'Walking-Out' : The Mobilities of Love

Pearce, Lynne (2018) 'Walking-Out' : The Mobilities of Love. Mobilities, 13 (6). pp. 777-790. ISSN 1745-0101

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Abstract

In this article, I propose that mobility performs a crucial role in the production and sustenance of intimate relationships and focus, in particular, on courtship practices and their modern-day equiva-lents. I pursue this discussion through close readings of literary and autobiographical texts from the nineteenth century through to the millennium, and by means of a framework that triangulates the work of Tim Ingold, David Seamon and Henri Bergson. My focus here is on how the mobilities we practice during the everyday routines of courtship - i.e., the paths we make, the routes we take, the roads we travel, the journeys we repeat, the transport we use - come to characterise the relationship concerned and impact upon its progress. Both Ingold’s work on “lines” and Seamon’s on “place-ballet” are conceptually suggestive in this regard and speak to recent work in mobilities/cultural ge-ography on the significance of patterns of movement in the praxis of relationships.