Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Ideas of belonging, cultural identity, and social relations based on ancestral connection, blood, and primordial kinship, have a contradictory presence in cultural theory and public culture. The search for alternatives to fixed, essentialist, and exclusive ways of imagining culture and belonging has been central to recent cultural theory and cultural geography. This has involved much attention to cultural routes, mobility, and hybridity and a critique of cultural roots, fixity, and purity in response to increasing transnational flows, the experience of displaced people, racism, and ethnic fundamentalism. Yet discourses of indigeneity and new migration patterns, as well as cultural globalisation more widely, have also prompted the growth in genealogy amongst ‘settler’ groups in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States who search for European, and often specifically Irish, roots. In this paper I explore the relationships between ideas of nation, ancestry, and diaspora. I focus on what happens when questions of nationality, ethnicity, and identity meet in the practice of ancestral research in Ireland, and begin to track the spatially differentiated cultural politics of genealogy. As the language of genealogy travels with Irish roots tourists and through electronic networks, the implications of genealogical practices and identifications can mutate so that what may be a politically regressive turn to ethnic purity and racial discourse in one context can, in another, productively unsettle older exclusive versions of belonging. For both individual and collective identities, genealogical projects can have unsettling results.

Inherent to the conflict in Northern Ireland has been the spatial segregation of men from women, whereby men go to prison and women are left to support and take care of their families. As a result of this segregation, a power relationship has been established that informs men's relationships both with women and with other men. While in prison, Irish men developed highly charged political friendships which reinforced the exclusion of women from the body politic. The eradication of women from the political discourses of the prison has been reincarnated years later in the spaces of Nationalist clubs. The private spaces of Long Kesh gave birth to a third space which is constructed from the traditional characteristics of both the private and the public spheres. This third space, unlike the impenetrable walls of the prison, represents an opening up of space whereby men no longer had to mirror the unrealistic image of the superhero. Instead this space represented a homeplace where these men could simply be themselves.

This paper deals with the rise of health and medical information on the Internet and considers the implications of this for a sociocultural geography of the body. The key purpose is to document how this information is communicated, consumed, and embodied, and also to evaluate how ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’ bodies constitute important geographies which are negotiated and contested in virtual space. There are two clear foci in the paper. First, using Foucauldian understandings of medicalisation, the notion of a ‘fourth spatialisation’ of the medical gaze is evaluated in the context of the Internet as a new geography of health promotion which enables human subjects to ‘self-diagnose’ and to ‘discipline’ their bodies. Second, this argument is complicated by the use of empirical examples gathered from MS chat rooms, places in which communities of people gather to discuss and to contest medical knowledges which surround the ‘ill’ body. The paper concludes with speculation on research pathways for a ‘new medical geography’.

In this paper I explore the social construction of masculinities among white working-class youth in contemporary Britain. The literatures of urban sociology, cultural studies, and education have been remarkably ambivalent about ‘lads’, both celebrating and criticising the anti-authority young men who have strutted across the pages of numerous books, papers, and reports. Policymakers, on the other hand, have feared rather than envied this group, representing them as a danger to respectable society. First, through an analysis of these discourses and, second, through an empirical study of two groups of young men, one in a northern English city, the other in a southern city, over a twelve-month period, I explore contemporary versions of masculinity, assessing the extent to which the attitudes and behaviour of the young men whom I interviewed reflect hegemonic notions of working-class masculinity. I suggest that this version of masculinity is itself complex and variable, combining not only protest and resistance but also respectability and domestic aspirations. These latter attributes have generally been ignored in studies of lads'.