Bodies and emotions

This chapter details how geographers have explored bodies and emotions, with a particular focus on scholarship in emotional geographies. We discuss five characteristics of this scholarship, namely that it attends to the gendered body, the body's fleshy materiality, the body in relation to systems and structures of power, what embodied emotions illuminate about the contexts in which they arise, and the development of novel methods to research embodied emotion. As geographical research on care exemplifies many of these characteristics, it is discussed for illustrative purposes. Four potential areas for future research are then outlined: the technologically augmented body, the circulation of affect through collective bodies, the ongoing development of novel research methods, and the continuing need to advocate for the value of research on bodies and emotion, within and beyond the social sciences.