Re‐Reading Time‐Geography from a Gender Perspective: Examples from Gendered mobility

Abstract

This paper is based on qualitative research on commuting and women's everyday lives. In the project 'Re-reading time-geography from a feminist perspective', labour force mobility is an important way of analysing women's time-space use and identifying the constraints experienced when organising everyday life. We claim that time-geography provides a useful set of analytical tools that successfully collaborate with social science theory such as gender studies. Timegeography has been questioned by feminists as well as others. However, we argue that timegeography could provide gender studies with a close, empathic and micro-levelled interventional approach that makes obstacles and constraints due to spatio-temporal conditions visible and thereby changeable. In this paper we use results from previous research to prove that timegeography is an approach with several sets of useful concepts that describe and analyse women's everyday struggles and possibilities in an era in which mobility and transport have become undisputed factors of everyday life. In order to do this, time-geography needs to be read from a gendered standpoint. Although we are still in the formative stages of this re-reading of original texts and the formation of additional sets of concepts, the indications are that this work is worth pursuing and expanding.

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