Home on the Road: Women, Mobility, and Space in Van Life

Abstract

In this article, I argue that representations of the road created by and about solo female van life travelers reimagine the male-coded American road as a more gender inclusive landscape, pushing back against the gendered divisions of public and private, casting women as mobile, and challenging traditional renderings of the home and domestic space. By situating contemporary van life narratives within the framework of Doreen Massey’s work on space and gender as well as the presentations of the road in the literary canon, I argue that solo female van-lifers use storytelling to place women onto the road as active participants and, in so doing, meaningfully alter the image of the road in the American collective consciousness. Through an examination of traditional understandings of public/private and inside/outside space, I posit that van life subverts these dichotomies, reconfiguring the landscape of the road and reimagining the boundaries between the home and mobility.