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.

中文翻译：

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流动性是为了什么？南亚的空间、时间、劳动力和性别


随着公共场所性别暴力和性暴力的增加，有关妇女安全的问题在印度和巴基斯坦变得越来越重要。这引发了人们对南亚公共场所女性的存在和流动性及其决定因素的疑问。在本文中，我们通过将流动性概念分解为两个新类别：工具性流动性和实质性流动性，扩展了关于空间和时间、社会再生产、古典父权制和日常生活的女权主义学术研究。我们利用这些类别来更深入地研究国家层面女性流动的空间和时间模式。我们基于全国代表性时间使用调查的回归模型和时间图表明，这两个国家的女性在公共场所的出现率仍然极低。它仅随着有偿/无偿劳动和教育的旅行而暂时增加。然而，任何打破日常生活节奏或空间和时间规范的流动性却很少被观察到。我们的分析还表明，这些流动性还受到婚姻、阶级和种姓等社会背景的影响。此外，尽管存在普遍看法，但我们发现两国女性的流动模式没有实质性差异。本文提出了重新评估新自由主义经济体制与古典父权制之间的相互作用以及空间、时间和社会再生产的“权力几何”如何影响南亚妇女流动性的案例。