Subjectivity, affect and place: thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs to explore a young girl’s becomings in a post-industrial locale

This article explores how subjectivities are affectively tied to the histories of space, place and time through ethnographic research on young people’s everyday lives in a semi-rural post-industrial locale. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of one teenage girl’s inventive practices, we capture moments in time that we arrange as ‘enunciating assemblages’ (Guattari, 2006) to explore how conscious and unconscious affective relations repeat and rupture sedimented gendered histories of place. We experiment with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the full and empty Body without Organs to trace the ‘ontological intensities’ of how, when and where newness and change become possible. We argue that making visible young people’s nascent becomings by focusing on what young people already do and imagine, we can potentially support young people pursuing new horizons without losing the very sense of place that makes them feel both safe and alive.