Feminist cartographies: Women´s daily urban mobilities to work by public transportation in Guadalajara, Mexico

This dissertation questions the systemic exclusion that women face in their daily
urban mobilities to work by public transportation in Guadalajara, Mexico. It
aims to understand unequal mobilities by emphasising that gender intersects
with other power structures, such as ethnicity, skin colour, social class, age, religion,
and functional diversity, affecting women’s mobility in a multidimensional
way. The research was guided by questions aimed at understanding how urban
mobility barriers impact the daily lives of women and at knowing the strategies
they use to negotiate the barriers. The research seeks to understand how women’s
intersectional experiences are configured through their paths to work by public
transportation. And to comprehend how women’s narratives, emotions, and embodied
knowledges are essential for transforming the planning of urban mobilities
considering a social justice approach.
I analyse the historical and geographical construction of unequal relations in
the metropolis of Guadalajara and the main social, spatial, and mobile dynamics
that limit women´s movement and their access to workplaces, social relations, and
urban services. To frame the research, I propose a theoretical framework from the
fields of urban mobility, feminist geography, and body politics. Adopting these
frameworks my gaze permits a joint study of women’s experiences and urban
mobilities including the emotional dimension. My framework situates the
understanding of the mobility barriers in the context of social relations and places.
It sets out to understand the way in which mobility experiences are empirical
knowledge that questions the status quo and seeks to eradicate inequalities.
The methodology follows feminist path based on a mixture of new methods
from mobility studies and traditional methods to capture the experience of movement
and the interaction of women with the mobility and transportation systems.
I travelled with twelve women with diverse social profiles on their journeys
to work by public transport and mapped the barriers they face, the strategies
they use to overcome the barriers, and the most frequent emotions they feel. In
this way, it was possible to consider the structural and personal barriers from an
intersectional approach.
The main findings are captured in a set of cartographies that portray the specific
barriers that women encounter at each moment of their journeys. The trajectory
maps reveal the internal and external worlds of women’s mobilities. Women
pointed out what blocks their paths and their responses to the constraints. Womenimprinted the emotions that sped up their pace, lengthened their paths, and made
them sweat or their hearts race, revealing implied sensescapes. In this way, the cartographies
subvert the traditional disembodied maps that are used to plan cities
and transportation systems. The relief maps detail the intersections of mobile urban
power structures that position women in various intersections in the places
they pass through. The charts expose how inequalities materialise in women´s bodies
through experiences of exclusion and specific emotions.
The cartographies, which include the women´s narratives as the movement
that articulates the topography, show that women encounter multidimensional
barriers, which they try to overcome, subvert, or resist by using multiple strategies
and tactics. They negotiate space, risk, time, financial resources, and social
networks. Nonetheless, they are not able to negotiate the barriers each time, and
not all women have the same resources to negotiate the barriers.
A major finding of this research is the need to consider the intersectional
contexts of urban mobilities and women’s experience of moving, including the
emotional dimension in urban mobility planning and policies. The constant
fear, stress, and anger that women feel while moving emphasises the political dimension
of affectivities within unequal mobilities. Specific emotions reveal the
injustices women face.
The emotional maps urge a paradigm shift in the conceptualisation of urban
mobilities and the policies to address the disparities that affect women detrimentally.
Women´s narratives call for three priorities to transform urban mobilities:
placing care at the centre of the mobility and transportation systems, considering
autonomy and freedom as intrinsic values of women´s urban paths; and
conceptualising mobility as a mobile common.
In summary, this research contributes to the counter geographies of urban
mobilities that historically have erased women from maps and formal city-making
processes. The embodied cartographies not only position women as active
agents of cities and mobilities but also provide concrete proposals for the reconceptualisation
of mobility and transportation systems.
This thesis contributes to development studies in three main aspects: 1) proposing
an innovative methodology to study women´s urban mobilities from an
intersectional and embodied perspective; 2) emphasizing the emotional dimension
of urban mobilities; and 3) positioning women´s priorities, views and contributions
regarding the construction of equitable and resilient urban settings
which are part of the global and local agendas that aim to achieve increased just
mobility, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, the New Urban Agenda,
and the State-run laws.