Turn right away from the track, down the road of tennis courts and cottages dressed in autumn, heading towards the traffic lights; the turning I took after my first training session with CUAC, whence I spent an hour and a half transgressing a ten minute journey back to college. Head straight on at the traffic lights, over the wooden xylophonetic bridge and up around the lefthand corner; dodge the cyclists racing back from the UL and walk the steps where I discussed intersectional feminism and setting up societies with friends. Cross the lights I've run a thousand times in makeshift interval sessions clothed in the escape from work, and walk up over the bridge past Trinity and Tit Hall, on which I scattered sequins and stars as I ran over it and back to pose for pictures with friends before King's Affair. Turn right past chalked signs pointing To The River and over cobbled stones, past the room in which I discussed postmodernism over tea and red wine in the early hours of the morning and the gateway in front of which I posed in tacky Christmas jumpers, turning left again and then right. Trinity Lane and King's Parade: the heart of Cambridge. Walk past the spires of King's chapel, the wall I jumped off at 6am in a white ball gown and stupid-inch heels after a ball, where I sat eating sushi with friends and past which I loudly speculated to tour-guides trying to sell me punting trips that I was neither here nor there. Past the haunt of coffee shops and unproductive dates, the bookstores I've convinced myself another two, or three, or five, books can do no harm, and the route I walked whilst trying to convince a guy I wasn't his soul mate, or whatever. Past Catz, the college in which I first encountered the prospect of studying in Cambridge. Past the sandwich shop that sells over-priced ice creams but is the only place that stocks them in January so I buy them anyway. Keep walking. That's how I constitute my geography of Cambridge. Flâner; wander, aimlessly, solitary. The world is yours for the making, as they say.
Except maybe it's not.
"Don't stay out late by yourself"
"Travel in groups, and make sure you get a taxi home if it's late"
"Dress sensibly and make sure you don't drink too much"
Do this, do that. It's not your public space, it's Theirs. I'm constantly followed by the shadow of myself, the embodiment of who I am intruding into the space I occupy.
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or while she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another [...] One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. - John Berger
Over the past two weeks of term, I've received a number of emails from my college and student body representatives warning of females who have been near-assaulted or followed by drunk men late at night. These are very normative emails: they inform me of the threat to my public space, and implicitly reconstitute it by telling me to adapt my behaviour in a particular way. They Other me. I don't feel as safe as I did walking the streets of Cambridge at night - I don't see the memory of past discussions, feel the warmth of old jokes or explore the space in new ways. I don't even walk them. I cycle quickly, burning lactic in my legs, down the streets where strangers lurk, round the corners where threats lie, over the hills that slow my retreat away from the unknown danger. These emails and the psychogeographies they embody pre-empt space as male and in so doing, in reminding me of my gendered vulnerability, force me to continually 'see' myself in my landscape. My clothing, my behaviour, my routes - all become embodied and situated, perceived from an imagined exterior of spatial threat. Nothing has happened to me to change my geography of Cambridge. And yet, in small, largely subconscious ways, how I understand my nighttime geography is entirely altered.
This is the power held by experience, real and imagined, personal and recounted, over space. Places are sites of constant production and reproduction, but we can't romanticise them as strictly Ours, or essentialise them as equally Everyone's, because not everyone in a given place is equally committed or welcomed to its making. Our geographies all intertwine and overlap, seep into and stain, alter and underline each other. It's something I'm resisting, and something I'm exploring.
It's been a week or so since the last email, and the feeling of threat perceived in my nighttime geographies is abating. But it shocked me how radically something so mundane and detached as an email could impinge itself upon something so everyday and real as how I walk in my city.
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