'Sexercise': Working out heterosexuality in Jane Fonda’s fitness books

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Leisure Studies, 30(2), 237 - 255, 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02614367.2010.523837.This paper explores the connection between the promotion of heterosexual norms in women’s fitness books written by or in the name of Jane Fonda during the 1980s and the commodification of women’s fitness space in both the public and private spheres. The paper is set in the absence of overt discussions of normative heterosexuality in leisure studies and draws on critical heterosexual scholarship as well as the growing body of work theorising geographies of corporeality and heterosexuality. Using the principles of media discourse analysis, the paper identifies three overlapping characteristics of heterosexuality represented in Jane Fonda’s fitness books, and embodied through the exercise regimes: respectable heterosexual desire, monogamous procreation and domesticity. The paper concludes that the promotion and prescription of exercise for women in the Jane Fonda workout books centred on the reproduction and embodiment of heterosexual corporeality. Set within an emerging commercial landscape of women’s fitness in the 1980s, such exercise practices were significant in the legitimation and institutionalisation of heteronormativity

Making Space for Failure in Geographic Research

The idea that field research is an inherently “messy” process has become widely accepted by geographers in recent years. There has thus far been little acknowledgment, however, of the role that failure plays in doing human geography. In this article we push back against this, arguing that failure should be recognized as a central component of what it means to do qualitative geographical field research. This article seeks to use failure proactively and provocatively as a powerful resource to improve research practice and outcomes, reconsidering and giving voice to it as everyday, productive, and necessary to our continual development as researchers and academics. This article argues that there is much value to be found in failure if it is critically examined and shared, and—crucially—if there is a supportive space in which to exchange our experiences of failing in the field

On comfort and the culture of cultural geography

In this commentary, the author revisits Cosgrove and Jackson's (Area, 19, 95–101) article in two parts: first, outlining the personal significance of Cosgrove and Jackson's agenda by revisiting her roots in, and routes through, cultural geography over the last two decades; and second, re-engaging with the paper's key themes and arguments in a contemporary context, considering its on-going influence, with reference to work on methodological innovation, collaborations with other practitioners and transdisciplinarity. The author concludes by calling for a continued practice of revisiting within cultural geography to help ourselves and our students understand where cultural geographies come from and may be going next

Understanding ethnography through a life course framework:a research journey into alternative spiritual spaces

Recently scholars have emphasised the importance of looking at the researcher's experience and how positionality, emotions and embodiment shape the ethnographic fieldwork process. Specifically, feminist contributions have shown how the professional and the personal can be interlinked when conducting ethnographic research and have reconsidered the role of the researcher in the production of knowledge. However, such accounts often lack analytical engagements and/or reveal little about the researcher's experience beyond the fieldwork. By adopting a life course framework and its conceptual categories of social pathways, turning points, and transitions & trajectories, this paper offers an analytical device to read through the ethnographer's own experience. The paper explores a research journey undertaken in the intentional spiritual communities of Damanhur (Italy) and Terra Mirim (Brazil) by the author, which aimed to study the enactment of alternative spaces. By integrating a life course framework, this paper firstly argues the need to consider how social pathways shape the life course positioning and the research trajectory. Secondly, it shows how turning points can affect both the research direction but also the researcher's life course. Thirdly, the paper argues that the fieldwork is only one of the transitional phases of ethnographic research and encourages the researcher to reflect on its long‐term effects. It concludes by discussing how such experience can impact on the life course of the researcher as well as on the research participants

On absence and abundance: biography as method in archival research

Geographical scholarship has rightly problematised the act of archival research, showing that practices of archiving are not only concerned with how a society collectively remembers, but also forgets. As such the dominant motif for discussing historical methods in geography has been through the lens of absence: the archive is a space of ‘traces’, ‘fragments’ and ‘ghosts’. In this paper I suggest that the focus on incompleteness and partiality, whilst true, may also belie what many geographers working in archives find their greatest difficulty: an overwhelming volume of source materials. I reflect on my own research experiences in the pacifist archive to suggest that the growing scale and scope of many collections, along with the taxing research demands of transnational perspectives, pose immediate practical challenges for geographers characterised as much by abundance as by absence. In the second half of the paper, drawing on recent scholarship in history and geography, I argue that the method of biography offers one possible strategy for navigating archival abundance, allowing geographers to tell stories which are wider, deeper and more revealingly complex within the existing time and financial constraints of humanities research