Jouissance in Geography
I am responding to Mountz and Williams’ (2023) “Let Geography Die: The Rise, Fall, and “Unfinished Business” of Geography at Harvard.”The paper engages with the history of Geography as Harvard, and how its characterisation as a “messy” discipline by a homophobic administration seeking to police the sciences drew on the perceived homosexuality of its teaching staff to delegitimise the field. The following reflections explore the afterlife of this messiness—its embodiment within a supposedly “cleaned up” institutional site where excess is displaced onto the figure of the graduate student, a queer figure.
I arrived at the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore in August 2026, exhausted. For many, beginning a PhD represents the fulfilment of a dream; I was not fortunate enough to share that fantasy. On my first day in Singapore, the accumulated stress of my recent years in Taiwan surfaced, and I found myself weeping over a bowl of chilli oil dumplings. The clutter of those years—during which I had worked multiple jobs to maintain my visa status and stay near my partner—suddenly collapsed.
That period had been stressful, but it had boundaries between its parts. Different jobs, but clear starts and stops. In weeping, I was not saying goodbye to an old life so much as mourning the disappearance of those boundaries: becoming a graduate student meant becoming researcher, student, teacher, and mentor all at once. I had quietly hoped my cohort might share something of this experience, or that I might find someone with whom to navigate this complexity in a way that sparked a friendship beyond the university's limits.
Instead, I largely suppressed these feelings, masking them throughout orientation—including a faculty-organised event titled “JOY in Geography.” This event, I assume, was premised on the difficulty of relentless academic work and the challenge of naming its burdens. It invited faculty to reflect on the small joys that sustain their scholarly pursuits. Theoretically, I saw the connections to feminist care scholarship advocates for finding moments of joy within crushing structures. I attended in hopes of meeting faculty and perhaps inhabiting the discipline more fully.
The event took place in a large classroom with seating arranged in rows—a configuration typical of formal lectures. In settings where some participants are well-acquainted and others are newcomers, simply choosing a seat became a source of stress. Fixed seating does not easily accommodate the organic formation of groups; sitting too close to the front can appear presumptuous, whilst sitting too far back risks invisibility. I chose a seat near the door.
Approximately forty people attended, including faculty, graduate students, and staff. Food at academic gatherings is intended to facilitate informal conversation, but it also introduces a subtle etiquette that newcomers must quickly decipher. As a graduate student newly arrived in Singapore and living on cash before opening a bank account, I had intended to use the catering as a meal replacement to save money. Academic events, however, occupy an ambiguous space between professional obligation and social gathering, and eating too eagerly can appear overly familiar or greedy. I found myself hovering at the edge of the room, uncertain how to navigate even these small gestures.
The event followed a modified pecha kucha format, with faculty invited to speak for two to five minutes about what brought them joy in their work. In principle, this should have produced personal reflections; in practice, most speakers defaulted to introducing their research. One after another, the presentations accumulated into brief professional self-descriptions—summaries of topics, methods, or recent projects. The word “joy” was present, symbolically, as a framing device for a familiar academic performance of self-promotion.
Nowhere in the event, to the best of my recollection, were graduate students permitted to speak or ask questions. I found myself tracking movements rather than arguments, someone falling asleep at their desk; senior faculty slipping out immediately after their own presentations. Although framed as an introduction to the department's intellectual community, the exchange moved in one direction. Faculty spoke; graduate students remained largely silent.
The final presentation, by James Sidaway, shifted the tone. He did not conclude with an account of intellectual satisfaction. Instead, he described violence and conflict, ending with the image of a hole in the ground. The anecdote was brief and somewhat opaque, but the image stayed with me. An event framed around joy had ended with an evocation of absence. I found I could relate to that hole.
Looking back, the afternoon tried to offer a glimpse into how, efficiently, ideally, an academic community takes shape—and the limitations of such introductions. Relationships are not formed through short presentations. I tend to think they rather accumulate slowly through repeated encounters. Not what was here. What I carried away was a sense of that hole, a gap that has continued to grow.
In contrast to what Mountz and Williams (2023) describe in their historical account of geography as a messy discipline, “JOY in Geography” organised a messiness that persists after the discipline has supposedly been tidied. That is, everything seemed ordered, but I would contend that disorder may have just been redistributed onto the graduate student as a series of desires and pitfalls. These holes that have only grown since the event:
The Pothole in the Career Path: The university encourages us to desire the destination of professional completion, yet the road itself is poorly maintained. For a human geographer at NUS, this manifests as a curricular void. When departmental offerings focus almost exclusively on climate change and GIS, the cultural or queer geographer finds little ground on which to stand. I was forced to navigate alternative, undergraduate-level courses simply to meet administrative requirements.
The Void of Ownership: Within working groups designed to foster intellectual exchange, I encountered a form of extraction in which graduate labour disappears into a superior’s tracking sheet. We performed the analytical work—reading, summarising, synthesising—only for that labour to be absorbed into a private document we could not access. The mess of unfinished scholarship is tidied by using graduate bodies as invisible filler for faculty projects.
Material Absences: We are addressed as emerging scholars, yet we are simultaneously constrained by a financial sinkhole. When travel funding is deferred until after qualifying examinations, the supposedly global network of geography becomes a space we can see but not enter. At the same time, the department asks for our presence at multiple recurring events—weekly cluster meetings and the like—whilst providing no real space for individual scholarly growth.
The Absence of a Genuine Collective: The JOY event presented an image of collegial community, yet our reality more closely resembles a social vacuum. Intellectual formation occurs in the solitary margins of the day—reading alone, working through problems in isolation. The community dissolves the moment a presentation ends, whilst the labour of teaching fragments our schedules, creating gaps where sustained thought might otherwise take hold.
Complaining, yes, I am. But these holes matter because they are the lived sites where the psychic formation of the graduate student occurs. Geographers often examine the body as a material site that gives rise to emotion, but less frequently do they offer a systematic account of fantasy and desire—attending to how bodies move through space whilst remaining less attentive to why subjects stay deeply, often painfully, attached to the very formations that fail them.
It is here that the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance may have purchase. The term refers to a form of enjoyment that exceeds simple pleasure—an intensity that emerges through repetition, frustration, and persistence in ways that can become painful. Academic work is inherently structured this way, drafts are written and revised, and every project opens onto further questions rather than a final conclusion. The graduate student becomes a subject who persists within an intellectual structure that is never fully resolved. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, lack is foundational, and desire emerges not from fulfilment but from structural incompleteness—the subject continuing to desire precisely because something is missing.
Academic work does not merely orient itself around gaps in knowledge; it is defined by a constant edging of those gaps—a form of jouissance. In this sense, the academic act functions as an intense, repetitive, and exhausting engagement with the limits of the symbolic order. This must be distinguished from simple pleasure, which seeks to reduce tension. Jouissance sustains excitation beyond comfort, persisting even when enjoyment becomes painful.
It is no wonder that in seminars at both NUS and the University of Toronto (where I completed my masters), I encountered Oliver Burkeman's (2013) Guardian article on the daily routines of history's “most creative minds.” These routines, designed for the social reproduction of the field, inevitably involve the management of stress—sometimes through substance use, substance use advocated for by many faculty (ironically in Singapore). Substances may dull the pain, but when multiple sites of desire open as absences, the constant return to them only intensifies the need for consumption. We need not recount the stories of alcoholics and geographers here, but they are plentiful.
We might say, then, that the contemporary geography department, in its sanitised and abstracted form, cannot help but reproduce jouissance. The promise of productivity relies on the student remaining in an unfinished state, desires scattered everywhere. Satisfaction in graduate life is derived from the repetitive movement of the drive—drafting, revising, recommencing—rather than from the closure of any project. This structural deferral ensures that the discipline reproduces itself not through the completion of work, but through an internalised desire for the process itself, each student seeking to fill the holes that define the institution. Graduate students are, in a sense, freaks: their presence and desire to be everywhere exceeds what any single body can sustain.