Outdoors assemblages, Scottish Highland bothies, and gendered fatness in nature: You’ll never walk alone SUPPORTING VIDEOS

The setting is hiking and bothying in the Scottish Highlands where, even while going “alone” in a practical sense —mitigating risk; carrying everything required for survival— it is impossible to extract oneself from relations of exteriority whose components are irreducible to functionality.

This includes the materiality of affect, wherein growing awareness of/and (non-)representation mark the experience of hiking ‘alone’. Further, within assemblages of putative ‘aloneness’ there are other people, particularly straight-sized hikers and men-in-the-outdoors: those on the internet with their comments, in bothies with their physicality, and on trails with their questions. Through ‘nature’ assemblages, then, fat-female subjectivity is paradoxically co-produced through both appropriation (i.e. agentically, such as through activism and ‘counter-hiking’) and attribution (i.e. against the Derridean notion of the constitutive outside).