‘Squeezing in’: body, affect, infrastructure and everyday passenger mobilities in contemporary China

Abstract

This article explores the entanglements of bodies, affects and infrastructures that give shape to the experiences, practices and sense-making of everyday mobilities among metro passengers in contemporary China. Building on the affective turn and infrastructural turn, this paper argues that passengering is an affectively charged and infrastructurally mediated process of forming and negotiating mobile subjectivities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, this paper demonstrates how ‘squeezing in’ is a core space-making practice among Chinese passengers that involves not only acquiring bodily skills, habits, and tactics but also engaging in affective capacities to negotiate modes of feeling and affective relations on the move. Moreover, situating the analysis in the specific context of infrastructural development and citizenship cultivation in contemporary China, this paper reveals how the norms, regulations and practices of ‘good ridership’ is closely entangled with the narrative of ‘quality citizenship’ in post-reform China. This paper thus enriches existing literature on passenger mobilities through providing new empirical insights and conceptual contemplation on what it means to be a passenger.