Chapter 9 Sticky places: temporality, affect and gender in Australian country towns Anna Hickey-Moody and Jane Kenway In outlining the aims of new materialism, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost emphasise its engagement with the possibility of matter having agency. They write: New materialists are attracted to forms of vitalism that refuse [distinctions between live and dead matter].… They often discern emergent, generative powers (or agentive capacities) even within inorganic matter, and they generally eschew the distinction between organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate, at the ontological level. 1 In this chapter, we build on this re-engagement with matter’s agentive possibilities, stressing that any such agency must be clearly located in time and space. Drawing on data from an Australian Research Council funded study titled ‘Country Boys in Uncertain Times and Places’ (1999–2001), which we have theorised in other ways elsewhere, in this chapter we consider possibilities for a feminist new materialist, or vitalist, reading of this early data on boys’ belonging in rural communities. 2 Our focus for that research, in the first instance, was on the lives and gender identities of young men living in four diverse and remote places in Australia. Our data-gathering techniques were typical of ethnographic methods. Over three years, we spent extended periods in our four fieldwork sites observing people going through their daily routines in their own settings. In each place, in-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with 36 thirteen-to-sixteen-year-olds. Over a period of six weeks, the 24 boys who were involved in the study were interviewed weekly and the 12 girls were interviewed fortnightly. Loosely structured focus and affinity group discussions were held with senior boys and senior girls in the school (16–18 years of age), mothers, fathers, community members, teachers and youth and welfare service providers. Informal conversations were held with a wide range of local people. We spent time at a variety of community and youth-specific locales (for example, the school, beach and main street) and events (for example, sporting matches, discos and local carnivals). In addition to this fieldwork, we considered relevant government statistical databanks and local documentary materials such as histories, visual archival material and town Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.