Geography Compass 4/9 (2010): 1273–1283, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2010.00373.

Visceral Geographies: Mattering, Relating, and Defying

Jessica Hayes-Conroy1* and Allison Hayes-Conroy2
1
Women’s Studies and Environmental Studies, Wheaton College
2
Growth and Structure of Cities Program, Bryn Mawr College

Abstract
This study explores the task of doing ‘visceral geographies,’ enrolling many areas of body-centered
scholarship in the task of better understanding the visceral realm including geographies of affect
and emotion, non-representational theory, sensuous and haptic geographies, health and disability
studies, and scholarship on performance and movement. The authors desire to open lines of con-
nection and communication between and beyond the current bounds of this scholarship. In doing
so, the authors attempt to clarify the goals of visceral geography, particularly in terms of political
action and social change. Three goals stand out: first, visceral geographies advance understandings
of the agency of physical matter, both within and between bodies. Second, visceral geographies
move beyond static notions of the individual body and toward more contextualized and interac-
tive versions of the self and other. And third, visceral geographies encourage a skepticism of
boundaries by insisting on the imagining and practicing of our (political) lives in, through, and
beyond dualistic tensions.

Introduction
What does it mean to ‘go with your gut?’ ‘Feel it in your bones?’ or react to something
‘viscerally?’ In common parlance, the visceral is typically associated with elemental emo-
tions, natural instincts, and non-intellectual bodily judgments. It is a word that connotes a
sort of purity and simplicity, in so far as visceral reactions are imagined to derive from
natural or pre-social forces (deep) within the body. Yet, several decades if not more of
scholarly research on the body would suggest that the visceral is anything but uncompli-
cated, and that the body is far from pre-social (Butler 1993; Nash 2000). Indeed, within
and beyond the discipline of geography, research on the body – and particularly the phys-
ical, material body – has yielded a diverse, detailed, and (often) linguistically dense set of lit-
eratures (only some of which use the term ‘visceral’ itself).
We have elsewhere detailed the concept of ‘visceral’ as well as grappled with its
presence in empirical investigation (Hayes-Conroy 2009; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-
Conroy 2008). We see such particular uses of ‘visceral’ as contributing to a much
broader, widening discussion about the centrality of the active (and sensing) material
body to both the academic projects of geographers and the progressive politics that
many of us care about. Our intent in this article is not to try to run through a com-
prehensive description of all recent academic work on the material body, nor is it to
provide a roadmap to the ‘sites of interest’ within this scholarship. The past 5 years
alone have produced numerous review articles in geography with relevance to bodily
materiality (Crang 2005; Lorimer 2005; McCormack 2008; Paterson 2009; Whatmore
2006). All of these reviews are important to what we discuss here, yet our goal is
more inventive than evaluative, and more invitational than orientative. That is to say,

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rather than delineating yet another body-centered subfield, we desire to open lines of
connection and communication between and beyond the current bounds of such schol-
arship.
In specifying the concept of ‘visceral geographies,’ we want to be both generous and
specific in our invitation ⁄ invention. We want to develop, encourage, and move forward
with doing ‘visceral geographies’ in a way that enrolls many different areas of body-cen-
tered scholarship in the task of better understanding the visceral (e.g. geographies of
affect and emotion, non-representational theory (NRT), sensuous and haptic geogra-
phies, cultural studies, post-humanism, scholarship on performance and movement,
health and disability studies, nature–society geography, and so on). But, we also want to
specify and clarify the goals of visceral geographies, particularly in terms of political
action and social change. In our view, the politics of the visceral do not just arise from
the ways that we, as academics, emphasize internal visceral sensations and reinscribe
their legitimacy in our social world, but also from our recognition that the dynamics of
social institutions and ⁄ or structures are always already visceral, and especially from the
actions that result from this recognition – changes in policy, method, and pedagogy. Ulti-
mately, our goal in inviting and specifying ‘visceral geographies’ is to move beyond
delineations of how best to conceive of, write about, or do body-centered scholarship,
and toward the creation of effective political strategies for affecting progressive social
change.
Longhurst et al. (2009) recently described the visceral as ‘the sensations, moods, and
ways of being that emerge from our sensory engagement with the material and discursive
environments in which we live’ (p. 334). We find this definition useful because it cap-
tures at once the physical capacities, relational processes, and fuzzy boundaries of the
human body. Following from this definition, we propose that visceral geography can be
thought of as a conceptually broad, dynamic, and sometimes inconsistent array of geo-
graphic scholarship on the body that collectively promotes and expands at least three ana-
lytical projects. First, visceral geography advances a greater understanding of the agency
of physical matter, both within and between bodies. Second, visceral geography moves
beyond static notions of the individual (body) and toward more contextualized and inter-
active versions of the self and other, combining both structural (political-economic) and
post-structural (fluid) concerns. Third, visceral geography encourages skepticism of
boundaries – e.g. mind ⁄ body, representation ⁄ non-representation – not through a com-
plete dismissal of such dualisms but through insistence on the imagining and practicing of
our (political) lives in, through, and beyond such tensions.
With such analytical projects in mind, we have organized this study into three sections:
Mattering, Relating, and Defying (boundaries). In each of these sections, we draw together
various (and often divergent) texts within geographic, body-centered scholarship to
explore recent examples of academic work that contribute to these projects. Many of our
examples do not fit solely and squarely into one of the above three categories, and nei-
ther do some of the works advance all three of these projects at once. Nevertheless, in
our view, taken jointly this body of literature works to develop and extend geographic
work on ⁄ with ⁄ through ‘the visceral.’ Moreover, the work also helps us to begin to spec-
ify the visceral as political.

Mattering
‘‘We [must] take notice of and begin to think through the bodies that we are now, [and] find
ways to live ourselves as developmental organisms.’’ (McWhorter 1999, 175)

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The first set of diverse literatures that we wish to draw together in advancing this visceral
project are all attuned to the importance of the physical body – in short, the mattering of
matter. This literature tells us that matter has agency, that the physical body is an actor in
the daily unfolding of political and social events. Bodily matter here goes by many names:
physical, biological, affective, molecular, sensuous, haptic, non-representational. But the
overall effect of these discussions is to encourage and extend scholarly recognition of the
role that the physical body plays in our social world.
Rodaway’s (1994) Sensuous Geographies is often cited as an initial attempt to connect
geography to physical bodily feeling and haptic (tactile) knowledge, but it was also cri-
tiqued for its abstract and formulaic approach to the body (Smith 1995). Since then
numerous geographers have taken an interest in the sensing, feeling body, particularly in
attempting to demonstrate the role of the physical body in the production of space(s).
Obrador-Pons (2007), for example, described how a beach is materially made through
bodily experiences of nudity. Following Massumi, he argues that, ‘the omission of sensa-
tion and movement in contemporary cultural theory has…undermined notions of body
and change,’ trapping the body in ‘a grip of pre-coded cultural meanings.’ (p. 124)
Instead, such scholars want to draw attention to how the body in space is materially pro-
ductive, particularly through sensuous experience. For Obrador-Pons, this means that
how it feels to be nude is directly constitutive of the space of the beach as it is experi-
enced ⁄ lived.
Other scholars have articulated similar body-centered projects. McCormack, for exam-
ple, has long been interested in the role of the physical, moving body in space (2003). In
a recent work, McCormack (2007) explains that he wants to diagram the ‘molecular
affects’ of the material body and their influence on both scientific practice and daily life
experience. Molecular here is shorthand for a variety of bodily mechanisms – e.g. chemi-
cal processes, neural pathways – that, through a body’s affective response, influence the
way we think, feel, and act. McCormack’s project is therefore to consider how such
mechanisms contribute to the spaces of human geography. Likewise, Hetherington (2003)
illustrates how people perform place through touch, explaining: ‘through haptic encounters
a place and our place within in get made and become familiar’ (p. 1942). In such works,
there is an emphasis on doing that is particularly important. Scholars of the sensuous, the
haptic, or the molecular argue that something is missing from geographic scholarship
when we fail to consider the profound influence that bodily sensation and experience
have on the unfolding of social and political life. Ignored and neglected, they argue, are
the embodied and sensory aspects of mobility that shape people’s transportation decisions
(Spinney 2009), or the moving materiality of urban life that renders the city processual
(Latham and McCormack 2004), or the physical capacities of fat that allow a fat body to
‘do’ in excess of the meanings placed upon it (Colls 2007).
Much of the above work is related to scholarship on ‘affect’ and ‘NRT,’ which have
increasingly appealed to scholars interested in the physical and sensuous. This is because
affect ⁄ NRT are theoretical perspectives that give primacy to the non-cognitive ways in
which people move about their daily lives, arguing that the focus on representation in
the post-modern era has led to a great lacuna in our understanding of the role of the
physical body in social space. Accordingly, affect and NRT scholars want to stress a dif-
ferent kind of intelligence about the world that is located in and between physical bodies.
Scholars contributing to this body of work include Thrift (2004, 2005), McCormack
(2003), and Anderson (2005, 2006), among many, while a feminist response (discussed in
section three) has emerged from Thien (2005), Nash (2000), Bondi (2005), and others
(see also Tolia-Kelly 2006).

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Beyond scholarship on affect and NRT, however, many others have also come to
emphasize the role of the material body in producing our social world. For example, for
over a decade now health and disability scholars have been articulating a comparable
body-centered approach. For these scholars, to ignore the physical body in favor of a
‘purely’ discursive, constructionist explanation of disease is to render the physical body
passive in the unfolding of daily life. Hall (2000) has stressed the role of the physical body
in the experience of disability, while Moss and Dyck (1999) draw upon Dorn and Laws
(1994) to highlight the importance of considering ‘embodied’ experiences of illness. Yet
for these scholars, a focus on physical bodily matter does not imply that cognitive or dis-
cursive activities are absent from such physical processes – a point to which we will
return later. Instead, they urge us to consider ‘the connections between the articulation
of identity and how discourses ‘‘materialize’’ and are invoked in different ways in differ-
ent spaces’ (Moss and Dyck 1999, 377).
Scholars of research methods, particularly qualitative and participatory, have also contrib-
uted to a focus on the physical, sensing body. These scholars suggest that in order to more
fully understand the body, we must approach methods with a sense of dynamic, creative
practice (Bennett 2004; Crang 2002; Latham 2003; Thrift 2000). In this light, Longhurst,
Johnston, and Ho have been particularly innovative in the opening up of their research
methods to the visceral. Indeed, their project is not only to conduct research on bodies, but
also with bodies. In Longhurst et al. (2008), they draw attention to the body as a physical
tool through which researchers access their subjects, suggesting, for example, that attending
to feelings of disgust or revulsion during research may provide valuable information.
How and why is all of this political? Longhurst et al. (2009) suggest that paying atten-
tion to bodily materiality is ultimately important for political reasons; that is, for reasons
of power and change. The authors argue, along with Probyn (2000) and others (including
ourselves – Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008; Hayes-Conroy 2009), that attention
to the visceral is crucial for understanding power and overcoming oppression. But exactly
how can sensuous geographies, geographies of affect, and other research on and with the
body translate into political action or social change? Part of the answer is that paying
attention to the physical body’s role in social life is not only a way of specifying how
oppressive regimes may become ‘internalized’ or ‘embodied,’ but also a way to recognize
opportunities for what feminist philosopher Ladelle McWhorter (1999) calls ‘counter-
attacks,’ where the body’s physical capacities are consciously re-mobilized to affect pro-
gressive change (also see Gibson-Graham 2003). McWhorter (1999) offers several intrigu-
ing examples of what this could mean in her own work, from learning how to line
dance in reclamation ⁄ disruption of whiteness to planting and eating from a garden in
resistance of corporate foodways.
Affect scholars like Thrift (2004) have articulated a similar position, arguing that the
recognition of the material body is not only important analytically but ultimately for rea-
sons of understanding and intervening in (bio)power and control. Thus, scholars have
come to discuss how affect can be manipulated through specific techniques – for exam-
ple, in relation to film and popular geopolitical articulations (Carter and McCormack
2006), or through listening to music (Anderson 2005). For these reasons, McCormack
ends up arguing that,

‘‘The corporeal economies of human life…are being rendered available as material to be

worked upon, intervened in, and manipulated in….In turn,…affective economies can be and
are mobilized in wider political and discursive economies of self-hood and subjectivity.’’
(McCormack 2007, 373)

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There is a warning in this statement, but as in McWhorter above, there is also a sense of
potentiality. By attending to the work of the visceral in the processes of daily life, such
authors contend that we can become better able to understand and mediate in the
embodiment and performance of social norms, categories and hierarchies.
In our own research on alternative food, we have found that differences in visceral
experiences of food can have a profound influence on the development of food actions
and activisms (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008). Diverse bodily experiences of
alternative food, articulated as ‘belonging,’ ‘pride,’ or alternatively ‘shame,’ or ‘anger,’ and
so on, can have a marked influence on who is moved to partake in alternative food prac-
tices and who is turned off or ‘chilled’ to them, often along lines of race and class (as in
Guthman 2008). Encouraging more diverse participation in alternative food, therefore,
would require activists to begin to evaluate and redress the socio-spatial circumstances
that tend to trigger negative visceral responses among certain social groups. We might
ask, what conditions are needed to promote feelings of belonging among a more diverse
group?
Ultimately, the above example is relevant not only to encouraging activism(s), but also
to public policy and pedagogical development, including efforts to influence eating habits;
our work points to the need to recognize how visceral experiences will shape the relative
efficacy of, for instance, nutrition intervention or taste education projects, among other
government and non-governmental initiatives. As Longhurst et al. (2009) similarly argue
with respect to migrants’ experiences of adjustment in New Zealand,
concentrating on the visceral – people’s gut feelings, in this instance about eating, home,
belonging, longing, food, hunger, identity and place – is one approach that has the potential to
‘feed into’ social policy and practice to create stronger programmes that might help improve
migrants’ experiences of integrating into a new home. (342)
In this sense, attending to diverse visceral experiences, becomes a way to create programs
and policies that are more effective at reaching – or ‘moving’ – diverse populations and
disenfranchised groups. Of course, such intervention is a multi-scalar task that is neither
universal nor fixed, and that cannot be solved by one person or organization. Yet, by
paying attention to how matter is mobilized in these ways – how different bodies are
moved to do or act – we can begin to recognize and utilize the body as an instrument of
progressive political projects.

Relating
‘‘We are…‘articulated’ subjects, the products of the integration of past practices and structures;
we are also always ‘articulating’ subjects: through out enactment of practices we reforge new
meanings, new identities for ourselves.’’ (Probyn 2000, 17)
Alongside the diverse list of vocabulary that is used to describe physical, bodily sensations
and judgments is another equally diverse and descriptive list used to locate those sensations
and judgments in socio-spatial terms: networked, rhizomatic, fluid, processual, post-
human, hybrid, relational, situated. Scholars who use these terms in reference to the body
do so to suggest that there is an interactive and interconnected quality to human exis-
tence, where the body is neither static nor individual (Probyn 2000; Saldanha 2005;
Whatmore 2006). In this second section, we want to draw together another diverse set of
literatures, not exclusive of the last, focusing on work that recognizes the human body as
relational. We stress the importance of scholarship that works to eschew the individualism

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of biological fixity and bodily isolation in favor of a more contextual and situated
approach to the visceral. We especially emphasize work that illustrates the importance of
the body’s (particular) socio-spatial location(s). There is a good deal of scholarship that
can help us in this task; far more, actually, than what we discuss here. We choose to focus
on a few scholars whose work has been directive for us in thinking through the visceral.
Although in the past few years alone scholars have generated much important work on
the relational body, it is important to recognize that the drive to understand the body
in ⁄ as a network of relations is not particularly new. Feminist scholars have long insisted
that the body exists within a broader nexus or matrix, in which it is impossible to sepa-
rate bodily matter from social context (Butler 1993), or humans from technology (Har-
away 1991), or individual behavior from social performance (McDowell 1995). While
the extent to which such discussions have specifically considered internal bodily sensations
is debatable, there is little doubt that feminist scholarship on matter, embodiment and
bodily performance continues to set precedent for much critical work on the body, and
especially for thinking through the body’s hybrid (or bio-social) and relational qualities
(Brison 2002; Grosz 1994; McWhorter 1999; Probyn 2000).
The work of corporal feminist Elspeth Probyn deserves special attention here not only
for her nuanced, ‘rhizomatic’ or networked approach to the body but also for her politi-
cally deliberate use of the term visceral (2000). Probyn’s work on food and eating is fun-
damentally about power, which she sees exercised across various scales and circulated by
way of the relationships in which eating bodies engage. To Probyn, ‘eating…becomes a
visceral reminder of how we variously inhabit the axes of economics, intimate relations,
gender, sexuality, history, ethnicity, and class’ (p. 9). Yet importantly, she also insists that
this is not all that eating does; in relating through food social structures and categories are
also destabilized. Thus, ‘eating [also] demonstrates our taste for change’ (Probyn 2000, 9).
This combining of structural and post-structural arguments is crucial in that it allows her
visceral approach to be at once cognizant of the fixities and inequities that power can
construct (within and between bodies) and open to the contradictions and potentialities
that life can produce (as bodies learn, develop, and change).
Beyond Probyn and corporal feminist scholarship, many others have also come to dis-
cuss the human body as relationally produced, materially affected, and developmental. For
example, drawing from Actor Network Theory (ANT) and other hybrid approaches, some
cultural geographers advocate an understanding of the human body as a socio-material
assemblage, where subjectivity is produced through specific material interactions within
particular socio-spatial arrangements, and where the human being is therefore always also
‘more-than’ human (Whatmore 2006). This type of analysis also mirrors the work of
health and disability scholars discussed in first section, who advocate a ‘social-materialist
approach [to health]…which locates mind-bodies in space’ (Hansen and Philo 2007, 494;
see also Mansfield 2008). Affect scholars also discuss affect as relationally produced.
In short, the literature that we identify here focuses in some way on the body as it
exists in interaction with other bodies and things. While the specifics of how and why
this interaction takes place may fluctuate in different explanations, the overall take-away
message – the body’s relationality to the social and material world – is a central and criti-
cal argument. This message is important politically for at least two reasons.
First, a relational approach to the body complicates the notion of individual choice or
behavior, and recognizes that physical bodily sensations and judgments arise out of spe-
cific (structural ⁄ material) circumstances (Latour 2004; also Bourdieu 1979). The political
effect of this is clear in Paterson’s (2009), for example, where he distinguishes between
‘sensations’ and ‘sensuous dispositions,’ the latter of which allows scholars to emphasize

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the ‘historically sedimented bodily dispositions and patterns of haptic experience that
become habituated over time’ (Paterson 2009, 14). Saldanha’s (2005) work on racialized
bodies also stands in a defining way here: after describing the rhizome of forces within a
certain rave scene – clothes, music, alcohol, drug practices, peculiar sociability, and so on
– which produce particular bodies as outsiders, and other bodies as insiders, Saldanha
notes, almost in passing, that ‘…in this constellation, you’re either comfortable enough to
star in the visual and hallucinatory economy, or you’re not, and you leave’ (2005, 190).
Although Saldanha does not discuss the visceral directly, his work reveals that comfort
itself is not an individual matter but instead dependent upon people’s (differing) abilities
to relate to a variety of other things: previous experiences, enough money, the right
clothes, a certain look. (Elsewhere we have called this visceral resonance, Hayes-Conroy
and Deborah 2010.) This is indeed an important shift if we want to begin to understand
and respond to the ways in which ‘individual’ bodily sensations and judgments are also
intensely social and political. These types of questions interrogate the fixities in bodily
relating that uneven power structures can produce.
Second, and more optimistically, the unpredictability of bodily relationality can also make
way for imagining new ways of feeling and being political. That is, the potential for
change that arises from the haphazard and chaotic character of daily life is also an impor-
tant quality of viscerality, particularly in terms of what it means (or could mean) for vis-
ceral political action and embodied social change. It is therefore also politically important
to not take the above fixities as inevitabilities, or to solidify them through deterministic
assumptions. Indeed, to do so would be to deny a human body’s material agency in re-
arranging and contradicting the very social patterns and categories that we wish disrupt.
Rachel Slocum’s (2007, 2008) work on race and food is particularly notable here because
it insists upon the capacity for bodies, in the haphazardness of daily life, to resist or re-
practice race in new ways – through, for example, a curiosity that propels encounters
with ‘others.’ In this sense, Slocum becomes, like many other relational thinkers, ‘stri-
dently dedicated to the uncertainty of outcomes’ (Lorimer 2005, 91).
To bring this discussion briefly back to our own research experiences, studying peo-
ple’s visceral reactions to food has allowed us to recognize both the ways that structural
inequities can reinforce fixities in food preferences and the ways that daily interactions
with food can lead to new food desires and attachments. Thus, inequitable patterns in
economic and geographic access to food can serve to fix cultural and familial food tradi-
tions that are repeated across generations, sometimes with dire consequences (e.g. high
rates of diabetes and hypertension in low-income and minority communities). At the
same time, opportunities to interact with food in new ways, such as through school or
community gardens, can also encourage the development of new habits that may disrupt
unhealthy patterns of eating and empower disenfranchised groups.

Defying (Boundaries)
‘‘the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us.’’ (Haraway 1991,
153)
The more investigation we do on the material, relational body, the more we realize that the
visceral is fundamentally about fuzzy boundaries. This fuzziness finds its ancestry, in part, in
a long history of feminists questioning dualisms (mind ⁄ body, male ⁄ female, active ⁄ passive),
as well as in the history of nature–society geographers and environmental activists interro-
gating the borders of nature and culture. Visceral geography necessitates a skepticism of such

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binaries, but it does not necessarily demand that we refute their existence. Instead, a visceral
approach recognizes the very real articulation of dualisms in our socio-material world while
at the same time witnessing the myriad ways in which these binaries are also called into
question and destabilized through the haphazard interactions of daily life. Accordingly, in
this final section we underscore scholarship that embraces such fuzziness – like the fuzziness
of mind ⁄ body and representation ⁄ non-representation – and especially scholarship that can
help us to negotiate our daily lives in, through, and beyond these dualisms.
Although affect and NRT scholarship certainly is important to the above task, we pre-
fer Lorimer’s (2005) term ‘more-than-representational’ as a most inclusive term. While
‘non-representational theory [notably] challenges the epistemological priority of represen-
tations as the grounds of sense-making’ (McCormack 2003, 488), a ‘more-than-represen-
tational’ approach suggests that the discursive, meaning-making activities of daily life are
not separate from sensuous, material life. A fear with NRT is that the distinctions
between affect and emotion, conscious and unconscious, pre and post social, or proximal
and distal (e.g. Hetherington 2003), may be somewhat misleading to the visceral project
of defying boundaries. While such distinctions can be valuable, for these categories can
help us to understand the body anew, if our (political) aim is to destabilize the hierarchies
that divide and the categories that bind, need we not begin to pay attention to how mat-
ter and discourse combine in the visceral body?
Following the work of Brison (2002) and other feminist scholars (Bondi 2005; Nash
2000; Thien 2005) we want to come to terms with how we are simultaneously meaning
and molecule. To us, this means exploring how identity often changes not just haphaz-
ardly and fluidly but instead through a much more viscous (and potentially conscious)
process of slogging-through, breaking down, and reconstructing the sense-making boxes
of the world. Indeed, as Grosz points out, even Deleuze and Guattari (1987) (whose work
is central to much scholarship on the material body) do not outright dismiss these labels:
‘‘…you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them
against their own systems when the circumstances demand it…and you have to keep small
rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality.’’
[Deleuze and Guattari (1987), quoted in Grosz 1994, 172]
Following a similar logic, Nash worries about abandoning the knowable for the unknow-
able, particularly because she sees this move as not politically effective. Nash (2000) notes
that while Thrift argues that cultural geography tends to take representation as a central
focus while ignoring material, bodily practice, he himself privileges practices over repre-
sentation, rather than offering strategies for connecting the two. Bondi (2005), Thien
(2005), and other feminist geographers have articulated similar critiques, viewing ‘emo-
tion’ as more useful for feminist theory and activism, particularly because the concept
does not ignore (consciously enacted) struggles for identity. Health scholars like Moss and
Dyck (1999) have also contended that women experience the embodiment of both dis-
cursive and material relations simultaneously, and that the outcome of this experience is
‘the development of embodied social practices of resistance and negotiation’ (p. 391).
Hetherington (2003) describes the concept of ‘praesentia’ to be just this sort of hybrid
experience. He explains that we confirm ourselves as subjects in the act of touching
(something). Yet, Hetherington insists that this comes before the production of meaning
and representation, which are ‘post hoc rationalizations as representations of how we feel
in this haptic performance’ (Hetherington 2003, 1941). We are not convinced of the
importance of this distinction for understanding the role of the visceral in moving
forward politically, toward progressive social change. If geographers and social scientists

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are to ‘confront some of the perceptual limits of thinking’ (McCormack 2007, 369) that
are currently fixed (or made viscous) within representational categories, then we need to
ask how our consciousness of meaning and representation infuse our visceral experiences
of our bodies-in-space. Indeed, in our own work on alternative food, we have found that
labels like ‘organic,’ and perceptions of certain foods as racially coded (i.e. ‘white people’s
food,’ like Slocum 2007), can have a strong influence on different people’s desires to eat
such foods, or their motivation to enter and participate in the spaces where such food
can be obtained. Visceral reactions can act as both a boundary and a bridge to alternative
food ⁄ space, pulling in some while pushing away or ‘chilling’ others (Guthman 2008).
Related is the boundary between conscious and sub ⁄ unconscious action. NRT scholars
tend to privilege the latter in an effort to encourage scholarly engagement with the agen-
tic character of physical matter. Yet, Hetherington’s work also implies that one’s conscious-
ness of the power of sensorial engagement is important if we are to learn how to use
bodily ways of knowing to re-practice place in new ways. McCormack (2007), too, is
interesting in thinking and perception, and although he makes a strong case for focusing
on molecular affects at an unconscious or pre-conscious level, we might question: isn’t
making (conscious) sense of our lived experiences through meaning and representation
itself a ‘molecular’ task? Certainly, ‘attending to the molecular affects of human geogra-
phies…provides a great deal of purchase for efforts to map the relations between affective
economies and other…kinds of economy’ (McCormack 2007, 364), but in order to do
this, we need to be aware of how representation and meaning can also ‘intervene in the
molecular substrate of mood and emotion’ (McCormack 2007, 364). Indeed, as our own
research has shown us, a visceral geographic approach ultimately requires attention to
what we might term the ‘minded-body’ (McWhorter 1999), where we recognize the
interconnection of thinking and being, and begin to negotiate our way through and
beyond the dualisms of our socio-material world.

Conclusion
Having pulled together a diverse set of works to discuss the matter, relation, and defiance of
the visceral body we want to end by encouraging the expansion of this visceral approach
to ever more remote corners of academic geography. Our own research has led us to the
conclusion that geographic work demands attentiveness to the visceral realm, a realm
where social structures and bodily sensations come together and exude each other, where
dispositions and discourses seem to relate as organic-synthetic plasma, and where categories
and incarnations defy themselves, daring to be understood. For us, research on food was
an obvious place to begin to recognize and theorize about the importance of the visceral.
But, it is certainly not the only place. When we do geography we always do it for some-
thing – to comment on and assist with social change, to avert environmental damage, to
articulate political processes, to shift, aid, begin, enhance, insist, speak up, speak out, trans-
form or revolutionize. The scholarship that we discuss above illustrates that the visceral
realm can help us to understand and facilitate such geographic ‘doing’ throughout many
different focal areas. Where next might geographers implement a visceral approach? Cli-
mate change research? Remote sensing? Perhaps, the answer is, wherever we are moved.

Short Biographies
Allison and Jessica Hayes-Conroy locate much of their research at the intersection of
feminist, political, and cultural geographies and agro-food studies. They have authored or

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co-authored papers in these areas for Transactions of…Gender, Place and Culture, Geoforum,
and Environment and Planning A. Allison has written two books on the culture of agricul-
ture within suburban landscapes and Jessica has authored chapters therein. They are both
currently working on an edited volume on Visceral Geographies. Allison received her
PhD in Geography from Clark University, and her MA in Geography from the Univer-
sity of Hawai’i at Manoa. Jessica received her PhD in Geography and Women’s Studies
from Penn State University and her MA in Geography from the University of Vermont.
Both received BA’s in the Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College. Jessica
is currently a visiting postdoctoral Mellon Fellow at Wheaton College and Allison is a
visiting professor at Bryn Mawr College. Their current research continues their joint
interest in bodies, food and progressive politics.

Note
* Correspondence address: Jessica Hayes-Conroy, Women’s Studies and Environmental Studies, Wheaton College,
26 East Main St, Norton, MA 02766, USA. E-mail: hayes-conroy_jessica@wheatonma.edu

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