Navigating the Battlefield

These pieces grew out of a final-year Gender, Space, and Place module in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. Students were invited to reflect on their own lives through concepts explored in class – embodiment, space, labour, identity, and intersectionality – and to use their memories as data for reflexive, auto-ethnographic writing.

What emerged from this assignment was extraordinary: work so powerful it cried out for a wider audience, so that others might read and understand the gendered experiences of young people in contemporary society.

Across these pages, you will find reflections that reveal how gender dynamics play out in classrooms and family homes, on sports fields and city streets. They explore the visible and invisible ways gender continues to shape our worlds – from overt acts of control, like kneeling before male teachers to measure the length of a skirt, to quieter injustices, like being told to change in a cupboard before a match. They speak of “familial structures, cultural expectations, and the emotional geographies that bind love to duty,” of young women pushed into roles of care, and of young men on soggy pitches proving that they are “real men,” or being mocked for asking for “Cinderella dresses” for Christmas.

These are stories of contradiction – of people navigating a world where there seems to be no way to “win,” where all choices are fraught, and where the performance of gender often demands contortions that do not fit who they are. Yet, among the pain and tension, there is also tenderness. There are stories of acceptance, care, and love – of young people learning to carry both worlds with them, to reimagine what masculinity, femininity, and queerness can mean.

Here, you will find accounts of parental love, sibling respect, and self-care – of resilience, courage, and the ongoing act of becoming. These stories remind us of the agency and strength of a generation remaking the world around them: a world that, word by word, becomes fairer, wiser, and kinder.

Isabella and Margot
Cardiff University, November 2025

If you would like further details, please contact: