ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what subjects and spaces are imagined and materialized via investments in regional competitiveness and cosmopolitanism, concluding that official registers of region and nation disconnect women's emotional attachments and registers of place. The chapter blends insights from feminist phenomenology and cultural geography to explore factors structuring spatial, gendered and classed experiences. Official registers of region interpellate young women as future-orientated and mobile but young women's experiences of place are coded and understood through classed and gendered embodiment and experience that sticks, as well as moves. Class intersects with gender to shape access to and experience of place and acts as a disorientation through past-present-future encounters. The North East is the empirical fieldwork site used to discuss bodies that stay, bodies that travel. It is a fraught location at once propelled into the future, through residents and policy-makers claims of regional resiliency, and economic and cultural capacity, while being stuck in the past.
