untitled


Affecting Geospatial Technologies: Toward a Feminist
Politics of Emotion*

Mei-Po Kwan
The Ohio State University

Building on earlier contributions to feminist understanding of geospatial technologies (GT), I seek to further
develop feminist perspectives on GTalong new directions. I argue that an attention to the importance of affect
(feelings and emotions) and the performative nature of GT practices offers a distinctive critical edge to feminist
work on GT. I emphasize the need for GT practitioners to contest the dominant meanings and uses of GT, and to
participate in struggles against the oppressive or violent effects of these technologies. I argue that only when
emotions, feelings, values, and ethics become an integral part of our geospatial practices can we hope that the use
of GTwill lead to a less violent and more just world. Key Words: affect, emotion, feminist politics, geospatial
technologies, GIS.

A genuine feminist politics always brings us
from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness
to loving. . . . To choose feminist politics, then,
is a choice to love.

—(hooks 2002)

Geospatial technologies include a broadrange of technologies for collecting, stor-
ing, displaying, or analyzing geographical infor-
mation (e.g., geographical information systems
[GIS]; global positioning systems, and remote
sensing). Much has been written about the lim-
itations and social implications of geospatial
technologies (GT) since the early 1990s (e.g.,
Sheppard 1993; Curry 1994; Pickles 1995). Cri-
tiques have focused largely on issues of episte-
mology, representation, power, ethics, privacy
violation, and the noncivilian deployment of
these technologies. With contributions by crit-
ical geographers from diverse perspectives, con-
siderable progress has been made in the nascent
subfields of critical GIS and critical cartography
to date (e.g., Schuurman 1999; Kyem 2004;
Sheppard 2005; Crampton and Krygier 2006;
Del Casino and Hanna 2006; Elwood 2006;
Knigge and Cope 2006; Kwan and Knigge 2006;
Pavlovskaya 2006; Propen 2006; Sieber 2006;
Ghose forthcoming; Kwan and Aitken forth-
coming).

Among recent critical perspectives on GT,
feminist geographers have provided new in-
sights since the early 2000s (e.g., Nightingale
2003; Gilbert and Masucci 2005; McLafferty
2005b). Sara McLafferty (2002, 2005a), for
instance, examines the role of GIS in feminist
activism and explores how GIS-based power-
knowledge may empower or marginalize
women activists as spatio-political scale shifts.
Marianna Pavlovskaya (2002, 2004) examines
the link between urban restructuring and the
microgeographies of women’s everyday lives in
Moscow through a grounded story composed
with GIS. Marie Cieri’s (2003) study of queer
tourism highlights how GT can be used to ex-
plore the gendered and sexualized geographies
of urban space. I renegotiate the meanings of
GIS at the intersection of science, art, and sub-
jectivities (Kwan 2002a). I have also argued that
GIS can be a site for deconstructing the binary
understanding of geographical method and
have called for a recovery of the critical agency
of GIS users or researchers (Kwan 2002b, 2004).
Much of this work is inspired by feminist cri-
tiques of modern science and visualization tech-
nologies and by poststructuralist feminist
notions like situated knowledge, positionality,
reflexivity, and performativity (e.g., Butler 1990,
1993; Haraway 1991; S. Harding 1991, 1998;
Grosz 1994).

*Earlier versions of this article were presented in the University of Minnesota Department of Geography’s speaker series ‘‘Feminism and Social
Theory in Geography,’’ 15 October 2004, and at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Denver, 5–9 April 2005. I thank the
audiences of these presentations, and Karen Dias, Jennifer Blecha, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

The Professional Geographer, 59(1) 2007, pages 22–34 r Copyright 2007 by Association of American Geographers.
Initial submission, November 2005; revised submission, June 2006; final acceptance, July 2006.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.



In this article I seek to develop feminist per-
spectives on GT along new directions, building
on earlier contributions to feminist understand-
ing of GT. First, recent feminist thinking in
geography has witnessed heightened attention
to the importance of emotion in social life and
knowledge production (e.g., Bondi 1999, 2003,
2005; Burman and Chantler 2004; Davidson
and Bondi 2004; Ekinsmyth et al. 2004; Ettlin-
ger 2004; Thien 2004, 2005; Bondi, Davidson
and Smith 2005; Tolia-Kelly 2006). As Kay An-
derson and Susan Smith (2001, 7) argue, the
‘‘human world is constructed and lived through
the emotions’’ and yet feelings and emotions are
silenced in both research and social life. Since
emotions affect research processes and findings
(Bennett 2004) and are highly political but rare-
ly an important consideration in public policy
(Kwan and Aitken, forthcoming), bringing
emotions back to bear upon GT practices may
offer new insights about ways of using GT that
contest the dominant understanding and mean-
ings of GT and their relationships with the so-
cial and political world (e.g., using GT as a
means of resistance or political protest).

Second, nonrepresentational thinking has
been influential both within and outside geog-
raphy (e.g., Deleuze 1986, 1994; Deleuze and
Guattari 1987; Baudrillard 1995, 2001; Thrift
1996, 1997; Smith 2003). Nonrepresentational
theories challenge ‘‘the epistemological priority
of representations as the grounds of sense-mak-
ing’’ or as the means for acquiring knowledge
about the world (McCormack 2003, 488). They
emphasize the importance of the corporeal, af-
fective, and unwritable dimensions of existence
and turn our attention from representations to
practices and performances (Nash 2000; Kwan
and Aitken forthcoming). Critical reflections
that nonrepresentational thinking inspired have
pushed our understanding of maps, cartog-
raphy, and GIS from conventional notions of
representations toward feminist notions of per-
formance and performativity (e.g., Del Casino
and Hanna 2006).1 Artists and scholars in cul-
tural studies have recently drawn on these femi-
nist notions to explore the use of GTas locative
media for self-expression and articulation of
emotional geographies (e.g., Parks 2001).
These experimentations hint at new geospatial
practices (or performances) that contest our
understanding of GT as representational or
communicative media.

In this article I address the two questions
raised by Karen Dias and Jennifer Blecha (2007)
for this themed issue in light of these recent
developments in feminist thinking. I argue that
an attention to the importance of affect (feelings
and emotions)2 in social life and research and
the performative nature of GT practices offers a
‘‘distinctive critical edge’’ to feminist work on
GT ( Jenkins, Jones, and Dixon 2003, 59), and
that GT can be a fruitful analytic project for
feminist geographers. I highlight some recent
works by feminist scholars and explore the ways
in which they hint at alternative geospatial prac-
tices that are more relevant to the contemporary
world, especially in light of the current epoch of
wars, international conflicts, ‘‘natural’’ disasters,
and globalization (Chomsky 1988, 2003; Enloe
1989; Gregory 2004; Hannah 2005; Hyndman
2005, 2007; Sparke 2005). I emphasize the need
for researchers, developers, and users (hereafter
‘‘practitioners’’) to contest the dominant mean-
ings and uses of GT, and to participate in strug-
gles against the oppressive or violent effects of
these technologies. Drawing on feminist con-
ceptualization of affect (e.g., Thien 2005), I
argue that geospatial practices need to be em-
bodied and attentive to the effects of emotions,
which mediate the social and political processes
through which our subjectivities are reproduced
( J. Harding and Pribram 2002; Bennett 2004).
This not only involves reintroducing long-lost
subjectivities of the researcher, the researched,
and those affected by GT back to geospatial
practices, but also involves making emotions,
feelings, values, and ethics an integral aspect of
geospatial practices. Only then will moral
geospatial practices become possible, and only
then can we hope that the use and application of
GT will lead to a less violent and more just
world.

Bodies and Emotions Matter

Geospatial technologies are designed, created,
and used by humans, and a large proportion of
their application is for understanding or solving
problems of individuals and social groups. Bod-
ies, however, are often absent or rendered ir-
relevant in contemporary practices of GT. This
‘‘omission of the body’’ occurs in two different
but related senses ( Johnson 1990, 18). First,
although bodies are involved in the develop-
ment and use of GT, there is little room in these

Affecting Geospatial Technologies: Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion 23



technologies to allow for any role of the
practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings,
passion, values, and ethics. Second, despite the
fact that a large number of bodies are affected
by the application of GT (e.g., people profiled
by geodemographic application, and civilians
who were annihilated as ‘‘collateral damage’’ by
GPS-guided smart bombs that missed their tar-
gets), bodies are often treated merely as things,
as dots on maps, or even as if they do not exist
(Gregory 2004; Hyndman 2005).

The dominant disembodied practices of GT,
however, are contestable as they are largely the
result of a particular understanding of science
and objectivity (Kwan 2002a). This historically
specific and socially constructed notion of
science, as Donna Haraway (1991) argues, is
predicated on the positionality of a disembodied
master subject with transcendent vision. With
such disembodied and infinite vision, the knower
is capable of achieving a detached view into a
separate, completely knowable world. The
kind of knowledge produced with such disem-
bodied positionality denies the partiality of the
knower, erases subjectivities, and ignores the
power relations involved in all forms of
knowledge production (Foucault 1977). Har-
away (1991, 189) calls this decorporealized vi-
sion ‘‘the god-trick of seeing everything from
nowhere.’’

Closely associated with this view of science is
a gendered notion of knowledge production and
academic scholarship that privileges rational
thought over ‘‘irrational’’ emotionality (Bennett
2004). This ‘‘marginalization of emotion,’’ as
Anderson and Smith (2001, 7) put it, ‘‘has been
part of a gender politics of research in which
detachment, objectivity and rationality have
been valued, and implicitly masculinized, while
engagement, subjectivity, passion and desire
have been devalued, and frequently feminized.’’
Geography in particular has tended to ‘‘deny,
avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional en-
tanglements’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith
2005, 1). Yet, to paraphrase Anderson and
Smith, there are times and places where lives
are explicitly lived through pain, love, hate,
anger, hope, fear, and passion. If the world is
imbued with complex emotional geographies,
GT practices are more relevant to real lives if
they allow us to take the spatial, temporal, and
social effects of feelings into account. To neglect
how our research and social life are mediated by

feelings and emotions is to exclude a key set of
relations through which lives are lived, societies
made, and knowledge produced (Anderson and
Smith 2001).

As GT practitioners, our decisions to adopt
particular research agendas and engage with
particular issues (e.g., emergency response) are
often motivated by the emotions provoked by
events such as wars, environmental problems,
and ‘‘natural’’ disasters (Bennett 2004). In field-
work involving interaction between GT re-
searchers and research participants, emotions
expressed by the researched may provide in-
sights about their relationships with others and
their social worlds. In social and political con-
texts involving interaction among diverse
groups of stakeholders, there are inevitably
underlying feelings and tensions that cannot
be clearly articulated or communicated—like
‘‘the thrown-chairs, the put-downs, the red-
faces and the hugs’’ and ‘‘the anger, the frustra-
tions, the sadness and the joys’’ in planning
meetings that involve the data or results gener-
ated by GT (Kwan and Aitken forthcoming).
Contemporary life is also imbued with emo-
tionally intense encounters brought about by
real-time media coverage of events around the
globe (e.g., planes crashing into buildings, dead
bodies of tsunami victims, and violent encoun-
ters in antiglobalization protests). Exploring
and developing new GT practices that are at-
tentive to bodies and emotions is therefore an
important and fruitful feminist project.

The critical project that aims to bring bodies
and emotions back in GT practices entails sev-
eral important elements. As feminist GT prac-
titioners, we can appropriate the power of GT,
contest the dominant uses of these technologies,
and reconfigure the dominant visual practices to
counter their objectifying vision. We can ex-
periment with new geospatial practices that
better articulate the complex realities of gende-
red, classed, raced, and sexualized spaces and
experiences of individuals. These new practices
should help us understand emotions in terms of
their ‘‘socio-spatial mediation and articulation
rather than as entirely interiorized subjective
mental states’’ (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith
2005, 3). While being attentive to how emo-
tions, subjectivities, and spaces are mutually
constitutive in particular places and at particular
times, these new practices should also take into
account the existence of different kinds of bod-

24 Volume 59, Number 1, February 2007



ies (e.g., pregnant, disabled, old, mutilated,
dead) and their socially encoded meanings in
relation to specific spatial, temporal, and cul-
tural contexts (Rose 1993; Laws 1997; Domosh
and Seager 2001; Longhurst 2001). In the arena
of public policy, feminist GT practitioners
have a role in questioning decisions that priv-
ilege detached rationality and the ‘‘logic of
efficiency’’ over emotions (Anderson and Smith
2001, 8).

As feminist GT practitioners we deeply care
about the subject(s) of our research and are
‘‘emotionally committed to our work,’’ and our
geospatial practices should be infused with a
sense of ‘‘emotional involvement with people
and places’’ (Bondi, Davidson and Smith, 2005,
2). We can develop GT practices that entail this
emotional involvement and help express mean-
ings, memories, feelings, and emotions for our
subjects. We can draw on the emotional power
of moving images and the techniques in narra-
tive cinema to create GIS movies or visualiza-
tions that tell stories about the lives of
marginalized people, highlight social injustice,
and—we hope—effect social change (Aitken
1991; Aitken and Craine 2006).

In the three sections that follow, I discuss
several GT projects to illustrate the specific
ways in which bodies and emotions can be
brought to bear on geospatial practices.
Drawing from my recent experimentations
and those by feminist scholars in cultural stud-
ies and media art, I explore how these projects
contest the dominant meanings and visual prac-
tices of GT. As these projects are more expres-
sive than representational or analytical, taking
the form of creative visual or artistic work (e.g.,
GPS-assisted travelogues and 3D GIS video),
they are in a certain sense ‘‘affective GT per-
formances’’ that seek to transform GT into
affective practices by incorporating the subject-
ivities and emotions of the practitioner and
research participants as an integral element
of the project. Through the use of GT as
a medium of self-expression and a means of re-
sistance, and to articulate emotional geogra-
phies and convey emotionally provocative
messages, these nonrepresentational practices
hint at ways of using GT that transcend the
conventional duality between subject and ob-
ject, design and use, author and reader, and
representation and practice (Del Casino and
Hanna 2006).

Subject(ive) Mapping with Global
Positioning Systems

Lisa Parks (2001, 209), a cultural critic and
video artist, contests the meanings of Global
Positioning System (GPS) by using it as an in-
teractive technology for ‘‘plotting the person-
al.’’ She explores whether the GPS can be used
to document human movement and everyday
experiences in a way similar to that of photog-
raphy, home videos, and travelogues. She high-
lights the paradoxical nature of GPS and argues
the need for critical strategies that struggle over
the meanings of satellite technologies. She
states that the ‘‘satellite occupies a remote or-
bital position beyond users’ reach and outside of
the field of vision; satellites have historically
been controlled by states and used in myriad
ways without citizens’ knowledge, involvement
or consent; and satellites are high-tech, high-
capital and high-maintenance devices that are
seemingly beyond the purview of the popular
and the personal’’ ( Parks 2001, 210). Parks con-
tends that what state-sponsored and commer-
cial digital mapping projects share is their quest
for total vision and total knowledge of the
planet. She argues that the personal plot ( per-
sonal map) she explored works against this cen-
tralization of vision and knowledge by insisting
that GPS need not be used to articulate the
agendas of the state or business. Instead it can be
used as a means of storytelling and a technology
for self-expression.

Parks explored GPS as a means of articulating
the politics of location through linking and in-
terpreting an individual’s global position (loca-
tion data produced through satellites) with her
subject position (historically and socially con-
stituted identities). Through a discussion of
GPS tracks of her movements that she recorded
in two recent trips, one in California and the
other in Alice Springs, Australia, she illustrates
how GPS maps might produce such politics. As
Parks (2001, 216) puts it, ‘‘At each juncture I
entered a waypoint, ensuring that each moving
trace would be remembered. I was reminded
here of my own mobility relative to theirs—and
that my GPS map of California would look
quite different from that of a migrant worker, a
Chinese pharmacist, a high-tech executive or a
groaning seal for that matter.’’ She suggests that
GPS maps (or personal plots) offer ‘‘new ways of
visualizing social difference that are based on

Affecting Geospatial Technologies: Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion 25



human movement rather than physiognomy or
pigmentation’’ ( Parks 2001, 211). These visu-
alizations, she argues, enable us to conceptual-
ize more precisely how identities are constituted
through material, bodily movements.

Like travel photography, Parks (2001, 213)
suggests, ‘‘the GPS receiver, rather than cap-
turing an objective record, instead generates a
visual display that may activate memories of
subjective perspective, of a particularly situated
point of view.’’ GPS not only registers location
coordinates but also records the highlights,
landmarks, and special events of one’s journey—
those personal experiences that are not coded
within conventional maps. In this sense, Parks
argues, the GPS map combines the objective
and omniscient discourse of cartography with
the subjective, grounded experience of the user.
Visual representation of the moving body by
GPS introduces the possibility of subject(ive)
mapping. Although represented as a series of
lines and dots, the body’s movement transforms
the map from an omniscient view of territory
into an individualized expression. By plotting
the personal, GPS inscribes embodied practices
into the discourse of mapping and allows the
user to call into question the objective status of
the map by inflecting it with personal move-
ment. The producer of the GPS map is none
other than the body that traveled, walked, or
moved along a certain trajectory carrying a GPS
receiver. The practice of plotting the personal,
then, figures the user as subject, produced
through a series of movements and encounters.
Drawing on Paul Virilio (1997) and Gilles Del-
euze (1986), Parks calls this subject ‘‘the
trajective self,’’ referring to a space in between
the subjective and objective that accounts for
the ongoing condition of bodily movement.

Further, as Parks (2001, 214) suggests, ‘‘GPS
mapping involves the act of self-positioning by
recording and displaying movements from here
to there. The goal of the personal plot is not to
reproduce panoramic vistas, but rather to dis-
play one’s changing position and archive one’s
routes.’’ The GPS maps therefore represent the
possibility of a mediated experience, as they
often necessitate storytelling and narration be-
cause what they reveal is seen and experienced
from very specific and personal points of view.
When used as a technology of self-reflection,
GPS invites the user to see herself as a subject-
in-motion, as an author and a reader, reflexively

inscribing personal trajectories onto the text of
the social world of her everyday life. In this light,
GPS receivers can be used as technologies of
self-expression, creating spatial interpretation
and social understanding as much as they can be
used as tracking and monitoring devices.

The Amsterdam RealTime Project, as Amy
Propen (2006) describes it, shares critical intent
similar to Parks’s personal plot. In the Amster-
dam project, real-time location data from the
GPS-enabled personal digital assistants ( PDAs)
of the participants were sent to a central server
via wireless Internet connection. As the GPS
tracks were visualized against a black back-
ground without showing any information about
the city (e.g., streets or parcel boundaries), the
participants’ movements in real-time construct
their own maps and representations of the city.
Through creating personalized maps of the city
with the performances of their own bodies (re-
corded and visualized as GPS tracks), the
project participants (who were all volunteers)
were the authors (subjects) of these plots and at
the same time were being portrayed in these
maps (objects). The project therefore contests
the conventional distinction between author
and reader, subject and object, performance and
representation (Del Casino and Hanna 2006).

Collaborative 3D GIS Videography

As I argued earlier, feminist GT practitioners
can draw on the emotional power of moving
images and techniques in narrative cinema to
create GIS movies that tell emotionally pro-
vocative stories or that highlight social injustice
(Deleuze 1986, 1998; Aitken 1991; Aitken and
Craine 2006). Cinema, in Gilles Deleuze’s
(1998, 15) view, tells ‘‘stories with blocks of
movements/duration.’’ As Stuart Aitken (1991,
105) argues, the frame-sequence in a motion
picture ‘‘portrays the dynamic interaction be-
tween people and their social and physical en-
vironments,’’ and the foundations of successful
narrative cinema lie in a unique portrayal of this
dynamic interaction.

In a recent project, I explored ways of using
moving images generated by GIS for articulat-
ing emotional geographies and contesting the
objectifying vision of GIS-based 3D geovisual-
ization. Drawing on the methods in visual eth-
nography, visual sociology, and film studies
(e.g., Banks 2001; Pink 2001; Rose 2001; Buck-

26 Volume 59, Number 1, February 2007



land 2003), I created a 3D GIS movie that is
more an artistic and expressive visual narrative
than an objective recording generated with the
aid of scientific visualization. As Sarah Pink
(2001) suggests, video materials should not
be treated merely as visual facts but rather as
representations in which the collaborations
and strategies of self-representation of those
involved are part of their making. For visual
ethnographers, video is not simply a data-col-
lecting tool but a technology that participates in
the negotiation of social relationships and a
medium through which ethnographic know-
ledge is produced. Participatory video has been
used by feminist geographers in action research
that seeks to encourage communities to ‘‘ana-
lyze their social world and to explore the con-
struction of meaning’’ (Kindon 2003, 143). The
collaborative use of video, as Kindon (2003,
143) suggests, has ‘‘considerable transformative
potential in terms of the action it may generate.’’

Based on these notions of participatory video
and narrative cinema, I developed ‘‘collabora-
tive 3D GIS videography,’’ a method of creating
videos using moving images rendered by a 3D
GIS for articulating the personal experience and
story of a particular research participant. I pro-
duced a video based on the oral history of a
Muslim woman in Columbus, Ohio (who was a
key informant of the study), about her feelings
when traveling and undertaking activities out-
side her home shortly after 11 September 2001
(hereafter ‘‘9/11’’). The purpose of the study was
to understand the impact of post-9/11 anti-
Muslim hate crimes on the perception of safety
and use of public space of the Muslim women in
Columbus, Ohio, study. Several months after 9/
11, I traveled with her for one day as she drove
her minivan to undertake her normal out-of-
home activities. As we passed through various
routes, she recalled her feelings and fear
when she saw particular buildings or stores
(and her oral narrative was recorded). Using the
textual transcripts of such audio recordings,
the field notes I took on that day, and the
activity diary and map sketches she completed
during an in-depth interview, I portrayed her
body’s space-time trajectory and her emotions
as she moved around the study area with a 3D
GIS.

Contrary to the high-angle perspective com-
monly used in 3D geovisualization, the video
that I produced adopts her point of view (in the

literal sense) as the vantage point. The moving
images of the video show what she saw (ren-
dered by 3D GIS) as she drove through various
routes in the study area on a particular day after
9/11; her movement is portrayed as a person-
alized space-time trajectory that is color-coded
to reflect the level of fear and perceived danger
she experienced, and the buildings along the
road were also color-coded to indicate the level
of perceived danger she experienced as she
passed them. Audio clips from her oral narrative
were also incorporated, resulting in a video that
not only shows the routes and the spaces her
body moved through, but also tells her story
through the images and her oral narrative as she
recalls what happened to her life and how she
negotiated the hostile urban spaces after 9/11. It
shows what she saw and experienced from her
personal point of view (i.e., from the position of
a driver who was traveling along various roads in
the study area). It is a powerful form of indi-
vidualized storytelling based on her personal
movements, memories, feelings, and emotions.

The 3D GIS video I produced seeks to ‘‘pres-
ent its subject matter in a subjective, expressive,
stylized, evocative and visceral manner’’ (Buck-
land 2003, 145). It is not an ‘‘objective’’ or im-
partial video recording of anything that can be
captured by a conventional video camera. Its
scenes have many physical elements that are
considered to be parts of the objective reality
and scientifically visible ‘‘facts’’ of the study area
(e.g., buildings and roads), but they are rendered
from the GIS database with symbolic and art-
istic techniques, which helped to create an ex-
pressive visual narrative that was produced
collaboratively with the informant. For in-
stance, a green line was used to represent the
tiny comfort zone that she experienced as she
drove her minivan through a major road in the
study area, and the oppressive effect of the hos-
tile urban environment was symbolically repre-
sented by coloring the surrounding buildings as
red blocks. Further, instead of being filmed,
represented as a protagonist, and being watched
by spectators, the informant does not appear in
the video. She is the person who saw and acted,
and mainly her emotions, feelings, memories,
and experiences find expression in the video.
The video produced is therefore not only about
her but also for her—she is situated at the center
of its production. It portrays her emotional ge-
ographies in terms of the dynamic interaction

Affecting Geospatial Technologies: Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion 27



between her feelings and the post-9/11 urban
environment of the study area. Through this
shift from a spectator’s viewpoint to the prot-
agonist’s (subject’s) viewpoint, the video con-
tests the objectifying gaze of conventional 3D
geovisualization practices through a particular
spatial and visual organization of its elements.

GT Art Practices as Politics of
Resistance

As Parks’s and my own work have shown, GT
can be appropriated as media for self-expression
and articulation of emotional geographies.
These experimentations contest the detach-
ment, rationality, and objectifying vision en-
tailed in conventional GT practices. Map artists
and art activists have long created art maps that
contest the authority and content of official
maps—witness the maps produced by the Sur-
realists and the Situationists (Krygier 2006;
Varanka 2006; Wood 2006). Art maps are often
created by extensively reworking preexisting
maps, ‘‘redrawing, digitally altering, painting
over, and reorienting the original images’’
(Wood 2006, 10). They point toward worlds
other than those mapped in official maps and
seek to ‘‘produce new configurations of space,
subjectivity and power’’ (kanarinka 2006). Each
art map is therefore not only a ‘‘work of art’’ but
also a ‘‘political action’’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 12). Similarly, GTcan be appropriated as
a digital art medium and used to create artworks
that protest against social injustice and violence.
GT art practices can be undertaken or per-
formed as a form of resistance (Deleuze 1998;
Kaufman 1998; Klebesadel 2003).

Based on these notions of art practices as pol-
itics of resistance, I have explored GIS as an art-
istic medium for generating digital artwork using
GIS software and data. As GIS was not developed
and designed for artistic work, my GIS art
project intends to challenge the understanding
of GT as scientific apparatus for producing ob-
jective knowledge or as an instrument of dom-
ination. I seek to destabilize the fixed meanings of
GT that have precluded their use in novel and
creative ways. Through my GIS art I also articu-
late my discontent with the use of GT in wars and
international conflicts that result in large num-
bers of civilian casualties (Gregory 2004; Hynd-
man 2005, 2007). I also protest against the use of

these technologies in any applications that vio-
late personal rights and privacy, as in geodemo-
graphic and surveillance applications.

I have explored the aesthetic potential of GIS
by experimenting with various artistic styles and
techniques (Figures 1 and 2).3 The digital spaces
of GIS have been appropriated as my spaces of
resistance, which elude state sanction on the
more readily recognizable spaces of political
protest ( Pile 1997; Wainwright forthcoming).
My GIS art project was undertaken out of my
sadness in light of the human casualties resulted
from the attacks at the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon on 9/11 as well as the ensuing wars
and violent conflicts in the Middle East. In the
project, GIS was used to create digital images
that are aesthetically pleasing, but none of the
visual elements in these images corresponds to
any particular object in the world. For instance,
the image shown in Figure 1 was created with
three layers of real vector GIS data. The color
schemes of these data and their overlay proper-
ties were first tweaked in a GIS. The map file was
then imported to an image processing program
and processed with several artistic filters that
transformed it into a drastically different image.

Through this abstract and nonrepresentation-
al GIS art practice, GIS is momentarily dissoci-
ated from any precepts of science, objectivity,
transcendent vision, exploitation, surveillance,
or control. I thus participated in the cultural
politics of contending the meanings of GT (al-
beit at a personal level), as cultural politics ‘‘are
contestations over meanings, over borders and
boundaries, over the ways we make sense of our
worlds, and the ways we live our lives’’ (Mitchell
2000, 159). Through this geospatial aesthetics
grounded on my concern about the role of GT in
global violence, I insist that GT should be used
primarily for creating a more just and peaceful
world, as when the technologies are used in re-
search on environmental justice or for empow-
ering marginalized social groups (e.g., Mennis
2002; McLafferty 2005a). In the project, GIS
was used as a medium of passionate politics for
countering the dominant practices. It is in this
sense that my GIS art project can be understood
as part of a broader counterhegemonic struggle
over GT, as a form of questioning, and a form of
protest and resistance.

My GIS art project and Parks’s (2001)
personal plot, however, are largely personal
endeavors. In order to influence public policy

28 Volume 59, Number 1, February 2007



and to effect broader social change, politics of
resistance at the individual level needs to be
scaled up and connected to collectively prac-
ticed politics. The recent trend of increasing
collaboration between researchers, artists, and
community groups in projects that seek to
understand people’s feelings and concerns may

be indicative of how this connection can be
made (e.g., Rose 1997). For instance, the
Greenwich Emotion Map Project engaged art
activists and local residents to reflect on the so-
cial change taking place on the Greenwich Pen-
insula (Nold 2005). It was a mapping project
that aimed at understanding how local residents

Figure 2 Digital image created

with Triangulated Irregular Net-

work (TIN) data. Artistic effects

were added to the original image

with image processing software.

Figure 1 Digital image created

with three layers of vector data.

Artistic effects were added to the

original image with image pro-

cessing software.

Affecting Geospatial Technologies: Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion 29



feel about the area based on their personal ex-
ploration and journeys. In the project, biomap-
ping devices worn by participants recorded their
emotional response (their body’s level of stimu-
lation) to and interaction with their immediate
environment, and a GPS tracked the routes they
took. On returning to the studio, the informa-
tion and photos taken along the way were up-
loaded and interpreted by participants to create
a personal visual narrative. The resulting emo-
tion maps encouraged participants’ personal
reflection on the complex relationship between
them, their local environment, and their fellow
citizens. The project allowed local residents of
the Greenwich Peninsula to visualize where
they feel stressed and excited, to articulate their
concerns, and to engage with wider community
issues (Nold 2005).

In my study of the post-9/11 experiences of
the Muslim women in Columbus, participation
in the research seemed to have helped them
recognize the need to address the threat of
anti-Muslim hate crimes on their everyday life.
The key informant, for instance, became an
activist in the local Muslim community. She is
involved in activities that aimed to mitigate
anti-Muslim sentiment and misunderstanding
about the Islamic faith (e.g., through interfaith
activities and mosque open houses). Although
the purpose of my study was to understand the
personal feelings and experiences of the partic-
ipants, it indirectly led to collectively practiced
politics that seeks to change other people’s
attitudes toward them.

Toward Embodied Practices and
Passionate Politics

The wars following 9/11 have taken an enor-
mous human toll, sometimes with the assistance
of GT such as GPS and remote sensing. The
failures that Hurricane Katrina revealed, which
many had hoped to be able to avoid through the
help of GT, are also disconcerting. As feminist
GT practitioners, we need to think carefully
about the kinds of geospatial practices that are
truly relevant to the contemporary world. We
should engage in the development of GT prac-
tices that help to create a less violent and more
just world. I have argued in this article that em-
bodied practices and passionate politics of GT
that are attentive to bodies, emotions, and sub-

jectivities will help us move beyond software
and data to focus on real people and real lives.
Drawing on recent developments in feminist
thinking, I suggest that attention to the import-
ance of affect and possibilities of performing
( practicing) GTas resistance would lead to dis-
tinctively feminist contribution to research and
practice on GT.

Feminist geography affords a rare discursive
space for making emotions, feelings, values, and
ethics an integral part of our work (Whatmore
2002; Ekinsmyth et al. 2004; Sharp, Browne,
and Thien 2004; Trauger 2004; Bondi,
Davidson and Smith 2005; Kobayashi 2005).
Mobilizing emotions in our work not only rep-
resents an important element of the feminist
project that seeks to recenter bodies in geospa-
tial practices, it also entails experimentations
with more expressive and evocative forms of
visual practices for conveying provocative femi-
nist messages. As video artist Pipilotti Rist
points out, ‘‘Messages that are conveyed emo-
tionally and sensually can break up more preju-
dices and habitual behavior patterns than . . .
intellectual treatise’’ (cited in Riemschneider
and Grosenick 2001, 142). Feelings and emo-
tions have long been silenced in research and
social life. Bringing them back to bear upon
our GT practices would have considerable po-
tential for yielding insights about new ways of
using GT.

In order to effect broader social change, how-
ever, it is important to scale our care or concern
from the personal/local level up to larger con-
texts. Although most of the projects I describe in
this article were undertaken as personal endeav-
ors, our personal politics of resistance needs to
be scaled up to the level of collectively practiced
feminist politics. Collaborative projects under-
taken by GT researchers, feminist/art activists,
and community groups throughout the world
offer important inspiration for how this may be
accomplished (e.g., McLafferty 2002, 2005a;
kanarinka 2006). As feminist GT practitioners,
we should develop innovative means to protest
against the use of GT for violence and to engage
in political activism that turn violence and fear
into hope. Only when emotions, feelings,
values, and ethics as well as a commitment to
social justice become integral elements of our
geospatial practices will moral geospatial prac-
tices become possible. Only then can GT help
create a less violent and more just world.’

30 Volume 59, Number 1, February 2007



Notes

1 The feminist notion of performativity (based on Ju-
dith Butler’s 1990 and 1993 works) concerns the
processes through which gender identity and social
practices are mutually constituted. As my focus here
is on geospatial technologies (not processes of iden-
tity formation), this article instead invokes the notion
of ‘‘performativity’’ through its more common
understanding as ‘‘performance’’ and ‘‘practice.’’
Following Liz Bondi (2005), I argue that the way
these notions are used in the article does not depend
on any particular theorization of the relationship
between emotions and performativity.

2 The term affect can mean many different things and is
often ‘‘associated with words such as emotion and
feeling’’ (Thrift 2004, 59). Its meanings seem to have
derived from different traditions, which include
(Thrift 2004) Freudian psychoanalysis (instincts,
drives, and emotional impulse), Spinoza’s metaphys-
ics (changes in the experiential states of the body
through actions and encounters), and the phenom-
enological tradition (expressive feeling and behavior
manifested through bodily states). Although the
term affect cannot be reduced to personal feeling nor
be detached from the body’s capacity to act, it is used
loosely in this article to encompass both emotion and
feeling. For helpful critiques of recent notions of af-
fect, see the discussions in Deborah Thien (2004)
and Divya Tolia-Kelly (2006).

3 Digital versions of these two figures are available at
http://geog-www.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/mkwan/
AffectGT.html.

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MEI-PO KWAN is a Distinguished Professor of So-
cial and Behavioral Sciences and Dr. Martha L. Corry
Faculty Fellow in the Department of Geography,
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1361.
E-mail: kwan.8@osu.edu. Her research interests in-
clude geographies of gender, race, and religion; in-
formation and communications technology; GIS; and
feminist perspectives on geospatial technologies.

34 Volume 59, Number 1, February 2007