The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice: An Introduction

Abstract

Opening with a brief overview of recent events across the globe that flash up a host of questions and concerns for academics, activists, and artists concerned with the politics of mobility and immobility today, this introductory chapter sketches out the political and intellectual stakes of calls for mobility justice and asks what becomes methodologically possible when mobilities researchers and mobility justice advocates grapple with feminist, queer, and trans theories of affect and embodiment. Setting the theoretical stage for the rest of the collection, the introduction identifies three distinct but related trajectories informing the critiques to come: (1) feminist theories of embodiment and the politics of location; (2) Foucaultian theories of disciplinary and biopolitical regimes; and (3) theorizations of desire, emotion, and affective governance. This chapter concludes by providing an overview of the innovative methodologies put forth by the essays compiled in the collection.