“Just Wait Here Ten Minutes”: Mobility’s Masculinism Within Urban Exploration

Abstract

In this piece, I place mobility and urban exploration in synecdochal relationship, illustrating how the latter is positioned as the near-ideal expression of the former. Urban exploration is praised as the consummate mobility practice, celebrating its rich subversive and liberatory potential despite acknowledgment that its practitioners are predominantly White men. My analysis of urban exploration’s masculinist rhetoric shows this praise to be misguided, as the masculinist and capitalist foundations of urban exploration illustrate the need for radical rethinking of both this practice and the conceptualization of mobility that sees subversive potential in it. After elucidating urban exploration’s underlying masculinism and habits of commodification of city spaces, I draw on the work of feminist geographer Doreen Massey to call for new relational paradigms of mobility that begin with a more just foundation of embodied experiences of difference.

Keywords:

• Embodied difference
• masculinism
• mobility
• new mobilities
• urban exploration

Notes

Notes

1 When discussing the production of urban space, I draw from Henri Lefebvre’s concepts as expounded upon in The Production of Space, where capitalist space is the product of the dynamic and variable interrelations of spatial practices, representations of space, and representational spaces.

2 Garrett describes UrbEx as “male dominated” (Explore 21) but does not use the term cisgender or consider gender identity further. He does not comment explicitly on other embodied differences such as race, class, sexuality, age, or able-bodiedness.

3 Bennett describes “bunkerology” as “predominantly male” (630) but does not use the term cisgender or consider gender identity further. He points to the specificity of his autoethnographic experience as a “British male researcher in his early 40s” (631), but he does not comment explicitly on other embodied differences such as race, class, sexuality, or able-bodiedness.

4 I refer to Berger’s statement that “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at…. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (47).