7 - Moving Forward: A Process of Becoming

Summary

Mapping women's travel

In this study — mapping Eastern Indonesian women's travel — the journey has arrived at the destination. This final chapter engages with both a conceptual discussion of the previous chapters’ themes and a strategic analysis of the specificity of the politics of space and its relation to subjectivity. Here, I show how my engagement with the local specificity of women's mobility in Part Two leads to a discussion of the power geometry of place. This links micropolitics of women's travel with the macropolitics of the region. I have explored the notion of women crossing and negotiating boundaries through the travel stories of teachers and nurses (Chapter 5) and also of domestic workers (Chapter 6), such as Susana, leaving home. Susana's emphasis on the importance of her deportment, her bodily attributes of fair skin and her spatial movement are indications of a subject being aware of multiplicities within herself in terms of her race/region, class and gender identity, moving through trajectories of the geometry of power. She strategically placed herself through langgar laut, playing her politics of place. Through travel, Susana and others crossed and negotiated boundaries, creating a space of different scales of relations and power.

My contribution to the research on women's mobility focuses on the relationship between the creation of a transient, liminal space of travel and women's shifting subjectivities. This relationship can then be used to explore the link between space, gender, and subjectivity. I have taken into account the travelling subject, explored women's agency in their mobility, and examined their mobility as more than the product of women's class positions and forces of globalization. I have done so by paying attention to the women's voice, identity and personal meanings of mobility, as suggested by Silvey and Lawson (1999).

As Part Two indicates, Eastern Indonesian women's travels in the context of local/ethnic and class relations contain gender dimensions in which a complex mix of identities shapes their mobility. The specificity of the local space produces and reproduces an association of gender with particular spaces, social categories/hierarchies, activities, landscapes and symbols, in which inter-subjective and collective experiences of the community are negotiated (Bhabha 1994). I have analysed women's travel as a space of shifting gender relations in a range of spatial domains and scales which vary between places and over historical time (Callaway 1993; McDowell 1999; Silvey 2006).