Gender and Daily Mobility in a New Zealand City, 1920-1960

This article will discuss how the concept of gender used in transport research is often one-dimensional, with the focus on gendered variations in behavior rather than on gendered meaning and identities. This paper will develop a more complex and multi-stranded way of approaching the issue of gender and transport, called daily mobility. A case study of a neighborhood in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in the early decades of last century is presented to explore how the practices of daily mobility constituted gender. A three-part concept of gender is developed as a basis of analysis: gender as a pattern of social relations, a cultural system of meaning and a component personal identity. This is then used to analyze a collection of sixty oral histories. The period 1920-1960 is particularly interesting; in these decades extensive and widely used public transport systems (notably electric trams) shared urban streets with bicycles and pedestrians, and the emerging private modes of motorcycle and automobile. As new transport technologies were discovered, they offered the opportunity for new social practices to be formed around their use, for cultural meanings to be assigned to the technologies and for embodied individual subjectivities to be constructed.

  • Authors:
    • Law, Robin
  • Publication Date: 2002-12

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Print
  • Features: Photos; References;
  • Pagination: pp 425-445
  • Serial:

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01144199
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS
  • Created Date: Nov 17 2009 2:58PM