Spatial mobility: A gendered phenomenon

As Edward Soja has rightly mentioned, it is very important to understand how “space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the ‘apparently innocent spatiality of social life’ and how human geographies often become filled with politics and ideology.” (Soja, 1996) There have been several studies that point towards the inevitable inequality inherent in the usage of places and spaces. Be it class, gender, caste, religion, disability or any other parameter, spaces always come to embody dimensions of power based on these parameters. Thus one can say that the ‘social structures’ are always evidently or in a subtle form visible through the ‘spatial structures‘. To quote Lefebvre (1991), “space is produced by those who use it every day; to the extent that spaces reflect social norms.” (Spain, 2014: 582) Hence, through this theoretical essay, I aim to bring to the fore, the latent spatiality of gender and how such spatiality tends to sustain the unequal gender relations.