Making Place, Making Self

Making Place, Making Self explores new understandings of place and place-making in late modernity, covering key themes of place and space, tourism and mobility, sexual difference and subjectivity. Using a series of individual life stories, it develops a fascinating polyvocal account of leisure and life journeys. These stories focus on journeys made to the North Cape in Norway, the most northern point of mainland Europe, which is both a tourist destination and an evocation of a reliable and secure point of reference, an idea that gives meaning to an individual's life. The theoretical core of the book draws on an inter-weaving of post-Lacanian versions of feminist psycho-analytical thinking with phenomenological and existential thinking, where place-making is linked with self-making and homecoming. By combining such ground-breaking theory with her innovative use of case studies, Inger Birkeland here provides a major contribution to the fields of cultural geography, tourism and feminist studies.

Inger Birkeland is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Contents: Introduction; The journey to knowledge: place-openness; Tourism, subjectivity and self: the North Cape; Tourism and the transformation of everyday life; Travel, masculinity and femininity; Travel as rite de passage; The North as epiphany; Estrangement, fluidity and femininity; Femininity and open space; Travelling internal and external worlds; A feminine aesthetics of travel; The dawning of the midnight sun; Making place, making self: choragraphy; Bibliography; Index.