On the Asphalt Frontier: American Women's Road Narratives, Spatiality, And Transgression (Critical Essay‪)‬

Abstract In this article, I am going to analyze the concept of "gendered space" as it appears in select post-1970s US-American road narratives produced by women writers of various ethnic and social backgrounds. Drawing on recent re-mappings in cultural geography, I will cross disciplinary boundaries and argue that for female literary protagonists, the "open road" appears as a dangerous frontier--in which women's physical and emotional well-being is always at perilous stake--rather than as an adventurous playground. In women's road stories, the American highway does not maintain its mythical, iconic status, signifying freedom and the heroic quest for identity, which has been ascribed to it at least since the legendary accounts of the flight from domesticity by Jack Kerouac and his fellow (anti-)heroes of the Beat generation.