Fear and Anxiety as a Part of Women’s Spatial Stories in the City

Abstract

This paper considers women’s fear of male violence experienced in motion. The topic has been developed in the Anglo-American feminist geography and criminology in the 1970–90s. I attempt to describe urban contexts of fear of male violence considering women everyday mobility. As theoretical framework I use work by geographer Doreen Massey, supplemented by ideas from emotional geography and sociology of emotions. I collected 10 semi-structured interviews with young women aged 18 to 25 years old. All of them are residents of non-central districts of Moscow and Moscow region. The analysis includes two parts. In the first part I try to draw the line between fear and anxiety as close but different emotions. I also talk about construction of women’s fear of a male violence and different agents involved in the social construction of threats. In the second part I describe conjunctions of spatial histories as gender orders, in which women’s fears are reproduced regardless of actual male threat. I consider conjunctions of material environment (streets, transport, lighting, etc.), human stories (“not suspicious people”, “suspicious people”, “companions”), natural stories (time of day) as fluid, unstable and situational. I conclude that it hardly can be any “formula of women’s fear”. Fear and anxiety significantly affect women’s spatial stories. I give examples of coping strategies women take to change the geometry of power within such gender orders.