Spatial Capability for Understanding Gendered Mobility for Korean Christian Immigrant Women in Los Angeles

Abstract

This paper suggests a new concept, ‘spatial capability’, for understanding how women’s freedom of mobility is systematically constrained. Based on the capability approach, it demonstrates that women’s adaptive daily culture causes individual agents voluntarily to limit their mobility. Through the orally expressed experiences of 42 married Korean immigrant women in Los Angeles, this research effectively argues how the marginalisation of the subjects in the migration decision, along with their limited daily mobility, constitutes their spatial capability. It also shows that their daily culture, including their gender roles and their Christianity, enhances their constraints by adapting the limits and ultimately becomes the limitation itself. Gendered mobility should be approached in terms of potential freedom and accompanied by a consideration of the dialectic relationship that exists between the social constraints and the individual agents.