Disciplinary mobility and women’s empowerment: a complicated connection

Annabel Dulhunty

Mobilities, 2023, vol. 18, issue 2, 282-296

Abstract: The intersections between gender, mobility and power have been well established. While research has examined the inequity of (im)mobility, the role of restricted mobility as a form of domestic violence and the connection between freedom of movement and feminism, hardly any attention has been given to the relationship between physical mobility and women’s empowerment programming. By drawing on the literature on ‘disciplined’ mobility and feminist understandings of space and violence, this research argues that mobility and empowerment are complicatedly entwined. Through qualitative field research in West Bengal, India, this article illustrates that empowerment programming is limited in what it can achieve due to the disciplining of mobility. Women’s mobility is disciplined through patriarchal control, evident in three key domains: first, through actively restricting women’s mobility; second, through surveillance and monitoring; and third, through women self-regulating their own behaviour. Through showing the difficulty of improving women’s wellbeing via empowerment programs, this research illustrates the pervasive violence of disciplined mobility.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17450101.2022.2088298 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:rmobxx:v:18:y:2023:i:2:p:282-296

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rmob20

DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2022.2088298

Access Statistics for this article

Mobilities is currently edited by Professor Kevin Hannam, Professor Mimi Sheller and Professor John Urry

More articles in Mobilities from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().