Feminist Psychogeography and Narrative Voice

I have a 'usual walk' that I take across these fields next to the canal. A couple of days ago, for the second or third time in a year, I encountered a young man on the other side of the tow path. He rides a bike. From a distance, he might be nineteen, or twenty. Either way, young. As I walk across these fields, I notice he stops, on the other side of the towpath, and seems to be checking to see if there are other people around. When he's sure there isn't anyone, he calls across to me. He asks if I have the time. The first time he did this, was last June. I was walking the dog in the early evening. It was a beautiful evening, still bright and warm. When he asked if I had the time, I told him what it was - maybe 7.30pm, something like that. Instead of responding and pedalling on, he kept calling, and pedalled up and down, calling things out to me. I'm not easily freaked out, but I did take another route home, through a more urban, more populated area, rather than follow the canal back on my usual route. I felt angry at myself for doing that, at the time. So, a couple of days ago, this time in the morning, he did it again: the usual routine, stopping and checking, then calling across at me. This time I didn't respond, and I could hear him continuing to call things at me. This time, I didn't take a different route home, and I think that, if it hadn't been for the fact that there were other dog walkers on his side of the tow path, I might have had the chance to confront him. Which I would have.

This has made me think about women walkers, about the flaneuse, so I've been reading some 'feminist psychogeography'. Will Self has described the community of male walkers, or flaneurs, as a 'fraternity [of] middle aged men in Gore- Tex...prostates swell[ing] as we crunch over broken glass, behind the defunct brewery on the outskirts of town.' (in Elkin 2016: 19). As a consequence, what is considered the gender imbalance in psychogeography, the city, in psychogeographical writing frequently 'appears as something feminine, passively there for the taking, a wilderness-like space of adventure to be conquered or possessed.” (Bassett 2004: 403). Laura Oldfield Ford has said: 'a lot of what is called psychogeography now is just middle-class men acting like colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and guarding their plot... I think my understanding and negotiation of the city is very different from theirs.' (in Richardson 2015: 15). Helen Scalway (2008), in her essay The Contemporary Flâneuse, explores the difference between masculine and feminine 'drifting'. According to Scalway, women walkers are either consumers (the very innovation that opened public space to solitary women was, after all, the department store) or are prey, and either way, are potential victims of male violence. The psychogeographic experience of walking, for a woman, is to experience an alienation that only their gender can evoke: 'Banks, financial institutions, museums, monuments. These embody dreams - overwhelmingly in the masculine - uttering in brick, stone and glass, the ideas, desires, meanings of successive generations of clients who could command or negotiate built expressions of their power and desire.' (168).

Now, I've also been thinking about the way I'm editing God's Country, and the way the narrative voice is evolving. This is, after all, Alison's narrative. She 'will say' what she's been told by Guy. She is his voice and she is complicit in his manipulation of her. Additionally, According to Scalway (and this is where it, I think, relates to my creative practice and Alison's narrative voice) the feminine gaze is different to the masculine because she emphasises the feminine visual caress rather than the controlling masculine gaze. The Situationists, it could be argued, were anti-feminist. For example, in their Memoires, Jorn and Debord compare the city to a woman’s body, whose chopped up and reconfigured parts they consider 'moving accidents', as if the female body can be reshaped into a more agreeable figure at will, by them. Debord was also also captivated by the mythology around Jack the Ripper, whom he called 'psychogeographical in love', apparently likening the flaneur's relationship to the city with a serial killer/rapist's stalking his victims. (Sadler 1998, 80). For Scalway, though, drifting, for a woman, is not only characterised by 'gendered alienation' and risk, but also by particular privileges, as a woman is less likely to be perceived as a potential threat, and might, therefore, be freer to take photographs or encroach on private spaces, or, perhaps, (for women of a 'certain age') to be 'invisible'.

There is much written on the subject of women walkers and feminist psychogeography, and perhaps the historical presumption that male = privilege/freedom and female = containment/constraint are just that, presumptions. Thinking about God's Country, I am aiming, specifically to make it look like Alison is the mouthpiece for Guy, that it is, if you like, his footprints she is treading. I like the idea that Alison WILL tell us, (I like the certainty of that, and the doubt it exudes), and I like the idea that, because she is a woman, and because of our ingrained cultural perceptions, we might perceive her viewpoint as unsafe, because, being a woman, surely her viewpoint must be questioned, perhaps she is a victim. I like the fact that it is Guy's voice that is tempered by hers, because there is a particular tension that exists between ideas of 'predatory masculinity' and' victimized femininity' that psychogeography might, if it isn't careful, continue to encourage. Van ratigan (2017) considers this a key element of 'our cultural conceptions of the great outdoors [that] could be one of the projects that feminist psychogeography sets for itself.' (51)

I'd like to have that conversation with the lad on the bike.

Bassett, Keith. “Walking as an Aesthetic Practice and a Critical Tool: Some Psychogeographic

Experiments”. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, vol 28 (3), 2004. pp. 397 – 410

Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse. New York: Vintage, 2017.

Richardson, Tina. Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Scalway, Helen. “The Contemporary Flâneuse: Exploring Strategies for the Drifter in a Feminine Mode.” In Aruna d’Souza & Tom McDonough, eds. The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Manchester UP, 2008. pp. 164-171

Van ratigan, Witold Jerzy. 'Loitering with Intent: The Histories and Futures of "Psychogeography"' Thesis submitted for a Degree of Master of Arts, 2017