this detailed examination of women’s emotional well-being in Shetland productively opens up the spatialities of emotion. This, in turn, extends understandings of the interplay between gender relations, gender identities, and the spatial patterning of non-urban life in western societies.