‘The road changes everything’: shifting gendered mobilities, spaces and subjectivities in Shimshal, Pakistan

Abstract

Shimshal is the most recent village in the Gojal region of northern Pakistan to gain road access to the Karakoram Highway. This paper analyzes relational reconfigurations of gendered mobilities, spaces and subjectivities in the community that are contoured by the ensuing shift in local mobility system, in which vehicular mobility replaces walking as the means to access the highway. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic data, we describe pedestrian-era gendered movement patterns and spaces, and the ways in which modernizing road infrastructure has reorganized mobilities and regendered village spaces. We then analyze changes in gender performances and self-representations that are commensurate to the modernized spaces in which they are enacted. We conclude by assessing the uneven and unanticipated consequences of these mobility-inflected processes for gendered futures in the community.

Keywords:

• Gender
• mobility
• Pakistan
• road infrastructure
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

We thank our research assistants and participants for their contributions to the execution of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nancy Cook

Nancy Cook (PhD York University) is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the interdisciplinary MA program in Social Justice and Equity Studies at Brock University in St Catharines, Canada. She serves as a co-editor for Studies in Social Justice. Two of her ethnographic research projects have analyzed transcultural interactions between development workers from the global north and local populations in Pakistan, highlighting their gendered, racialized, sexualized and imperial dimensions. In recent research studies in the Gojal region of northern Pakistan, she focuses on mobility justice, mobility disaster, and the gendered constitution of (im)mobility.

David Butz

David Butz (PhD McMaster University) is a professor in the Department of Geography and Tourism Studies and the interdisciplinary graduate programs in Social Justice and Equity Studies and Popular Culture at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. He sits on the Faculty Steering Committee of Brock’s transdisciplinary Social Justice Research Institute, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Studies in Social Justice. David has been conducting ethnographic research in northern Pakistan since 1988 on a range of topics including human transport labor, environmental governance, irrigation agriculture, and development-related social change. His current research focuses on the social implications of road infrastructure development and associated (im)mobilities in the Gojal region of northern Pakistan.