Towards a feminist politics of mobility: U.S. Travel and immigration memoirs

Leah Butterfield

doi:10.14198/fem.2020.36.06

Abstract

This paper challenges longstanding cultural associations that link men to mobility and women to stability by outlining what I term a feminist politics of mobility. Bringing together four contemporary memoirs that foreground journeys, I explore how U.S. women embody and represent their mobility, as well as how movement shapes their relationships to global power structures and to norms of gender and sexuality. I draw on feminist geography, feminist and queer theory, memoir studies and mobility scholarship to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love (2006), Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us (2012), Daisy Hernández’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014), and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012). Highlighting the differences between these authors’ journeys as well as the patterns across them, I ultimately find that these memoirists model a feminist politics of mobility, wherein moving through space redistributes power to women and renegotiates social relations that have historically supported women’s subordination.

Highlights

This paper challenges longstanding cultural associations that link men to mobility and women to stability by outlining what I term a feminist politics of mobility
I consider four books published during the recent «memoir boom» that approach gender and mobility in provocative ways: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006), Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us: A
Their authors inhabit distinct social positions, with differing levels of privilege as a result of race, class, citizenship status, sexual orientation and other factors. These four stories are linked by their central plots: women on journeys, moving through space as they reckon with identity, selfhood and cultural expectations in the twenty-first century United States. By putting these diverse memoirs in conversation with one another, I outline a feminist politics of mobility, wherein women enact positive, sometimes radical change, as they move through space –reconfiguring their senses of self, rejecting prescribed gender roles and taking risks in the hopes of reaching better, more just futures

Summary

HIERARCHIES OF MOBILITY

Leisure travel and migration are linked by their heightened mobility, but they have divergent histories, embodied realities and cultural representations (Domosh and Seager 110). Point B is different for these authors, too, and neither Grande nor Hernández tell a straightforward tale that begins in global south and ends in global north Owing to these complex narrative structures and to the racial biases of many book publishers, marketers and readers, neither Grande’s nor Hernández’s memoir ended up on a bestseller list, nor have they reached the pop culture status of Eat Pray Love or Wild. Eat Pray Love is a cosmopolitan travel narrative, Wild is a solitary wilderness story, The Distance Between Us is a first-generation immigration tale, and A Cup of Water Under My Bed relates a second-generation coming-of-age immigrant experience Among these four tales, there is a clear hierarchy of mobilities –some ways of moving are less risky, less damaging and less encumbered by prejudice, poverty or fear. Leah Butterfield Towards a feminist politics of mobility: U.S Travel and immigration memoirs they use the language of mobility, reflecting on moments of movement and transformation

ROUTES AND ROOTS

THE THREAT OF WOMEN’S MOBILITY

MOBILITY AS RESISTANCE

RECONFIGURING IDENTITY

CONCLUSION