Out of place: women experiences in public spaces of mobility in Buenos Aires

DHAN ZUNINO SINGH

México DF

Congreso; 14th T2M Annual Conference. Mobilities: Space of Flows and Friction; 2016

T2M

The gender perspective and, even more, the passenger as sexualized bodily subjectivity, has reminded unexplored in studies on Buenos Aires transport and history as much as mobility has not been a subject in gender history. In this context, the paper explores the experiences of women in Buenos Aires public transport over the first decades of the 20th century; a period in which the city expanded, population increase rapidly, means of transported multiplied and modernized, and women began to use and occupy the public space massively and travel daily. The paper also depicts how women were represented through discourses and images in mass media, advertising, literature and films in order to understand what new experiences the female passenger triggered in a space largely dominated by men. Most of those representations expressed male anxieties, desires and perceptions but the paper also explores through those materials what women used to say about their own experiences as passengers. The experience of women travelling everyday in that modern metropolis has not been smoothly, although could have signified a space of freedom. Women have tended to be seen as a sexualized object and abuse or harassment has been a common experience. Hence, the paper discusses the gender relations built up in the daily mobility to approach public transport as a space with a constitutive tension between bodily proximity and social distance and as a place where power relations are not only reproduced but also produced. In short, the focus on female passengers aims at highlight the frictions of daily mobility in Buenos Aires and how women in public space has tended to be perceived (by others but also by themselves) as ?out of place?.