Walking women: shifting the tales and scales of mobility

Heddon, D. and Turner, C. (2012) Walking women: shifting the tales and scales of mobility. Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(2), pp. 224-236. (doi: 10.1080/10486801.2012.666741)

Abstract

Narratives attached to walking practices, influenced by the Romantic, Naturalist and avant-garde movements, continue to frame and prioritise aestheticised acts of walking as heroic, epic, individualist, and conquering. This reiteration of dominant knowledge risks obscuring certain types of walking and other ways to think about and recognise walking art’s potentialities. Encountering work by contemporary women artists and interviewing them about their motivations and experiences suggests the need for a radical mobilization of the rhetorics of scale, a task we begin here. The walking art works we introduce propose a destabilisation of values, unsettling familiar analytical and interpretative approaches: the local is magnified to the scale of the epic; the epic is one small step after another; the familiar is a site of risk; and walking a means for building relations rather than escaping them. Whilst assumptions about who walks, in what way and with what value are confronted, so too is the nature of the task in hand, as the walking body remains entangled in monumental historical and social structures, including the spatial.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Heddon, Professor Deirdre
• Authors: Heddon, D., and Turner, C.
• College/School: College of Arts > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Theatre Film and TV Studies
• Journal Name: Contemporary Theatre Review
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• ISSN: 1048-6801
• ISSN (Online): 1477-2264
• Published Online: 24 May 2012
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2012 Taylor and Francis
• First Published: First published in Contemporary Theatre Review 22(2):224-236
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher