One of my favour­ite flickr groups is ‘Taxis of the world from inside’. I like the glimpses of the city in these shots, and the con­fu­sion between the out­side spaces and the mobile indoors of the car. The car in the city rep­res­ents a super­mod­ern­ity (Augé, 2009), a non-place, neither pub­lic, nor private, fluid without being free. Taxi drivers are some­times myth­o­lo­gised as an emblem of the city “The New York City cab­driver per­son­i­fies the energy and zeal of the world’s greatest city” (Hodges, 2007: 1), or as an oppor­tun­ity for the priv­ileged to access an ‘authen­tic’ ‘cab spun wis­dom’, with all the class over­tones that car­ries; although recent events in the UK point to the danger of the loner-driver (I’m think­ing here of Jon Wor­boys, the ‘black cab rap­ist’ and Der­rick Bird who recently shot dead 12 people and injured 11 in Cumbria). 

The set of pho­tos by Suz­anne Lee/Panos Lon­don, of women taxi drivers in Delhi gives lie to the hyper­the­or­ising of super­mod­ern­ity. Here, an older story of gender, fam­ily and work is on dis­play. Diya Chaudhri’s text describes women’s dis­cov­ery of free­dom and sub­ject status through their entry into taxi driv­ing. For Meenu Vadera, dir­ector of the Azad Found­a­tion which trains women to become taxi drivers, this is a way of giv­ing women cit­izen­ship: the driv­ing license is a doc­u­ment which proves existence. 

Photo by Suz­anne Lee for Panos London

One of the women inter­viewed, Ekta , says “I feel empowered, as if I have my own iden­tity other than a wife and mother.” There is extens­ive research to show how paid work provides empower­ment and con­nec­tion and free­dom, but taxi driv­ing dif­fers from other work. For Sheller and Urry (2006), mobil­ity is a way of gain­ing sub­jectiv­ity, of becom­ing a per­son; though they don’t give that much of a sense of whether it mat­ters what the mobil­ity is for, is it just to be prized for its own sake? 

It seems here that it is work as much as mobil­ity, that offers this sub­ject status, and mobil­it­ies research should take work ser­i­ously. The female taxi driver chal­lenges the norms of the city as a gendered space because she works and well as because she moves. Run­ning a taxi, of course, is not merely a pro­cess of learn­ing how to nego­ti­ate those city streets with that machine, but of nego­ti­at­ing the internal space of the car. Chaudhri notes the chal­lenge the women taxi drivers provide to other drivers on Delhi’s streets, but the only cus­tom­ers she con­siders are other women, who will feel safer if driven by a woman. I won­der and worry about the dan­ger­ous cus­tom­ers. How­ever empower­ing it is to learn to drive, being at the van­guard of gender equal­ity and work­ing as a driver is a risky place. 

Ref­er­ences

  1. Augé, M. (2009) Non-Places: Intro­duc­tion to an Anthro­po­logy of Super­mod­ern­ity. Verso.
    Hodges, G. R G. (2007) Taxi! A Social His­tory of the New York City Cab­driver. Bal­timore: Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity Press. 
  2. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘The new mobil­it­ies paradigm’. Envir­on­ment and Plan­ning A 2006, volume 38, pp 207–226.