This blog will likely not resemble my original design for it.
In my first blog of this year, I wrote about the varied experiences of American mobility and how the US’s doctrine of free movement has never been evenly applied across all demographics. My aim this year has been to highlight some of these demographics and to provide some useful terms for understanding how to pay closer attention to the issues surrounding the mobility that so many of us (including me) often take for granted. My plan for this final blog was to review and summarize, to offer you some tips on how to make mobility more visible in your lives and especially in your entertainment.
Then America voted.
In various forms, mobility was central to the right-wing platform: Republican candidates at every level advocated for the increased surveillance, limits to trans and women’s healthcare, and mass deportations that would exponentially increase the amount of friction already experienced by such marginalized groups.
Under the proposed regime the US has chosen for itself, what is the fate of the open road? Will it continue to spark the imagination of generations of artists, inspiring more narratives of self-discovery and self-fashioning? Or will it harden around images of dominance and aggression, intensifying the association between driving and hegemonic masculinity? Will the car itself, with its own emotional attachments, continue to blur boundaries between the road and the home, or will it only ever be an instrument of fear and power?
And what about real life? Certainly place-ballet will become all the more important to achieving any kind of belonging within an authoritarian state, but the prospect of scaling up that ballet with adventurous cross-country road travel will come with new risks – or rather, the old risks of the United States before the transformations of the Civil Rights Movement. A nation profoundly reliant on automobility will see the state of automobility change profoundly.
I presented at this year’s Hal-Con fan convention only a few days after the election. In my talk, I spoke about the Epix series From, a horror mystery about an isolated small town, not shown on any map, that traps those who enter it. The town summons people unexpectedly from off the roads they’re travelling on, blocking their progress with a fallen tree. The town, then, becomes a perpetual detour that creates a paradoxical mobility in which the inhabitants are both permanently trapped and permanently travelling. The title of the series, From, emphasizes this state – all departure, no destination. The series exemplifies the stifled agency key to depictions of gothic mobility, as its characters find themselves living every day in survival mode while also trying to work towards their long-term goal of getting themselves home.
I mention this talk for two reasons. First, because of the ways From acts as a metaphor for the frustrated experience of the American dream. Physical mobility stands in for social mobility, and the forced movement that still doesn’t get the characters anywhere signifies the cruelty of financial precarity under late capitalism. Second, because my approach to that talk shifted after the election in much the same way the aim of this blog has. I knew I was already talking about a scary series with scarier implications, and facing that prospect when much of the audience would already be frightened and hurt felt cruel. “It needs more hope,” I thought to myself. “Make sure you end on the hope.”
And so, that is what I leave you with here. The characters of From, trapped in nowhere America, in a town where monsters come out of the woods at night, still fight to find a way home. For them, hope is a practice, not an emotion. They do what they can, when they can, every day striving to keep themselves and each other safe. When they have victories (and they do), it’s because they work together, trusting in each other’s expertise instead of giving in to their own pride. They look toward the future, respecting the past but not clinging to it.
We can do the same – Americans and anyone who wants them to find the life, liberty, and happiness they’re pursuing. We can work together; we can find ways to help those with marginalized mobility right here and right now, whether we’re investing our time, our money, or our political will. We can keep ourselves informed and protect our own country from an authoritarian fate. We can act with hope, thinking forward and outward. That’s what I want to end my year of mobility with. An invitation, even a plea, to keep working toward increased mobility, increased agency, for all of us.
And please, for your and all our sakes, keep imagining how the world could be. Keep telling stories.
Photo by Jens
