ABSTRACT
CARS ELICIT A WIDERANGE of feelings: the pleasures of driving, the outburst of ‘road rage’, the thrill of speed, the security engendered by driving a ‘safe’ car and so on. They also generate intensely emotional politics in which some people passionately mobilize to ‘stop the traffic’ and ‘reclaim the streets’, while others vociferously defend their right to cheap petrol. Cars are above all machines that move people, but they do so in many senses of the word. Recent approaches to the phenomenology of car-use have highlighted ‘the driving body’ as a set of social practices, embodied dispositions, and physical affordances (Sheller and Urry, 2000; Dant and Martin, 2001; Edensor, 2002; Oldrup, 2004; Dant, 2004; Thrift, 2004). More encompassing approaches to the anthropology of material cultures have also resituated the car as a social-technical ‘hybrid’ (Michael, 2001; Miller, 2001a). 1 This article builds both on this work and on recent approaches in the sociology of emotions (Hochschild, 1983, 1997, 2003; Bendelow and Williams, 1998; Katz, 2000; Goodwin et al., 2001; Ahmed, 2004) to explore the ways in which the ‘dominant culture of automobility’ (Urry, 2000) is implicated in a deep context of affective and embodied relations between people, machines and spaces of mobility and dwelling, in which emotions and the senses play a key part.
