“That crosscountry 1969 vw squareback and holiday inn affair”: lesbian mobility

Abstract

This article argues that lesbian mobility contributed to the development of lesbian identity in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing primarily on published accounts, it explores the ways in which women achieved and sustained their lesbian identity in part through their access to what cultural geographers term a transportation assemblage or constellation of mobility. This was constituted through the symbolic meaning of mobility for predominantly white women, the existence of new highway networks and Volkswagen vehicles, which were popularized through countercultural branding, and lesbians’ embodied experiences of fear and desire.