Discourses of Mobility: Institutions,Everyday Lives and Embodiment

This article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the politics of mobility, revealing the ways in which the governing of mobility intersects with everyday mobile lives. We suggest that dominant and enduring institutional discourses of mobility, which are pervaded by a privileging of individualised automobility, can be conceptualised around a framework of morality, modernity and freedom. By examining everyday discourses of mobility in this context we highlight the ways in which these discourses reflect and resist normative sets of knowledge and practices. It is argued that by emphasising the everyday and mundane in an analysis of discourses of mobility, and acknowledging their situatedness in prevailing normative discourses, we are then able to focus on how movement is a social and cultural practice in constant negotiation and (re)production.     

“It's A Boy Thing”

The recent proliferation of videogame theory has opened up a body of work concerned with legitimating the videogame as a viable cultural text. However, there is still a significant gap in research around addressing the lived cultures or cultural practices of gaming as an embedded domestic leisure activity. Furthermore, research into the “cultural practices” of videogames reveals that predications to play, perceptions about, and actual play are highly gendered in ways that reveal gaming as a normalised and normalising technology. This article is the result of nearly four years ethnographic research, during which I interviewed and recorded gamers and gameplay. Six out of the eleven participatory households are represented here. The scope of the research is also expanded through the questionnaire of, at the time of writing, 118 respondents. Included in this demographic are all-female and all-male households, mixed gender, sexuality, and ethnicity and diverse geographical intake from Northern Ireland to southern England. Throughout my research and this article, I argue the political and social necessity of including gamers into research on gaming, in order to better understand the significance of gaming and gaming discourses on our social and political lives.     

Fertility and Distorted Sex Ratios in a Rural Chinese County: Culture,State, and Policy

This article explores how gender bias in population policies interacts with local culture to reinforce distortions in sex ratios among infants and young children in rural China. It argues that population policies introduce new sources of inequality into local culture while, conversely, gender inequalities embedded in local culture influence formal population policy and practice. Applying an institutional approach to the study of an agricultural county in Jiangxi province, southeast China, the analysis identifies four ways in which an interplay between gender bias in policy and culture produces gendered fertility outcomes: (1) the creation of gendered official categories such as “daughter‐only households”; (2) a male bias embedded in local government; (3) the use of local gender norms in state pedagogy; and (4) the reworking or subverting of official norms in ways that reinforce gender inequalities in local reproductive culture. The article concludes that despite indications of contestation of village patriarchy, discrimination against daughters is likely to persist.     

Invisible mobilities: stigma,immobilities, and female sex workers’ mundane socio-legal negotiations of Dhaka’s urban space

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnography, this paper conceptualizes invisible mobilities by exploring the linkages between mobility, invisibility and hotel and residence based sex work in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Since both are illegal in Bangladesh, hotel and residence based sex workers (HRSWs) become targets of the different laws and sex work related social stigma. We show, in this paper, how invisible mobilities is used to strategize and counter-enact against the existing exploitative gendered socio-political-legal regimes and practices involved in sex work. Invisible mobilities refers to the way HRSWs move in order to hide their occupation from society and the law. Invisibility is at the core of all these connections: It enables HRSWs to continue sex work and avoid exclusion from family and members of their communities. While making themselves invisible permits them to continue their daily ways to earn a living, it also reinforces the same social stigma they are constantly trying to avoid. In doing so, this paper reveals the political economy of sex work in the city and provides a new theoretical window to understand the connections between gender, mobility and the city, constructing a bridge between mobility and sex work studies literature.     

Care moves people: complex systems and futures signals supporting production and reflection of individual mobile utopias

ABSTRACT

Futures of mobility are a pressing concern for cities addressing sustainability and climate change challenges. As cities renew their mobility systems and launch efforts to meet these targets, new sensitive qualitative methodologies are needed. This article discusses a focused mobility diary experiment that was conducted in May 2017 in Turku, Finland and its subarea, with a small set of participants. The goal of this study was to gain insights into potential developments in the city’s mobility systems and practices. This article utilises a multidisciplinary complex systems approach describing how we used the concepts of futures signals and mobile utopias as tools when analysing some prefigurative patterns in individual mobility practices. A key outcome of this methodological experimentation was the interconnections made between two research traditions and a notion of the various ways care underlies, effects, and contours the mobility practices of people–in other words, people are moved by care. This article demonstrates how with the concepts of futures signals, and mobilised utopias, we can reach the important aspirational and prefigurative practices and motivations of people, which permit us to interpret potential futures in particular urban settings characterised by daily life activities.     

“Sexy” And “Laddish” Girls

Unpacking ideologies at work within contemporary popular media discourses about young womanhood can be challenging when the terrain of their representation is often presented in a kind of binary-oppositional fashion. There is concern that in contemporary popular culture traditional gender roles are becoming even more entrenched, with femininity increasingly defined around notions of (hyper, hetero-normative) “sexiness.” At the same time, it seems that certain aspects of masculinity, namely sexual hedonism and social, drinking-centred hedonism, have conditionally opened up to young women. The panics that exist around both the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” lead me to unpack here how it is that concerns about women's excessive “sexiness,” and the gendered reinforcement of the sex-object role, relate to discourses of gender “transgression” that often circulate around the figure of the “ladette,” and the supposedly new-found freedoms she is exercising. I suggest that while the figures of the “sexy girl” and the “laddish girl” are both to some extent deplored and constructed as “excessive” and “transgressive” in recent media discourses, they are also both normalised and publicly imag(in)ed through such discourses as central post-feminist paradigms of young womanhood. I go on to explore a possible ideological function of the co-existence of “sexy” and “laddish” girls as normative figures within contemporary media culture.     

BDSM Role Fluidity: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Investigating Switches Within Dominant/Submissive Binaries

This mixed-methods study of BDSM investigates the nuances of BDSM participants’ role identities, role frequencies, and role fluidities—shifts in identities and play across time, location, scene, and play partner. Data were gathered from 202 online surveys and 25 semistructured interviews about participants’ roles given their gender and sexual identities. These data reveal that men tend to self-identify as Dominant, Master, Top, or Sadist (DMTS) and always perform dominant roles, while women tend to self-identify as Submissive, Slave, Bottom, or Masochist (SSBM) and always perform submissive roles. Although this would seem to support the theory that BDSM reinforces gendered dominant/submissive binaries, further analyses indicate that women and queer/pansexual individuals disrupt this binary through their Switch identities and roles. Switching and queer identities, thus, offer the possibility for transforming dominant/submissive and other binaries.     

Gender und Sozialpolitik: Ein Transformationsansatz

Before the third feminist wave, gender theories demanded either an adoption of ‘male’ lifestyles or enhance the status of ‘female’ lifestyles in society to overcome gender inequality. Present, ‘Gender Rebellion Feminisms’, however, debate the binary thinking of gender and challenge the gendered order on this issue. This shift has hardly influenced the debate in social policy, which is still bound to the ‘sameness’ or ‘difference’ theory. This article proposes a transformative approach that conceives equality as a complex concept beyond sameness and difference and calls for a degendering of social policy. By doing so, it is argued, the binary division of gender can be abandoned and feminist critique on social policy can reconnect with contemporary discourses in gender theories. This paradigmatic re-orientation overcomes the binary view on sameness and difference, re-addresses gendered social policy and entails a degendered distribution of care work and gainful employment.     

Stripping for the State

This article examines whole body imaging technologies in contemporary airport security contexts. Situating these technologies more broadly within histories of aviation and theories of mobility, we examine how discourses of technological efficiency and freedom of movement work to obscure the ever-expanding surveillance practices of the state. While whole body imaging technologies are marketed as objective and neutral, we investigate how they draw upon, and reinscribe, existing social inequalities. Using Angela Davis' theory of the strip search as a form of state-sponsored sexual assault, we assess contemporary uses of whole body scanners by the state and allied corporate interests not only as alleged privacy violations, but also as potential acts of violence by the state on marginalized subjects. By demonstrating the disproportionate impact of whole body imaging technologies on particular communities, including the intersections of transgendered travelers, travelers with disabilities, and racialized and religious communities, we show that whole body imaging technologies continue and expand upon the tradition of stratified mobilities that has always been a component of air travel. We also argue that the alleged non-invasiveness and efficiency of the “virtual strip search” marks a troubling trend in which the state consolidates power through increasingly concealed surveillance practices.     

Claudia Jones speaks to “half the world”: gendering Cold War politics in the Daily Worker, 1950–1953

As feminist scholarship has illustrated, historical resurgences of global migration raise questions about the intersections between war politics, persecution of activists, and its gendered implications. Informed by a new historicist approach, this article seeks to contextualize contemporary scholarly conversations on journalism, migration, and feminist studies by conducting a historical analysis of a bi-weekly column entitled “Half the World.” This column was published in the Daily Worker and was written by little-known Caribbean activist and journalist Claudia Jones. A close reading of all printed columns between 1950 and 1953 illustrate that despite Jones’ tendency to reinforce gendered dichotomies of war discourse, where women represented peace and men violence, she also placed women as the creators of a national and transnational movement against US intervention in Korea. Jones’ story, therefore, contributes to previous feminist histories on the role female journalists and activists have played in shaping the relationship between gender, nation, and war politics.     

Geschlechterdemokratie und Arbeitsteilung. Aktuelle feministische Debatten

Recent transformations of societies as well as the erosion of the fordist welfare compromise raise the question of a reformulated concept of work and labor in gender critical terms. Moreover, this new concept of labor should include the opportunity not only to organize labor in democratic ways but also that work enables for democratic behavior and action. The concept of “sociable work” suggests such a gender sensitive perspective. The article combines the two perspectives: the democratic organization of labor as well as the labor sensitive reorganisation of democratic institutions and practices. The article reviews recent feminist theories of democracies and analysis how these theories conceptualize labor, inequality and democracy. Moreover the article shows how and if these theories are able to include the reorganisation of labor as a prerequisite for democratization in gendered terms.     

Speaking to silence: toward queering nonverbal communication

The majority of nonverbal communication research and pedagogy reproduces heterosexist and sexist ideologies, normalizing and naturalizing gender and sexual binaries, and sanctioning an exceedingly narrow range of gendered and sexualized subjects, practices, and relationships. This essay proposes that nonverbal communication scholarship and pedagogy need to address these issues. First, I provide a brief summary of the history of the field of nonverbal communication. Second, I critique the conspicuous absence of the queer subject, the rigid essentialism, and the pervasive heterosexism in nonverbal communication textbooks in particular. Finally, I discuss three examples of communication research that avoid these pitfalls and herald what queering nonverbal communication might look like.     

When People Stay and Things Make Their Way: Airports,Mobilities and Materialities of a Transnational Landscape

Abstract

This article explores different meanings of mobility and place by examining the interweaving of people, things and airports in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two airports – of departure and arrival of this migratory route – I look at the practices of sending and receiving objects by migrants in Lisbon and their kin in Bissau. The transnational yet grounded setting helps to provide a better understanding of the complexity associated with different forms of mobility – including corporeal, imagined and desired – and their key role in socially and relationally constructing a lived airport space, as well as wider social landscapes. Bringing in evidence from a less-explored setting – a small airport in a West African country – will particularly challenge some of the assumptions that tend to associate mobility with ‘modernity’ and fixity with ‘tradition’. It will show how people in Guinea-Bissau are, as much as migrants abroad, dynamically involved in global practices of movement – materialised in trading and reciprocating objects between two continents – through local performances of mobility that do not necessarily involve corporeal travel across borders.     

Proud to be a woman: Womanhood,old age,and emotions

ABSTRACT

This article takes its starting point in the discussions regarding intersecting discourses of gender and age and the lived experience of older women. The main objective is to discuss the experience of womanhood among older women and to demonstrate their active role in creating spaces for themselves and their friends and affecting each other. The study is based on narrative interviews with female members of the University of the Third Age (U3A). The main findings describe older women who actively engage with discourses of gender to embark on positive constructions of womanhood. They create their own spaces for women’s activism that are filled with positive emotions mobilized to support each other. This article discusses such findings and their relevance to the study of old age and gender. As a result, it serves as an invitation to think and feel differently about older women and their experience of womanhood.     

"This area has been declared a prostitution free zone": discursive formations of space, the state, and trans "sex worker" bodies

The mayorally instituted and police-enforced Prostitution Free Zones in Washington, DC, serve as a tool of nation-state disciplinarity, wherein many transgender women of color, viewed as ideologically suspect, are profiled as "sex workers," facing police harassment and arrest. This article explores here how this process is not merely about sex work but rather about discourses that are evoked in the displacement of the always-already displaced-racial, sexed, and gendered "others" through interviews with activists and trans community members, as well as District of Columbia government publications.     

Criticising the Solitary Mobile Subject: Researching Relational Mobilities and Reflecting on Mobile Methods

One of the key arguments of the mobilities paradigm is that people’s mobility practices are embedded in their spatial, cultural, political, economical, social and personal context. Yet, empirical mobility research tends to research these two sides of the social separately – either mobility practices and their subjective sense and experience or their discursive, spatial or structural foundation. Taking this desideratum as point of departure, I will make a proposal for researching the links between structures and practices of mobilities consisting of the application of multiple correspondence analysis. This proposal attempts, furthermore, to operationalise mobilities as relational practices, which reinforces that social networks rather than solitary subjects are the origin of mobility decisions. This methodological approach is demonstrated by a comparative data analysis of movement patterns in England and Switzerland. In the final part of the paper, I will reflect upon methods and quantification more generally – against the background of an understanding of mobilities research as being also critical and political.     

Constructing risk and responsibility: a gender,race, and class analysis of news representations of adolescent sexuality

Teen sexuality has been portrayed as dangerous (i.e., risk of pregnancy, STIs, sexual victimization for girls) yet pervasive in a growing post-feminist culture of sexualization. Adolescents are tasked with negotiating the difficult terrain of desire and danger as adults persistently construct contradictory discourses and panics around teen sexuality. This study examines a sample of online news media through a feminist intersectional lens, considering race, class, gender, and sexuality as mutually imbricated within dynamics of power, to analyze how contemporary news articles on teen sexuality construct adolescent sexuality at the intersection of neoliberalism and the sexual double standard. Our analysis revealed three particular moral panics around risk for girls: (1) pregnancy and STIs; (2) engagements in sexualization; and (3) sexual victimization. We illuminate how the sexual double standard and neoliberal notions of accountability reinstate and reproduce gendered, raced, and classed representations of adolescent sexualities.     

Mobility and the City Improvement District: Frictions in the Human-capital Mobile Assemblage

In this paper, we interrogate the role of the city improvement district (CID) in the intervention and management of mobility within the context of the South African city and the case study of the Groote Schuur Community Improvement District (GSCID), a public–private urban governance scheme situated in Cape Town’s middle income southern suburbs. Using the theoretical lens of bodily-scale mobility, we investigate the CID’s activation and management. This is useful, as we will demonstrate, because it is through the mobility and immobility at the scale of the body, where the CID’s mandate is operationalised and it is through the control of mobility that the CID’s mission, discourses and activities are linked. This work demonstrates that CIDs, as elite-driven urban renewal initiatives closely aligned with capital interests, employ exclusionary spatial practices that have the potential to shape the twenty-first century urban experience in significant ways. We conclude by theorising the co-constitutive nature of human mobilities and capital as the ‘human-capital mobile assemblage’ and by arguing that the CID occupies an ambivalent place in the contemporary city.     

Verflochtene Mobilitäten und ihr Management. Mobilitätspraktiken von Expatriate-Managern und ihren <Emphasis Type="Italic">‚trailing spouses‘</Emphasis> im Auslandseinsatz

This article analyzes forms and enabling practices of expatriate mobility, i. e. the mobility of managers and skilled professionals assigned to a foreign subsidiary of their company. We will show that (1) expatriate mobility has to be conceived of as complex entangled mobilities that add up to a hyper-mobility, and (2) that this hyper-mobility inevitably depends on the active mobility work of the expatriates’ ‘trailing spouses’. Thus, it becomes clear that the mobility management on which expatriate mobility depends is highly gendered. By focusing on the specifics of expatriate mobility, the article also opens up new theoretical perspectives for mobility research in general.