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Men and women on the move

Dramas of the road

University of Karlskrona/Ronneby, Sweden

This article comments on three post-Second-World-War road novels: Kerouac’s On the Road(1957), Robbins’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues(1976), Atkinson’s Highways and Dance Halls(1995). Framing its perspective within the question of what is involved in creating a 20th-century ‘traveller identity’, it conceptualizes the road in terms of how it historically and generically emerged as a primarily male territory, gendering the travel experience as a ‘male’ identity project which sociospatially constructs women as Others. Via mythologically and psychoanalytically inspired approaches to travel, it discusses the boundaries of men’s and women’s spatial movement. Juxtaposing the supposedly stationary situation of women with the performance of two (fictional) women travellers it highlights the gendered politics of location and subjectivity issuing forth as men and women collide and collude in the same congested plot. To conclude, the article discusses the question whether a regendering of the representation of women on the road is at all possible in light of the genre’s heavily gendered past, and phrases its conclusions within a framework of women’s controversial mobility.

Key Words: gendering • identity politics • mobility • representations of women • road narrative • road novel • space • travel criticism • travel narrative • women travellers

European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, 403-420 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/136754940000300307


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