Re-storying gendered im/mobilities through a mobile and generationed autoethnography

Abstract

This mobile autoethnography reveals the spectacular and the mundane in gendered im/mobilities. It considers generational stories of death and near death to apparently mundane mobilities to state-induced immobilisations and present day imagined mobilities of motherhood. Stories are uncovered and analysed using mobile autoethnography, which in tandem is scrutinized in relation to autobiography. I set my own present-day story of gendered im/mobilities in conversation with the stories of my parents, grandparents, great-grand-parents and current generations, including my children, spanning the last one hundred years in Northern Ireland and England. The paper argues that the celebration of certain stories across generations is gendered in a way that intersects with other social characteristics and this is bound up with time. Biographies are connected to the wider socio-cultural and political mobility landscapes that structured mobile lives. The often re-storied narratives of the spectacular contrast with the less known and more hidden stories, the micro-mobilities of the mundane. The paper draws out the importance of autoethnographic storying in revealing the ways in which micro-mobilities connect to broader transnational and global im/mobilities and to mobilities of the future.