Looking for gender in mobility justice: implications for transport and mobility futures

In her recent book: Mobility justice, Sheller (2018: 17) argues that we need to move beyond existing theories of transport justice to consider ‘all forms of movement’ and ‘the wide-ranging techniques for the management of different kinds of im/mobilities and mobility infrastructures’. ‘Mobility’ as opposed to ‘transport’ justice is about embodied relations of gender, racialization, age, disability, sexuality etc., as situated in historical contexts of colonialism; ‘rights to the city’; movement across borders – including violence against women; and the politics of the circulation of goods, resources, pollution and waste. This paper considers this proposition from a gendered perspective, calling upon feminist approaches to justice, space and mobility and looking at particular mobility and transport issues that have been the subject of debate for decades, such as the transport and mobility implications of gendered ‘domestic’ roles and under-representation of women in the transport industry; and emerging issues of violence, harassment and immobilisation that operate across multiple scales.