their actions are restricted and censured accord-
ingly. ‘Heavily’ pregnant women in particular
are seriously discouraged from entering certain
environments (such as bars), taking part in cer-
tain activities (such as rugby), or ‘displaying
themselves’, that is entering ‘public’ space, in
clothing considered ‘revealing’. Women who
breach such normative and normalizing stan-
dards of expectant feminine decency can find
themselves subject to moral outrage and indigna-
tion, and this is illustrated pointedly by
Longhurst’s (2000) account of a New Zealand
‘pregnant bikini competition’. Letters to the editor
of a newspaper that reported the event used
evocative terms such as ‘spectacle’, ‘abhorrent’
and ‘shame’ to express their response to photo-
graphs of these ‘pregnant women with attitude’
(2000: 463). One respondent was moved to
‘draw frocks’ on them, presumably to reinstate
their misplaced modesty. What this episode
reveals is that atypical and unexpected acts can
test and potentially stretch the limits of ‘public
decency’, and the modes of ‘doing’ gender that it
is un/able to contain. The ‘scantily clad’ and
pregnant presence of women in a city centre is a
contestatory and controversial act capable of
subverting accepted ideas of how a particular
manifestation of gender – that of a woman during
pregnancy – ‘ought’ to be performed.
This example shows how both regulatory
norms and performances of gender are context
specific. It also implies a separability between
gendered subjectivities and contexts: the places
of public space are construed as ‘external’ to the
gendered subjects who perform and negotiate the
norms through which spaces, bodies and subjec-
tivities acquire and articulate gendered mean-
ings. But some important studies in cultural
geography have argued that people and places
are imagined, embodied and experienced in ways
that are more radically and inextricably inter-
twined with each other (Davidson, 2000a;
2000b; Kirby, 1996; Nast and Pile, 1998). That is
to say, subjects and environments exist, not as
definitively bounded entities in proximity with
each other, but as dynamically interconnected
and mutually constitutive.
This intertwining of subject and environment
is not ‘normally’ brought into conscious aware-
ness, but ‘problematic’ or ‘phobic’ experiences
of space, including for example agoraphobia and
vertigo, serve to highlight what is usually taken
for granted (Bordo et al., 1998; Kirby, 1996).
The experiences drawn upon in such studies are
themselves highly gendered. Of agoraphobia
Esther da Costa Meyer writes ‘[i]ts connection towomen is beyond dispute’, and she argues that it
can be understood to ‘allegorize the sexual divi-
sion of labour [hence the notion of agoraphobia
as the ‘housewife’s disease’] and the inscription
of social as well as sexual difference in urban
space ... Agoraphobia represents a virtual
parody of twentieth-century constructions of
femininity’ (1996: 141, 149).
In this context more detailed analyses of expe-
riences of agoraphobia have explored how
(gendered) bodies and spaces are experienced in
panic attacks, which precipitate and help to
maintain agoraphobic geographies (Bankey,
2001; Bekker, 1996; Davidson, 2001). Panic can
be understood to express a radical and horrifying
disintegration of boundaries around selves which
ordinarily provide subjects with a sense of being
safely delimited and demarcated from surround-
ing spaces. When such boundedness is thrown
into question by problematizing phenomena such
as panic or vertigo, the fragility and imagined
nature of taken-for-granted boundaries become
excruciatingly evident (Davidson, 2001). Such
sensory realization can be deeply disturbing to
selves for whom the regulatory fiction of exist-
ing as bounded, autonomous isolates, in prox-
imity with but separable from their environs, is
deeply felt.
Experience of such boundary crises typically
prompts sufferers to seek out environments
likely to engage soothingly, rather than dis-
turbingly, with their sense of themselves. For
many who suffer agoraphobic panic, this entails
avoidance of populous and otherwise sensorially
stimulating places such as restaurants, shopping
malls and public transport, where the volume and
intensity of interactions with sentient and non-
sentient others is often experienced as pro-
foundly corrosive of already fragile boundaries
presumed to contain the subject (Davidson,
2001). Ironically, given the popular misconcep-
tion that agoraphobia involves a fear of open
spaces, safe spaces for the agoraphobic subject
are often found in quiet countryside or parkland,
or at night, when the potential for others to
impinge in this way is reduced. More often (and
stereotypically), however, sufferers will feel
safest in the more predictable spaces of their
homes, whose walls can serve to reinforce their
fragile and weakened boundaries. In a sense, the
very bricks and mortar are imbued with and have
power to imbue feelings of safety and security
for the subject within.
Agoraphobic panic can be understood to con-
stitute a kind of boundary dispute, a phenomenal
discordance that occurs in and through theTROUBLING THE PLACE OF GENDER 3373029-ch17.qxd 03-10-02 10:56 AM Page 337