This project was inspired by walking that has been referenced in FLINTA literature, films, journals, and memoirs over the past two centuries. For example, the film Ammonite and the Radcliffe Hall novel The Well of Loneliness. As well as walking associated with the lives of diarist Anne Lister or BBC presenter Claire Balding.
Walking is celebrated for the sense of freedom it can evoke and its positive impact on physical and mental health – often cited as a ‘for all’ activity. However, this perception, especially outside urban areas, frequently privileges imagined figures such as the country gent or heroic long-distance hiker, implying a particular type of body and a particular history of walking.
In this project, walking is used as a method to engage with these associations directly and does so from a unique standpoint—FLINTA ways of living in and knowing the world. The research draws from foundational concepts in feminist and queer theory and juxtaposes them with conventional histories of place and person. This collection of reflections, perspectives, and opinions are then geolocated in the landscape as an experiment in how lives are understood and lived.
By walking this way, this project engages with atypical intimacy, rights-of-way and rights of passage, and the rutted-out paths that direct us to one place, not another. Routes and P(l)aces explores this as something we do rather than something we are.
The project considers and experiments with:
- FLINTA content for self-designed walks – neuroqueering tourism and walking maps.
- Walking as a method and metaphor for expressing narratives grounded in the bodies, and therefore the lives, of its subjects.
- Mapping a/normative and a/typical ‘belonging’ in the landscape – exploring methods to represent that which unsettles the physical, emotional, spiritual, and romantic conflation in relationships.
- Unmarked sites on or near established footpaths – such as the location in Sussex on the Ouse River where Virginia Woolfe committed suicide. Or, the Cornwall village of Lamorna, which over the centuries has hosted many residents that today might be understood as have been living on a FLINTA spectrum.
- Ways to investigate walking as a mobile site of FLINTA connectivity via mapped visual, auditory, photographic, and in situ written records.
