Almost as soon as I hatched my plan to spend the summer driving around the part of the world known as the United States, a friend of mine sent my an article called āThe Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Mattersā by Vanessa Veselka. In the essay, she critiques how our society has no way to understand a woman who is so riddled with wanderlust that she has no option but to explore. Instead, our cultural imaginary only allows for female explorers who encounter some sort of physical violence-either rape, murder or both. Veselkaās critique shaped the way that I heard peopleās reactions to my trip:
āYouāre going alone? Why donāt you go with friends? Arenāt you scared?ā (Implying, of course, that I should be scared).
āAre you bringing mace? Do you have a knife?ā (In fact, I even had one person give me pepper spray)
āYouāre going to camp? Donāt you think it would be better to stay in a hotel?ā
The article resonated with me because in nearly every discussion I had about my trip I was confronted by the fact that for me to travel alone was inherently dangerous. By the time I left I was pretty used to these standard responses, all of them dripping in fear culture but every time it made me angry. It makes me angry that I live in a culture that literally has no space for me to explore alone (donāt even get me started on how our culture disallows and delegitimizes female anger).
With the exception of my therapist, I cannot think of one person who did not warn me about the dangers of the road (including the people who were supportive and excited for me). As a traveler, Iāve been told time and time again how the places I visit are ādangerousā but this labeling begs so many questions. What makes a city or a country or a form of travel dangerous? Is it the crime level? The risk factor? The exposure to strangers? Crime exists in my own city but the people there are not aghast that I live there? So why is it so hard for them to stomach me navigating other spaces where crime may or may not exist (in so many instances I feel that peopleās understanding of a place as dangerous is colored by the news or by a movie and rarely by personal experience). In these conversations, danger seems to be qualified as violence against bodies, in this case mine. And yet, I would argue that watching the news for an hour or reading any standard magazine also does damage to my body as I absorb messages about Ā (through the absence of an image that reflects mine). Magazines tell us that there is a normative way to comport ourselves and look. My chubbiness, androgyny, or piercings are not reflected on the glossy pages. As for the ānews,ā it paints a picture of constant war and violence. Conceptualizing US media as businesses that do violence to the masses (all genders), I am baffled by peopleās inability to understand solitary female exploration.
By setting out on this road trip I was saying āfuck youā to fear culture and letting myself bask in the power of that. Veselka writes, āDuring my travels I had literally thousands of interactions with peopleās ideas about what I was doing with my life, but almost none of them allowed for the possibility of exploration, enlightenment, or destiny. Fate, yes. Destiny, no. I was either ālucky to be aliveā or so abysmally stupid for hitchhiking in the first place that I deserved to be dead. And, while I may have been abysmally stupid, my choice to leave home and hitchhike was certainly no stupider or more dangerous than signing onto a whaling ship in the 1850s, āstealingā a slave and taking him across state lines, burning through relationships following some sketchy dude around the U.S., or accepting rides from drunk people while on hallucinogens. These tales are fictions, yes, but they deeply affect how we see people on the road. And the shadow cast by these narrativesāone that valorizes existential curiosity, adventure, individuality, and surlinessādoes not fall over women. In a country with the richest road narratives in the modern world, women have none. Sure, there is the crazy she-murderer and the occasional Daisy Duke, but beyond that, zip.ā
With this in mind, I set out to, in a small way, lay a foundation for a female bodied road narrative. That is not to say that my experience will define what female road narratives look like, but rather I hope to expand peopleās tolerance for someone other than a male-bodied person on a solo quest. My experiences will be colored by my white privilege, thin privilege, the fact that I know someone in almost all the cities Iām visiting, the fact that I have a car and appropriate gear to spend many nights alone and that I am not allowing fear or fear culture to narrate my adventures. Ā
