Abstract

The narrative of American nomadism is a story of contradictions. Retirees are seen pursuing a life of leisure in RVs, their rolling recliners moving from one scenic destination to the next. Young men, spending their summers beach- bumming in a Volkswagen van, engage in a culturally-indulged rite of passage. In the imagination lives the promise of adventure–life on the road ala Kerouac or Steinbeck. Historically, however, a strong cultural sentiment against transiency stigmatizes mobile lifestyles. Its members live on the fringes of traditional norms both spatially and socially. While #vandwelling is being popularized on social media as an appealing alternative lifestyle, cities across the country are simultaneously implementing bans on overnight street parking in an attempt to mitigate what is viewed as homelessness. Despite this stigma, the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (RTR), an annual meetup of nomads in Quartzsite, Arizona, has been doubling in size since 2009. In 2018 there were over 3000 attendees, and the organizers– acknowledging that single women are a significant portion of those gathering–launched its first women-only event. A majority of those who attended the Women’s RTR were single women over the age of fifty. “Going solo,” these women are crossing more transgressive social lines than their male counterparts as they defy gendered social and familial expectations to claim space within what has traditionally been a male-dominated road narrative. What motivates these women–at a time when security, rootedness, and comfort are generally prioritized–to live out precarious existences in cars, vans and old motorhomes? Based on participant-observation and interviews, this paper focuses on the experiences of liberation, displacement and transgression as these women seek new lives and identities on the road. Their stories offer a reframing of what it means to age, as a woman, in America.

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