The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating

Abstract

This essay analyzes embodied experiences of enclaving. It argues that by tracking revolutions in built form that gating enacts, urban geography has simultaneously tracked revolutions in urban subjectivity. It highlights three enclaved “body types” within existing literature: securitized bodies in fortressed cities, performative bodies in consumptive enclaves, and hygienic bodies in purified zones. It then offers three ethnographic scenes of gating related to new crises of personhood: metabolic illness, atmospheric breakdown, and resurgent ethno-nationalism. Attention to the psychic forces behind gating, it finally argues, can further show the gender, class, and ethnic underpinnings of what appear as generic architectural zones.