FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE CITY: HOW AFFECTS AFFECT STREET-WISDOM

Abstract

The study of women’s fear of crime is a rich and continuously developing field.
Researchers have contributed to these studies from fields as varied as criminology, geography, cultural
studies and urban studies, to name a few. Despite the breadth and depth of sustained interest in this
field, this paper posits that one perspective which is often overlooked in fear of crime studies is a
problematisation of the construction of the knowledge of the subject of these studies; who she is, how
she situates herself in the context of the space and how she constructs and deploys knowledge about
fear and safekeeping. This paper offers some preliminary inroads into this enquiry by drawing on the
finding of a larger doctoral study and analysing these through an affective theoretical analytical lens.
The paper understands affective from a Deleuzian perspective but rejects the autonomy of affect to
argue that by understanding fear and safety through an affective theoretical lens, fear of crime theorists
can being to see alternatives for the fearful or safe feminine body in space and challenge the exclusions
that become inherent through such fearing or safe constructions of place and thus contribute greater
understandings of the how fear and safety come about.