Emily Falconer

Queer youth, Facebook and faith: Facebook methodologies and online identities

‘Making space for queer-identifying religious youth’ (2011–2013) is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project, which seeks to shed light on youth cultures, queer community and religiosity. While non-heterosexuality is often associated with secularism, and some sources cast religion as automatically negative or harmful to the realisation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity (or ‘coming out’), we explore how queer Christian youth negotiate sexual–religious identities. There is a dearth of studies on queer religious youth, yet an emerging and continuing interest in the role of digital technologies for the identities of young people. Based on interviews with 38 LGBT, ‘religious’ young people, this article examines Facebook, as well as wider social networking sites and the online environment and communities. Engaging with the key concept of ‘online embodiment’, this article takes a closer analysis of embodiment, emotion and temporality to approach the role of Facebook in the lives of queer religious youth. Furthermore, it explores the methodological dilemmas evoked by the presence of Facebook in qualitative research with specific groups of young people.

Transformations of the backpacking food tourist: Emotions and conflicts

This article focuses on sensations relating to food, consumption and digestion, and will specifically seek to address the conflicting emotions surrounding food, tastes and eating practices while embarking on a backpacking journey. There has been a growing interest in food tourism within the social sciences, exploring the significance of food and drink to the tourist experience. However, there is little focus on the heightened and often problematic emotions associated with food and eating for backpackers who are travelling independently for an extended period of time. Drawing on fieldwork data that explored the emotional and embodied experiences of women travellers, I will describe some of the strong emotions determined by the everyday practice of consumption while moving through different travelling spaces. Moreover, this article will discuss the temporal context of the production of emotions around food. Mealtimes often provide structure and rhythm to backpacker’s everyday lives ‘on the road’, but their emotional responses to food also follow a process of change over an extended period of time. I will argue that the realm of the backpacking journey intensifies both positive and negative emotions relating to food and consumption, and discuss how this fits into wider theories of embodiment and temporality in backpacking tourism.

‘Seedy bars and grotty pints’: close encounters in queer leisure spaces

This paper is based on the British Academy project ‘Not all bright lights and big city?’ (2008–2010), which explores the diverse and divided lives of lesbians and gay men in the north-east of England. Here, we focus on the ‘close encounters’ between material culture and place, within queer leisure spaces (Binnie, 2014; Binnie & Skeggs, 2004; Brown, 2013; Lim, 2007, 2010; Lim & Fanghanel, 2013; Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2014). We build on existing geographical intersections of class, gender and sexuality (Browne & Bakshi, 2014; Savci, 2013; Taylor, 2007a, 2007b; Tyler, 2013) and incorporate embodied and affectual analysis of ‘things’ (food, drink, décor) as well as sensual and affective articulations of ‘atmosphere’ (light, dark, dirty, ‘seedy’) (Anderson, 2012; Bennett, 2013; Brown, 2008). Considering the potential ‘zero sum’ game of territoriality and identity (Brown, 2013) – as mapped onto scene space – we highlight material cultures and sensual atmospheres that both seduce and disgust bodies, affectively pulling people into and out of place, mattering the ‘changing structurations’ of sexualities and space.

Negotiating queer and religious identities in higher education: queering ‘progression’ in the ‘university experience’

Abstract This article addresses the negotiation of ‘queer religious’ student identities in UK higher education. The ‘university experience’ has generally been characterised as a period of intense transformation and self-exploration, with complex and overlapping personal and social influences significantly shaping educational spaces, subjects and subjectivities. Engaging with ideas about progressive tolerance and becoming, often contrasted against ‘backwards’ religious homophobia as a sentiment/space/subject ‘outside’ education, this article follows the experiences and expectations of queer Christian students. In asking whether notions of ‘queering higher education’ (Rumens 2014) ‘fit’ with queer-identifying religious youth, the article explores how educational experiences are narrated and made sense of as ‘progressive’. Educational transitions allow (some) sexual-religious subjects to negotiate identities more freely, albeit with ongoing constraints. Yet perceptions of what, where and who is deemed ‘progressive’ and ‘backwards’ with regard to sexuality and religion need to be met with caution, where the ‘university experience’ can shape and shake sexual-religious identity.

Dans le Noir? Eating in the dark: sensation and conviviality in a lightless place

Drawing on ethnographic interviews with customers, this paper looks at the experience of dining at Dans le Noir?, a restaurant in London where eating is carried out in complete darkness. As an exemplary gastro-tourist site within the expanding leisure economy at which sensory alterity is sought, we argue that the transformation of the usual unreflexive habits of sensing while dining offer opportunities to encounter difference and reflect upon our culturally located ways of sensing the world. In focusing upon the altered experience of apprehending space, eating and socialising in the absence of light, we contend that this dining experience offers broader suggestions about how we might reconsider the qualities and potentialities of darkness, a condition which has been historically feared and reviled in the west.

'Who' Can Play 'This' Game? The Lived Experiences of Doctoral Candidates and Early Career Women in the Neoliberal University.

Abstract Work intensification is a characteristic of the current neoliberal trend in academia. Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers (PhD candidates and ECRs) in geography are no strangers to this development but are rarely the focus of publications or dialogue on the (gendered) outcomes of the academy’s neoliberal agenda. Encouraged by the recent emotional turn in the social sciences and humanities, this article seeks to unveil some of the everyday particulars of life in academia for PhD candidates and ECRs under the tide of financial cuts and increased competition for funding. We explore the question: “Who can – and indeed wants to – play this game?” As three early and one mid-career academic women in four different institutions in the Global North, we make use of reflexivity, autobiographical writing, and reflection, to analyze increasingly stressful and demanding working conditions. Through the depiction of our lived experiences, we contend that the push for ever increasing outputs attends most of our time and represents a distinctly different form of scholarship than has been traditionally considered as the pathway into academia, not seldom jeopardizing well-being of young academics, one that needs to be interrogated by geographers.

‘Learning to be Zen’: women travellers and the imperative to happy

Abstract This paper follows the emotional management of lone, independent women travellers as they move through tourist spaces, based on my doctoral research Embodiment and Emotion in the experiences of independent women tourists (2009–2012). Specifically, this paper will focus on ‘gendering happiness’ by arguing that women travellers are significantly compelled to feel and display characteristics of happiness, humour and ‘learning to be Zen’ in order to be successful travellers. The imperative to become, and remain, happy and humourous in the face of embodied, emotional and gendered constraints is a key feature of women’s reflections of their travelling experiences, mirroring the recent emergence of literature into happiness and positive thinking within feminist theory. Negotiating ‘bad’ emotions provides a powerful insight into the perceptions of women travellers; to remain happy can mask problematic power relations and other forms of resistance. This is not to say that emotional negotiation is not partly a form of effective resistance, rather, I wish to make room for the freedom to be unhappy and angry in travelling space without feeling failure for not achieving a successful travelling identity.