Edinburgh Napier University

  This autoethnographic performance text examines the paradoxical co-production of “aloneness” in nature spaces charged with a politics of memory. The context is hiking “alone” as a fat, middle-aged, queer woman, to Highland Clearances ruins and bothies in Scotland. Bothies are remote, rustic shelters; the Highland Clearances (1750s—1860s) were a tumultuous time during which subsistence farmers were violently evicted from rural land.

Within “solo” walking assemblages, there is nonhuman agency: the deer ticks, the peat bogs, the hi/storied buildings. There are human others: body-normative hikers (their odd looks; their comments) and the people creating tangible mobilities affordances/constraints (after Urry): the ferryman; historical path builders; those geotagging —or not— online. Then there is the intangible: the materiality of affect and the cultural turn in which solo walking becomes desirable. All this walks alongside, meaning that you never really can walk “alone”.

The scare quotes thus speak to the impossibility of extracting oneself from relations of exteriority whose components are irreducible to functionality. That is, we are all, always, part of assemblages (after Deleuze) comprising human/nonhuman agency, meaning, and affect, our “solo” experiences mediated through culture, affect, politics, and memory.

The paper operates on two levels. First, it is an exemplar of a critical autoethnography as hiking research, written narratively, performed through multimedia, and aimed at critiquing the politics of embodiment, gender, and outdoors mobilities. Second, it interrogates a central methodological problem: the socially and environmentally situated subject —putatively autonomous, but really not— that is at the heart of experience-near qualitative research.