Narrations and practices of mobility and immobility in the maintenance of gender dualisms

Abstract

This paper analyses the role of practices and representations of mobility in supporting particular kinds of gender orders. While scholarship has shown the various ways women are materially and symbolically ‘fixed’ in place, less attention has been paid to how discourses and practices of mobility interface with systems of gender differentiation more broadly. This work is based on a robust empirical base of 55 interviews, 90 h of participant observation and an analysis of museum displays in Kalgoorile, Western Australia, an iconic frontier mining town selected for this investigation as a site of strongly bifurcated gender discourses. Analysing our field data through the lens of feminist theory which problematizes gender binaries, we argue that while some narrations of gender mobilities serve to reinforce gender binaries, lived practices of movement can also destabilise (idealised) notions of gendered movement. This paper extends conceptual work by advancing understanding about the role of mobility within systems of gender differentiation, showing how lived practices of mobility are just as likely to challenge idealised patterns of gendered movement as they are to reinforce these patterns.

Key words:

• Mobility
• sex-work
• skin-work
• gender binaries
• mining
• Kalgoorlie Australia

Notes

1. We further note that gender binarisms limit understandings of gender identities in ways that are both heteronormative and ignore trans-gender identities.

2. After Cabezas (2004) we recognise that ‘sex worker’ is a fluid boundary and ‘sex work’ a fluid category.

3. Though since the ascendance of the internet, personal computing devices and mobile phones many aspects of the sex-trade are now, arguably, ‘everywhere and anywhere’ (Hubbard).

4. This information was gleaned through our interviews with skin workers.

5. We also found discussion of ‘private’, unmarked brothels off Hay Street which were problematized.

6. Mining work was also supported by a rigorous system of compensation in case of illness or accident that had no equivalent in sex and skin work, especially the ‘less visible’ brothels which were not linked-in to local health services as were Hay Street Brothels. In contrast to the image of mining as particularly dangerous work we all perceived sex and skin work as potentially much more dangerous than mine work.

7. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/1039/1/Fitness_for_Work_in_Mining.pdf This report identifies truck drivers in the mining industry as a segment of the workforce that is particularly vulnerable to a range of health problems due to ‘prolonged exposure’ to ‘occupational sitting’.

8. A ‘ute’ is Australian slang for a low-riding pick-up truck.

9. We were not able to find any male sex or skin workers in Kalgoorlie (though we did ask participants about this).