Abstract

Our world is characterized by mobility. The number of refugees on the global scale has increased considerably. Meanwhile border control measures and legal avenues for mobility have been severely curbed, and the political climate has become all the more violent against racialized and gendered “Others”. Business elites traverse the fast-track lines to financial hubs and tourists discover new destinations. Ageing societies need people from abroad to perform care work. Domestic workers carve out nearer and further paths to reach employment, often leaving their family members behind in need of care.

This book examines global mobilities from gendered perspectives, asking how gender together with race/ethnicity, social class, nationality and sexuality shape globally mobile lives. By developing analysis that cuts through economic structures, policies and individuals enacting agency, the book demonstrates how intersectional feminist analysis helps to comprehend uneven mobilities. Through multidisciplinary angle the book draws examples from different parts of the world and refuses to provide easy answers. Calling for students, scholars and general readers alike, the book invites the reader to imagine and relate to the world in manifold ways.
Gender and Mobility brings a critical approach to the study of gender and migration, using feminist theories to understand how gender shapes global mobilities, and how local, national and international policy frameworks impact on these. I would highly recommend this book to all those interested in migration, mobility and gender relations.
Jane Freedman, Professor, Université Paris 8
Penttinen and Kynsilehto take us on a scholarly feminist journey that maps gender and mobility in deeply empathetic, challenging and unsettling ways. Gender and migration scholars will read this book but its significance is greater for those in mainstream IR who continue to believe that we can theorise without considering the lived realities of people moving across space and time. That myth has been powerfully busted in this book.
Swati Parashar, Associate Professor in Peace and Development Research, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Elina Penttinen is Lecturer in Gender Studies in the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and
Art Studies, at the University of Helsinki.

Anitta Kynsilehto is Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Fellow at the Tampere Peace Research
Institute in the University of Tampere.