Who gets to wander? Compound mobility friction, intersectional identities, and the politics of solo female travel in the digital age

The proliferation of solo female travel as a cultural and social practice has been accompanied by a narrow representational default: the solo female traveller of tourism marketing, and of much scholarship, remains implicitly white, Western, middle-class, able-bodied, and heterosexual. This paper addresses that narrowing by developing ‘compound mobility friction’, a conceptual tool for understanding how overlapping social positions (race, class, age, sexuality, and nationality) interact multiplicatively, rather than merely additively, to shape women’s access to, experience of, and safety within independent travel. The paper is conceptual in orientation: it develops and illustrates the concept through an interpretive synthesis of publicly available survey data, industry intelligence reports, and published scholarship on digital travel cultures, rather than through original coding of a bounded corpus of digital texts. Organised around four intersecting axes (race and ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and gender identity) the discussion illustrates how constraints on solo female travel are likely to be unevenly distributed, and how marginalised travellers may perform additional, uncompensated labour of research, risk assessment, and community-based knowledge production that mainstream travel safety discourse does not reliably provide. The paper’s contribution is twofold: it offers compound mobility friction as an analytical vocabulary that is distinct from, and more precise than, adjacent concepts such as intersectionality and mobility justice, and it identifies concrete implications for tourism research methodology, destination marketing, and travel safety infrastructure.

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