The politics of stuckness: Waiting lives in mobile worlds

Elizabeth Straughan, David Bissell and Andrew Gorman-Murray
Additional contact information
David Bissell: The University of Melbourne, Australia

Environment and Planning C, 2020, vol. 38, issue 4, 636-655

Abstract: This paper develops our geographical understanding of the gendered politics of (im)mobility by exploring the hidden politics of waiting experienced by some mobile working households. Reflecting on qualitative fieldwork with female partners of mobile workers in Australia who remain at home, we explain how ‘stuckness’ is a specific form of waiting that highlights a power-geometry where their immobility is exacerbated by the mobility of their partner. Its key contribution is to spotlight an overlooked durational aspect to immobility which supplements a previous focus on spatial immobility. Taking the self-governing activity of emotion management as our point of departure, we draw on qualitative interviews to highlight the multiple ways that our female participants become focused on short-term processes of getting by, leaving them stuck in the present. A more extensive immersion into the lifeworld of one woman through a photo diary and subsequent interview draws attention to the more passive, insidiously listless dimensions of stuckness which can compromise wellbeing for mobile worker partners.

Keywords: Waiting; household; mobilities; labour; precarity; gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2399654419900189 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:38:y:2020:i:4:p:636-655

DOI: 10.1177/2399654419900189

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().