1 - Women, Space, and Travel

Summary

Introduction

Exploring the mobility experiences and subjectivities of women travellers in the context of a developing country, this book aims to contribute to the theorization of women's travel. Routes of travel are significant in tracing contemporary social and cultural processes (Clifford 1997; Tsing 2000). The routes of travel by Eastern Indonesian women are varied and so are the outcomes. This book focuses on groups of young women travellers from Eastern Indonesia. It analyses the ways these women through their travel have created a subjective space enabling re-imagining identity and subject positions in a larger scale of social relations.

Travel, traveller, and travel stories have formed the heart of geography as a scientific discipline for centuries (Domosh 1991). In the context of Indonesia, travel is a visible part of the recent economic and political changes that have taken place in the country. Women's travel is a component of these national and regional transformations or the macropolitics of location, and is interconnected to multi-layered social relations. Travel also reflects a range of specific local, social and cultural changes. A question that motivates my research concerns these forces of change in relation to women and space; why and how has travel preoccupied women of Eastern Indonesia? More specifically, I address three inseparable concerns: the distinctive characteristics of women's voyages; how women's travel not only reflects and reproduces but also resists gendered space; and how the space of travel allows women to shift subject positions and subjectivities.

Indonesia is the setting of my research. The country's recent political and economic changes provide a window through which we can gain a perspective on the flow of people, and of women in particular. My choice of Eastern Indonesia as the regional focus of the study follows one of the classic interests of human geography in its concern for the region, the area or the locality (Massey 1984, p. 2). My own familiarity with the people, language and culture is, of course, an advantage. Eastern Indonesia, in particular the province of East Nusa Tenggara, attracts my interest for a number of reasons. It is known as a place at the margin. The region has been described as the Outer Islands, with a relatively low transport penetration indicating that it is a “peripheral region” (Rutz 1976, p. 161), and “the least integrated and most underdeveloped of Indonesia's provinces” (Drake 1989, p. 221).