TY - JOUR

T1 - (Im)mobile autobiography

T2 - the mobilisation of life without children auto/biography and its significance

AU - Spurling, Nicola Jane

PY - 2024/9/2

Y1 - 2024/9/2

N2 - The paper contributes to the theme of the special issue by making auto/biography the focal point of analysis and theorising its potential to be mobile or immobile. The theoretical developments of the paper are grounded in a mobilisation of life-without-children auto/biographical non-fiction across the last 10–15 years, in which those who do not have children, whatever the reason, have opened-up about their stories and found ways to share them with one another. The paper explicates an original concept immobile autobiography defined as: ‘life narratives that are invisible and side-lined, essentialized or not told in first person, and whose circulation both within (intra) and between (inter) generations is structurally limited’; and its converse mobile autobiography. (Im)mobile auto/biographies include, but cannot be reduced to, digital and physical mobilities. The potential of the concept lies in its ability to consider how lives, and the stories told about them, evolve, circulate and perform transformation, as they intersect with, transgress and re-shape changing cultural climates of a mobile world.

AB - The paper contributes to the theme of the special issue by making auto/biography the focal point of analysis and theorising its potential to be mobile or immobile. The theoretical developments of the paper are grounded in a mobilisation of life-without-children auto/biographical non-fiction across the last 10–15 years, in which those who do not have children, whatever the reason, have opened-up about their stories and found ways to share them with one another. The paper explicates an original concept immobile autobiography defined as: ‘life narratives that are invisible and side-lined, essentialized or not told in first person, and whose circulation both within (intra) and between (inter) generations is structurally limited’; and its converse mobile autobiography. (Im)mobile auto/biographies include, but cannot be reduced to, digital and physical mobilities. The potential of the concept lies in its ability to consider how lives, and the stories told about them, evolve, circulate and perform transformation, as they intersect with, transgress and re-shape changing cultural climates of a mobile world.

KW - Autobiography

KW - childfree

KW - childless

KW - climate change

KW - epistemic injustice

KW - mobility justice

U2 - 10.1080/17450101.2024.2347231

DO - 10.1080/17450101.2024.2347231

M3 - Journal article

VL - 19

SP - 837

EP - 852

JO - Mobilities

JF - Mobilities

SN - 1745-0101

IS - 5

ER -