Mobility as survival and freedom: Pandemic, Immobility and its implications for women and queer migrants
Mobility as survival and freedom: Pandemic, Immobility and its implications for women and queer migrants

Summary/Abstract: This paper intends to move beyond the common knowledge of how pandemic restricts mobility at large and provokes us to think about those for whom mobility restriction was a way of life much before the coronavirus arrived. Looking at shadow pandemic of gender-based mobility restrictions of women and non-male actors in conservative societies in South Asia, in this paper I argue that social deconstruction of “immobility” is embedded in the process of gendering the pandemic. Drawing from interviews conducted on the Indian immigrants in Germany over a year during and after the global lock down, this paper explores how covid-induced immobility mimics an already established framework of coerced immobility based on gender that acts as a motivation of migration for women and non-male actors at some level. Referring to Ayelet Shachar’s idea of shifting borders, I locate the moral borders at home as a crucial competitor of physical borders of the barbed wire, that often provokes women and non-male actors to take the leap of faith for survival and better livelihood.

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