Narrations and practices of mobility and immobility in the maintenance of gender dualisms

Abstract

This paper analyses the role of practices and representations of mobility in supporting particular kinds of gender orders. While scholarship has shown the various ways women are materially and symbolically 'fixed' in place, less attention has been paid to how discourses and practices of mobility interface with systems of gender differentiation more broadly. This work is based on a robust empirical base of 55 interviews, 90 hours of participant observation and an analysis of museum displays in Kalgoorile, Western Australia, an iconic frontier mining town selected for this investigation as a site of strongly bifurcated gender discourses. Analysing our field data through the lens of feminist theory which problematizes gender binaries (Braidotti 2002; Coole and Frost 2010; Haraway 1991), we argue that while some narrations of gender mobilities serve to reinforce gender binaries, lived practices of movement can also destabilise (idealised) notions of gendered movement. This paper extends conceptual work by advancing understanding about the role of mobility within systems of gender differentiation, showing how lived practices of mobility are just as likely to challenge idealised patterns of gendered movement as they are to reinforce these patterns.

Stuck and sticky in mobile academia: reconfiguring the im/mobility binary

“…Being ‘stuck in place’, for instance, tends to denote rooted communities who are considered socially and geographically immobile (e.g. Boyer et al, 2017 ); the term has also been used to refer to ‘stuck policy places’ (Pillow, 2015 , p. 64). ‘Stickiness’ has been used to refer to the ways in which individuals become anchored to particular contexts such as countries and workplaces (e.g.…”

Doing and undoing gender in rice business and marketplaces in Tanzania

“…Elsewhere, women also tend to despise fellow women who dress too sexily at workplaces (Carr & Kelan, 2016;Mavin & Grandy, 2012). Society produces norms about dressing because of the tendency to link women with sexual propriety (Boyer et al, 2017). Accordingly, the majority of women traders in Kyela went to the marketplace with handbags holding their Kitenge (a loose cloth worn by women in casual work and social events, symbolising respectability), and once there they put it on.…”

The myth of LGBTQ mobilities: framing the lives of gender- and sexually diverse Australians between regional and urban contexts

“…Although the Queer Generations project did not set out specifically to ask questions related to mobility, internal migration, regional-to-urban transitions and other kinds of geographic and social movement, these topics emerged strongly in participants' accounts of growing up in both interviews and focus groups conducted in Australia. In these mobility narratives (Boyer, Mayes and Pini 2017) we observed a number of tropes related to LGBTQ transitions to adulthood. Greater than half the participants in our study described having experienced some form of mobility, broadly defined, in ways which were valuable for them to recount in articulating their stories.…”