Mobility for What? Space, Time, Labor, and Gender in South Asia

Questions about women’s safety have gained importance in both India and Pakistan, as gendered and sexual violence in public spaces has risen. This motivates questions about the presence and mobility of women in public spaces in South Asia and their determinants. In this paper, we extend feminist scholarship on space and time, social reproduction, classical patriarchy, and the everyday by unpacking the concept of mobility into two new categories: instrumental and substantive mobility. We use these categories to dig deeper into spatial and temporal patterns of women’s mobility at the national level. Our regression models and tempograms based on nationally representative time-use surveys show that women’s presence in public spaces remains abysmally low in both countries. It increases only temporarily with travel for paid/unpaid labor and education in instrumental ways. However, any mobility that breaks the temporal rhythm of the everyday or norms governing space and time is rarely observed. Our analysis also shows that these mobilities are also affected by social contexts such as marriage, class, and caste, among others. Also, despite popular perceptions, we find no substantial differences in the mobility patterns for women in the two countries. This paper makes a case for reassessing interactions between neoliberal economic regimes and classical patriarchy and how “power geometries” of space, time, and social reproduction impact women’s mobilities in South Asia.