‘Let’s Have Some Music’: Sound, Gender and Car Mobility

Abstract

This paper draws on a visceral approach to explore the role of sound/music for people who drive cars. We examine the ways in which gendered subjectivities emerge from the pleasures associated with listening to sound/music during short car trips. The first part of the paper reviews the recent literature on ‘feelings for cars’. We highlight why gender is often absent from the literature before offering a conceptual lens drawing on geographical feminist thinking to consider sound/music, feelings, gender and mobility. We draw on driving ethnographies to explore the role of sound/music in how gender is assembled with the flow of connections between bodies, spaces and affects/emotions. Considering the contextual pleasures of listening to sound/music on these trips and emergent gender subjectivities we provide a more nuanced interpretation of why people choose to drive cars. To conclude, we point to the implications for applied research for new context-specific transport and climate change policy.

Key Words:

• Automobility
• Bodies
• Cars
• Sound
• Music
• Visceral

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.