1225 | 100 | Assembling gendered commuting and labour flexibility in the tourist city | Alejandro González Domingo; Maria Inmaculada Pastor Gosálbez
This research offers an analysis of unequal everyday gendered mobilities embedded in the labour and mobility regimes of the tourist city of Barcelona. The article explores how labour flexibility is negotiated by women tourism workers in terms of home-and-work conciliation and commuting. Moreover, using assemblage theory we present gendered commuting as a multiplicity to understand how women’s bodies are enacted and how their agency is negotiated in relation to other entities for gaining security and conciliation over their life trajectories pre- and post-COVID-19. How people move is gendered and continues to reproduce gendered power hierarchies. Meanwhile, gender-differentiated roles related to family care place a greater burden on women, which can expose them to high daily mobility, which highly intersects with their labour and working conditions. We combine in-depth interviews with key informants and women workers, and policy documents and mobility surveys, to provide inductive insights on how tourism labour flexibility embedded in the tourist rhythms are conditioning the livelihood of women workers, and how workers’ bodies are enacted relationally with other entities and to negotiate flexibility, security, and conciliation within the spatiotemporalities of the tourist city. Our results show that commuting and home-and-work conciliation emerge, indeed, as a highly feminised issue that hints at the practical opportunities for social reproduction. Labour flexibility business strategies lead to intense emotional and physical workloads and awkward working shifts, and labour exploitation in many cases, to which female front-line workers are more prone to be subject to constrain childcare, family time, and social timings of young adults over labour trajectories. Dwelling and labouring through (im)mobilities provide a framework to understand how commuting intersects with labour and residential (im)mobilities in a perpetual relationship of possibilities.
Alejandro González Domingo; Maria Inmaculada Pastor Gosálbez
Departament de Geography, Universitat Rovira i Virgili; Social & Business Research Laboratory, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
ID Abstract: 100