“Just Wait Here Ten Minutes”: Mobility’s Masculinism Within Urban Exploration

Abstract

In this piece, I place mobility and urban exploration in synecdochal relationship, illustrating how the latter is positioned as the near-ideal expression of the former. Urban exploration is praised as the consummate mobility practice, celebrating its rich subversive and liberatory potential despite acknowledgment that its practitioners are predominantly White men. My analysis of urban exploration’s masculinist rhetoric shows this praise to be misguided, as the masculinist and capitalist foundations of urban exploration illustrate the need for radical rethinking of both this practice and the conceptualization of mobility that sees subversive potential in it. After elucidating urban exploration’s underlying masculinism and habits of commodification of city spaces, I draw on the work of feminist geographer Doreen Massey to call for new relational paradigms of mobility that begin with a more just foundation of embodied experiences of difference.