Rural being: Merleau‐Ponty, embodied perception and intersectionality

• Published in: Sociologia ruralis Vol. 65; no. 1
• Main Author: Kerrigan, Nathan Aaron
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-01-2025
• ISSN: 0038-0199; 1467-9523
• DOI: 10.1111/soru.12501

Discussions of space, place and intersectionality have been present in rural studies since the early 2010s. Drawing upon the ‘relational turn’ in rural sociology and geography, this research has tended to focus on the ways in which the materiality of rural space interlocks with the connective lines of the various identity markers (e.g., ‘race’, gender, classed, able‐bodied, sexuality and so on) of the body to produce criss‐crossing and rhizomic assemblages and networks of rurality that has ability to produce inclusionary and/or exclusionary experiences of the rural based on the social locatedness of the individual. This article argues such theorising of rural intersectionality does not foreground rurality enough. Instead, it has the tendency to reproduce intersectional thinking in ‘additive’ ways within the rural literature. The purpose of this article is to provide a philosophical intervention to the debates in rural sociology and geography on intersectionality. Merleau‐Ponty's concept of embodied perception will be deployed to theorise rural as an identity category, which is always already inscribed with ‘raced’, gendered, heteronormative, abled‐bodied and classed configurations because of the historicity of the motor intentionality of the body. Here, I argue that the rural is an extension of the body in which it gets to know itself as an included ( being‐towards‐the‐rural ) or excluded ( being‐away‐from‐the‐rural ) being due to its pre‐reflexive bodily habituation and orientation. Such theorising sees rural as an impregnated reversibility with the identification demarcations of the body—opposed to being ontologically criss‐cross and rhizomatic as understood in the current relational literature on rural and rural intersectionality—and thus repositioning rurality as an inherently intersectional category/concept.