Beyond respectability? Office taxis and gendered automobility in urban India

Abstract

With its late-night work requirements and prevalence of women employees, the Indian information technology industry is firmly embedded within urban middle-class imaginaries of the mobile woman traversing the city after dark. This article analyses the emergence of the office taxi, a legally-mandated provision to facilitate night-time travel, as a crucial site for the enactment of gendered automobility. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in the South Indian city of Chennai, it explores the textures of women’s mobility by grappling with ‘respectability’, an important analytical framework for unpacking embodied modes of class and caste consolidation. It highlights how corporate and state praxis work together to create the structural conditions of mobility, and examines the multifaceted ways in which women themselves negotiate these measures. Moreover, it interrogates distinctly neoliberal interpretations of the taxi that result in particular forms of gendered (im)mobility. In doing so, it suggests that thinking with and beyond normative frameworks such as respectability can offer new insights into gendered articulations of mobility, work and urban life.