Pedaling towards emancipation: Women’s narratives of (vélo)mobility/immobility in different geographical places

Abstract

This research is part of a larger study, examining the gendered mobility/immobility of female asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants in their homelands and in the host country (Germany). In this study I focus mainly on the life histories of ten women (one Iraqi, one Somalian, two Syrians, three Afghans and three Iranian) who recently fled to Germany and took part in a project called Bike Bridge, which uses bikes as tools to increase the spatial and social mobility of female refugees/asylum seekers and to foster social inclusion. The study seeks to investigate the interconnections between gender and (vélo)mobility in different regions. I understand mobility as corporal travel of people for leisure, work and socialization purposes which is not only limited to the present and past displacement (actual mobility) but also includes the concept of motility which is the potential of movement as lived and experienced (Kaufmann et al. 2004).

My analysis is guided by the spatial triad approach (Lefebvre 1991) which conceptualizes mobility dialectically through its perceived, conceived and lived dimensions of the production of spaces. Perceived mobility is what the women experienced socially and culturally in different geographic contexts. Conceived mobility refers to material infrastructure like bike paths, roads and public transportation.

In the last part, I focus on the embodied practice of riding a bicycle by women as a lived mobility example in Iran and Iraq. I discuss how urban public spaces can be sites of everyday resistance for some women to challenge and negotiate patriarchal ideas through their embodied spatial practices like cycling. To collect data for this section, I have particularly focused on virtual social spaces such as Instagram and Twitter as they have provided democratic spaces for an expression of ordinary people and in particular women.

The findings draw attention to the centrality of socially constructed women’s morality and the spatialization of moral codes of behavior in shaping women’s everyday mobility in different geographical places (Freeman 2005; Silvey 2000). The study also indicates the ways women try to reclaim public space and challenge their confinement to the private sphere of their households through recreational cycling.