Backpackers,influencers,and hobos: The reality of contemporary Portuguese solo female travellers

Abstract

The number of women travelling alone has been increasing in recent years, with over 80% of solo travellers being women. Despite their gender's greater vulnerability, travellers employ a series of protection mechanism, such as strategic deployment of gender and community building. Alienation from the dim socio-economic prospects at home and a desire to craft an existence more aligned with their ideals are at the core of why women are choosing to travel in accordance with an increasingly DIY ethos. This trend has been studied from various perspectives, but an analysis of the Portuguese reality has been missing. We interviewed five Portuguese women experienced in solo travel, with semi-structured scripts to gather qualitative data. We concluded that the participants aim to enlarge their community network, resisting pre-established narratives about Othered places and people. They also hope to widen the practice by disseminating their testimony through digital DIY.

Introduction

The number of women travelling alone has been increasing in recent years (Terziyska, 2021; Thomas and Mura, 2019). Solo Travel Statistics (2019) indicates that more than 10% of global tourism is done by solo travellers, and 84% of those are women. This raises various questions about what it is that attracts women to this practice and how the experience is lived. In this article we aim to look at what characterizes solo female travelling by Portuguese women, as the literature on this field is scarce in general, but even more on this particular topic. We will attempt to argue that this practice fits within a DIY ethos, considering the travellers’ impulse to resist the mainstream way of travelling, how they raise funds for their trips, the communities they create, and the initiatives they develop in a logic of narrativizing territorialities (Guerra, 2023b, 2024). By ‘mainstream’ we mean the practice of buying vacation packages, mostly urban or beach destinations, typically in Europe, focused on monument visiting and sightseeing, or else staying in sanitized resorts of Western influence, with well-delineated borders, comfortable, always accompanied, with no instances of work whatsoever. For the context of this paper, we will look at DIY as a way of life that allows subjects to turn their existence into resistance, as proposed by Guerra (2023a, 2023b, 2024).

Foucault's (1990) concept of ‘techniques of the self’ or ‘arts of existence’ is key here as we look at women who attempt to remove themselves from their families’ and their cultures’ influence, seeking an environment more conducive to self-analysis and contemplation, searching for people with different perspectives and experiences to learn from, engaging in a different kind of life than the one they were taught to seek; living humbly, in deep communion with the people and the land that surrounds them, inching closer to an existence that is in accordance with their values, far from the capitalistic life path they’ve been nudged towards. They see this not just as a moral obligation but also as a joyous artful process, where they consciously and excitedly craft their existence.

We will additionally be looking at the discursive strategies these women use to talk about their experiences since, as Noy (2008) refers, subjects are called to perform not only during the trip, but also afterward, recounting their obstacles and victories. The idea of Cave and Ryan (2007) that this adventurous identity transcends gender is also very pressing to our work as we analyze the ways in which women embrace their femininity or push away from it. We see these women's way of travelling, following Butler's (1997) and West and Zimmerman's cue, as well as Guerra's (2024), as a form of doing gender and doing (foreign) spaces.

What I will call strategic deployment of gender lack sufficient study, but we can find some clues in Raby and Pomerantz (2015) regarding the managed performance of intelligence among young women. Girls start from the characteristics attributed to them by their age, class, social position, and gender prestige, having then to manage what traits they want to bring forth at what times to reap the best rewards. This same process is referred to by our interviewees in relation to adapting their femininity to the different patriarchal systems of the countries they visit and the interlocutors on whom they depend for accommodation, food, or transportation.

This paper is composed of a literature review that will summarize the state of the art regarding solo female travel studies, touching also on some notions of DIY and alternative communities, ecofeminism and practices of (re)territorialization, harassment and coping mechanisms, digital DIY, and decolonization of Academia. This is followed by a short methodological section that describes how the five in-depth informal interviews were conducted, transcribed, and analysed in a qualitative approach with content thematical analysis influenced by the social constructivist grounded theory. This study was also rooted in a minor theory approach that privileged counter-storytelling with subjects from semi-peripherical, below-average-income, politically and culturally marginalized territories. This is followed by a longer discussion section divided into 10 sub-sections for easier readability covering their interpretation of the solo traveller identity, protection mechanisms and gender, the need for community, work while vacationing, DIY practices, and hoboing.

Literature review

Despite the greater danger this activity poses for women, when compared with men (Wilson and Little, 2005), the literature in social science and humanities has established that the attractiveness of a challenge and overcoming it, escaping routine, the desire for new experiences and learning, as well as contact with other travellers are at the base of this trend (Pereira and Silva, 2018). An ethics of celebration, which primarily values the present and the pursuit of pleasure, while attempting to escape from the constraining responsibilities of daily life is identified by Guerra (2021) as a trend in today's youth microcultures. Additionally, the increasing socio-economic independence of women, the boom of low-cost travelling and the reduction of crime rates have also contributed to this (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2018).

This urge to both break with the traditional male characterization of the lone adventurer (Elsrud, 2005) and the restrictiveness of a pre-arranged package travel to visit Othered locations ¹ starts to suggest a DIY way of going about life. A planning that tries to keep the environmental impact of travelling at a minimum, mostly relying on means of transportation used by locals, creating community bonds to find housing and work that does not contribute to the gentrification of local areas, alongside the decision to venture into spaces long denied to them and to deepen one's relationship with nature are ecofeminist practices that contribute to the decolonization, (de-)masculinization, and decentring of Eurocentrism in the Anthropocene, as has been shown by Barca (2020) and Guerra (2023a). Both these authors analyze the way ecofeminist practices and the DIY ethos are employed to counter the damage done to civil society and the environment by colonial and patriarchal practices. Guerra goes further to frame this in an existence as resistance attitude adopted by many of her interviewees (Guerra, 2023b, 2024), as by many of ours.

Yang et al. (2018) conducted a series of very informative interviews with Asian woman travellers in which they narrated first-hand experiences of sexual harassment, discrimination, social disapproval, theft, fraud, and losing their sense of direction. All, regardless of age, cultural background, or travel destination cited fear of rape as their most pressing concern. Many described street harassment situations, though considering the milder instances flattering. Informants of Wilson and Little (2008) narrated employing strategies of accommodation and erasure of their bodies to diminish these instances, such as ‘modifying their dress, fitting to local (female) norms of behaviour, remaining constantly aware, or removing themselves from places where they felt fearful’. Stephens (2020) expand on this, analyzing the emotional burden of making oneself enjoy even dehumanizing experiences and her decision to avoid cultures where women are not welcome in the public space.

Israel's backpacking tradition, studied in great detail by Noy (2008), reveals interesting mechanisms of gender management by female travellers entrenched in masculinized travel narratives. Israeli female travellers, being obliged by a prescriptive travel tradition to achieve certain feats, feel deprived of the spiritual reward promised by the cultural narrative promoted by male travellers, but also unable to criticize it due to its historical and cultural capital within the Israeli community. Several interviewees even identified themselves as poor informants, feeling that they were not deserving (or as deserving as others) of the backpacker identity under study.

A very useful tool for this community is online groups. Karagöz et al. (2021) studied the importance of the psychological support these offer travellers in the face of gender-associated risks – including personal safety, violence, sexual harassment, and rape; psychosocial risks, like feelings of isolation and exclusion; and destination-related risks, which encompass food safety, hygiene, natural disasters, diseases, and language and cultural barriers. These groups allow access to other women's travel experiences, promoting socialization and allowing informal sharing of useful information, which is of the utmost importance, as it provides a sensation of security about the specific fears of solo travelling as a woman (Casaló et al., 2010). According to Yang et al. (2020), the #MeToo movement prompted the creation of a badge on TripAdvisor to mark hotels where sexual harassment has been reported. Additionally, the authors proposed the installation on panic buttons in hotel rooms (to protect guest, but especially staff). ²

Several of the travellers we spoke with keep travel blogs where they talk about their travels, give advice and engage with women aiming to travel solo. In her 2023a article, Guerra analyses how the artist Fernanda Meireles establishes new territorialities by working on her relationship with her place of origin, Fortaleza, Brazil, through her artistic practice. Similarly, these women create new territorialities by sharing on their blogs their perspective of spaces they visited and the emotional connections they formed with them and their communities. All of them reject the discourse of the Exotic, choosing instead to highlight the normalcy of local lives, and deconstruct the idea of the Other which their inherited narratives attributed to these places.

The preservation of what has been witnessed is eternalized in blogs that exist in a balance between something that is perennial but also uncontrollably iterated upon, once shared online, destined to fade in the rhythm of the attention economy. Guerra (2021) mentions this idea of digital DIY, especially for subjects whose (artistic) practices have yet to be legitimized with a physical space for discussion. This struggle for recognition and the right to demarginalization is pursued through digital artivism, positioning the internet as a marginal space to the museums and galleries that assign capital to these kinds of testimonies (Guerra, 2023a). At the same time, these narratives are part of a tradition of utopianizing imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), envisioning ecosystems that are less hierarchical, freer, safer, more inclusive, more connected to the natural environment they inhabit, and less governed by industrial capitalism. This refers not only to the re-narrativization of safety and freedom in Other spaces, but also at home, as travellers serve as living proof of the demystification of narratives of fear and violence concerning the unaccompanied female presence in public spaces. As Guerra (2024: 113) states, ‘Through DIY, the female body has become a form of contestation about the meanings carried by urban territories’.

That said, the content shared on these digital platforms always invites interaction, sharing, and collaborative construction of the spaces, in a practice that does not seem dissimilar to that described by Guerra (2023b: 7) regarding the artist Fernanda Meireles.

She disseminates her artistic objects in the form of ‘pollination’, as she calls it, because she considers that this movement enhances the return of these stories back to her after passing through people, (…) promoting enchantment not only between people but between people and the world around them. This is how we can view her work from a perspective of (de)territoriality.

Vermeulen (2024) presents an interesting study about feeling of alienation in this generation as a result of the unlikelyhood of economic stability in their future, despite their high levels of education. Travelling is a common antidote to this, however, Yu and Liu (2023) suggest it is becoming less and less efficient, as young people grow increasingly disillusioned by their lives’ prospects.

This paper is unavoidably an heir to the Chicago School of Sociology which favoured ethnographic approaches to the study of communities living in the fringes of society and championed the idea that transient lifestyles were structured responses to economic hardship, lack of social support, and labour instability, rather than the result of moral failures or desires of deviance (Park, 1915; Anderson, 1923). In the same way, the women in our study are reacting to an economy of precariousness, low salaries and prohibitive housing costs, as well as a capitalistic economic model that has proven dissatisfactory time and time again. That is why they are choosing to participate in alternative living styles, engaging in community organizing, immersing themselves in non-capitalistic cultures, privileging a system that shares skills and knowledges rather than gatekeeping them. This is why it is important to foreground the practitioners’ discourse and self-analysis, rather than impose an external one.

Methodology

To explore the experiences of female Portuguese solo travellers we adopted a qualitative approach. More specifically, our paper is grounded in the interpretivist paradigm as we acknowledge the existence of multiple realities and subjective ways of producing and interpreting knowledge. We were also influenced by constructivist grounded theory and relativist epistemology, recommended by Charmaz (2013) and Jordan and Gibson (2004) as a valuable tool in matters of empowerment. As a result, we will try to emphasize the informants’ active role in the construction of knowledge, highlighting their own self-analysis, more often than imposing an external one.

We are very interested in Deleuze and Guattari's (1986) proposal of minor theory. This aims to shine a spotlight on the less known devices marginalized communities have found to express themselves and the particularity of their experiences. It is to be expected that the tools Academia favours are best suited to the study of subjects that interest Academia. Experiences and cultures existing in the blind spots of mainstream attention have created their own means of self-analysis and dissemination that Academia must widen to include. These women's practices favour not a major theory of travelling and womanhood, but minor ecofeminism, minor underconsumption, minor DIY ethos, minor feminized writing, and minor strategic gender deployment.

A call for volunteers was shared on social media between 18 March and 31 April of 2024. Sampling criteria was restricted to Portuguese women who had travelled abroad alone, consistently, for leisure purposes. Pseudonyms were used for all those involved and participants provided written consent for the use of their data within the scope of this investigation.

Five semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted, from an outsider position. The volunteers were all white women between the ages of 20 and 25, of higher education and middle-class socio-economic backgrounds, from different parts of the country. The resulting transcriptions underwent thematic and discourse analysis (Orlandi, 2005; Fairclough, 2013) in order to identify common categories in the different travellers’ testimonies. Form was also taken into account, considering how the interviews were interactions and not written testimonies (Noy, 2008).

We found great value in counter-storytelling as ‘a powerful mode of recentring knowledges from the margins – a decolonial alternative to neoliberal epistemes that maintain institutions/universities as centres of knowledge production’ (Dutta et al., 2022: 67). It would not be wholly adequate to classify Portugal as a country of the Global South, especially as a former colonial empire, however Wallerstein (2004) characterization of it as semi-peripherical, politically and culturally marginalized territory (Mahler, 2017) seems adequate to us. Thus, its stories are in need of attention and analysis, to bring a more peripherical perspective to the attention of Academia.

Discussion and results

Changing the script on the solo traveller identity

From a critical discourse analysis standpoint, the first thing that stood out to us was the interviewees’ tendency to separate themselves from other women. Consistently they pushed away from a script of what they thought (and supposed the interviewer thought) a female backpacker would be like, by accentuating their lack of fears, safety precautions, and self-preservation instincts. They were never dismissive of that script or the hypothetical women they believed followed it, rather they made jocular comments about their own riskier practices, as a distancing mechanism – exactly as Elsrud (2005) describes – or apologized for not being a better, ‘more normative’ subject for the study. Like Noy's interviewees, who suggested a reformulation of their trekking practices, creating an alternative script, i.e., an alternative trekker identity, our travellers also suggested a reformulation of the fears they experience, redirecting them to a fear of boredom or ill-adaptation, reshaping the identity of the female solo traveller.

Inherited fears and learned protection mechanisms

The travellers’ feedback, generally very positive, devoid of fears, clashes with the conventional wisdom about women travelling alone – a wisdom with which the travellers are well familiar, thanks to their families and friends back in Portugal – be it the danger of being scammed, kidnapped or murdered. Interviewees brought these up only to deconstruct them. Grounded in their own experience, they strive to demystify the danger-ridden imaginary of Othered places.

Being seen as a tourist has bivalent consequences, according to the informants. It can serve as a shield, protecting the foreigner from the idiosyncrasies of local culture; or as a target, marking them as possible scam victims and attracting a fetishizing gaze. Several of the interviewees cited examples of attempted scams they didn't fall for thanks to their experience, making a caveat of the danger they pose to less seasoned travellers. Nevertheless, they insist on demystifying the discourse on misfortunes abroad – everything, they say, can be solved with common sense and firmness. That said, whiteness, as Wilson and Little (2008) have established, serves as protection, especially in countries where the economy depends heavily on tourism, or where a large colonial heritage still exists, leading its institutions to respect Europeans above immigrants and even locals.

Rewriting the manual on coping with harassment

This brings us to the topic of harassment and assault. Although the interviewees could provide examples of situations in which they felt less comfortable, none reported an environment of harassment they would define as ‘serious’. Their tendency was to dismiss the situations. None reported feeling threatened, guaranteeing that a firmer ‘no’ is enough. Let us look at KK's testimony, a traveller with great experience in Islamic countries:

Last year when I went to Oman, I was invited to go camping on the beach by a friend of my couchsurfing host. I wasn’t very sure about him. Obviously, he didn't try to do anything, but he was always saying how beautiful I was and I understand that was him trying to pass a message, but as soon as I told him, «Don't say those things, nothing is going to happen», he changed completely and continued to be super hospitable (…) I know there are women who would probably have blacklisted him because he tried or he had ulterior motives. But I already expect this from most men so it's not something that will make me blacklist him, and I’m grateful for that because even after I told him that I didn't want anything to happen he continued as if nothing had happened. He was still friendly, I had a spectacular night with him, sleeping in the same place but separated. He showed me turtles the next day, brought me breakfast, arranged a taxi for me to return to the city where I was going – amazing.

From a discourse analysis standpoint, it's hard not to notice how the interviewee begins by saying ‘obviously, he didn't try to do anything’, proceeding to describe the verbal advances the subject did make. The adverb ‘obviously’ works, we believe, as a tension diffuser, a guarantee that the story will end well. It also seems to suggest that the approacher was not a harasser, as the setup ‘I was a bit cautious with him’ might have suggested. This decision to present the subject in a forgiving light, putting the stress of the narrative in how well he took the ‘no’, and how hospitable he was after, could be classified, according to Scarduzio et al. (2018), as face-saving. We also see the interviewee comparing herself with other women. Our travellers all mention a script they were taught should be followed to handle advances from men, and their own relationship to that script. At one point, KK even admits that men are the main source of danger to women. She also partakes in what Scarduzio would categorize as powerlessness, ³ stating that ‘When it comes to these things, men, who I think are our biggest threat, are not going to be stopped by that’.

The fact that all of these perspectives exist within the same person and all contribute to inform her actions–her faith in humanity, her understanding of her vulnerability to assault, her precautions, her identification of men as threats, her chastising of other women for drawing harsher lines than her, her understanding of those same women's precautions–is a very informative image of the complexities of travelling solo as a woman.

RY, a queer AFAB ⁴ traveller the same age as KK, speaks about the complexity of reacting to sexual harassment by admitting to knowing the script but being unable to comply, reacting out of impulse, enraged by the audacity that it requests women ignore. She often recurs to reacting loudly when assault happens in public places, instead of ignoring it, as it makes the harasser hypervisible and embarrassed. This contributes to building an alternative script, similar to how our interviewees reframed solo travel fears, in the beginning of our analysis.

Strategic negotiation of gender

We arrive now to negotiation of gender. Toning down one's femininity, acting more masculine or making one's body less noticeable are examples of precautionary measures. Alternatively, respondents also claimed to heighten their femininity to appear more friendly and encourage offerings of help.

RY speaks about this duality in her management of her gender: playing ‘the dumb girl’ to discourage repercussions when she makes mistakes at work, but also buddying up with her superior to engage in dominance bonding ⁵ and prevent aggressions further on:

These past years I was always working in very male-dominated kitchen environments, where there is a very strong dynamic between the chef and their cook, in it that they’re basically always trying to humiliate us, especially if we’re women. I feel like I especially did that with these power games, when I'd either act really dumb or be one of the boys because in both extremes I felt like I was controlling that game.

Here is another example from MS about the search for accommodation:

When asking for volunteering, for example, in the kinds of situations when I need accommodation (…) I femme up for women and queer people specifically, so that I appear less threatening. We've stayed at men's homes, who provided us with accommodation, and there I do butch up.

As we saw with Raby and Pomerantz (2015), this bringing forth and holding back of feminine characteristics is a strategy young girls and women practice to navigate the patriarchal system they find themselves in. Again, we see the travellers resisting traditional readings, finding power in owning those performances. By choosing the version of femininity or masculinity that best serves them then they are DIYing their identity as a protection mechanism.

When asked about what would make them feel safer, travellers mentioned other women looking after them, besides hosts bringing up the issue of safety and giving them recommendations, apart from their personal research. This trust in the community that travellers make sure to build wherever they are and its importance in making women feel safe is a great example of imbued, almost unconscious DIY practices that just come naturally to women.

The need for community and growing together

Socialization practices are deeply linked to mitigating loneliness and vulnerability that solo travel can bring. Most travellers cited meeting people from different cultures as one of the great joys of solo travel.

MTN, who has lived abroad for a long period of time, talks about individual exploration as a factor that triggered her departures:

At that time, I was more interested in being more isolated and having time for myself to be more alone. (…) I think I wanted to find a space where I had a job to do, where I could help someone, be part of a community, be part of a project (…) the lady I was there with, she is a therapist, she works with animals, she does homeotherapy, so I was interested in learning things from her.

This impulse to find oneself by finding a community and wanting to grow in adjacency with others in a space of sharing and communality is a landmark of the DIY culture all our travellers seem pulled to. The end goal is to sow roots everywhere, connecting with kindred spirits wherever they may be. Because this path is still so uncharted, they have to make it up as they go, DIYing funds, accommodation and transportation, connection and narratives about themselves and those territories.

DIY it ‘till we make it

MC first visited Cape Verde as a volunteer. She helped look after young kids while their mothers were at work, teaching them music and entertaining them. She was housed by locals and built such strong ties that she made sure to organize a second visit, bringing more people who were eager to help, as well as resources gathered by her Portuguese community.

To do this, MC and her friends collected small contributions from their neighbours, organized fundraising concerts and take-away services from which all profits were sent to the Cape Verde nursery she volunteered at. They learned school supplies were needed and sought sponsorships to donate desks and chairs. Given the size of the items, it was necessary to send them by air freight, which they achieved through community organizing. This is an exceptional example of DIY skills put in practice to extend communities and mutual support. MC talks at length about the enrichment that both the travellers and the locals gained from the experience. She highlights the importance of sharing information without imposing it (Ribeiro, 2017) – avoiding projecting an urban vision onto rural areas, instead reshaping social imaginaries about these kinds of places and supporting alternative forms of local livelihood, as described by Guerra (2024).

Vacations from work or working vacations?

During their travels, some women found fixed jobs in the countries they wanted to get to know, and some swapped work for lodging and food. Not abdicating the things they love to do by figuring out strategies that can make them cheaper is DIY praxis. Like Guerra (2021: 123) says ‘DIY has always been more of a necessity than an ethos of resistance’. If these young women don’t come up with strategies to move through the loopholes of the prevailing hustler system they fear they’ll fall into the standard life of precariousness and live-to-work existence that this system promotes. Negotiating work flexibility, being self-employed, complementing their salary with sponsorship from the travel blogs they maintain, exchanging skills (like social media management, website design, multilingualism and social skills, musical talents, arts and crafts production) for accommodation and food are practices mobilized by all of the travellers.

Digital DIY and virtual communities

The literature mentions the importance of online platforms in helping foster networks of mutual support, share firsthand testimonies, and provide specialized advice to women travelling alone (Karagöz et al., 2021). Our interviewees also mentioned Facebook groups that facilitate ridesharing between cities or countries, and the protection provided by social media coverage, as well as the review system on accommodation platforms that gives clients a leverage in negotiation, in cases of misleading advertising.

Towards the end of our interview, KK wanted to clarify why she created and maintains her official solo female travel profile on Instagram. She talked not only about her desire to inspire other women to travel alone but also the occasional emotional stress that comes from living such a counter-current, self-made life. She still made sure to say it wouldn’t make sense for her to live any other way. This balancing is in line with what Bourdieu (1996) calls illusio, i.e., the commitment to the pursuit of an objective or way of life that overshadows all difficulties in its wake.

We see here suggestions of the alienation tendency mentioned in the literature review. Our interviewees reject the future that awaits them back home if/when they stop travelling. This journeying then becomes a way of resisting a life path they do not want for themselves. We might be tempted to see in their travels a period of liminality, as is proposed by Stein (2011) or Selänniemi (2003), however, unlike most people who go on vacations to take a break from their real life, our travellers seem to feel their travel time is their real life and the periods they spend in their home countries as interim. While it might make sense to see this as a journey, there is indubitably more interest in the journeying itself than the crossing line at the end of it. Many of them even admit to fearing considering the possibility of stopping.

Hoboing: DIY as necessity

The last traveller whose practice we will look at is MS. Based on the testimonies we read in the previous sections, we believe all the women above (KK, RY, MTN, and MC) lead DIY solo traveller lives. MS, despite engaging in a lot of DIY practices, would, we believe, be better classified as a hobo. ⁶ Hoboing and DIY share a lot of common traits, but the former implies a much more vulnerable way of living. Additionally, that is her self-identification which we believe should be respected.

MS came into contact with the hobo community, whose ethos appealed to her, while she was in college in the US. This means she has an itinerant lifestyle, looking for casual work, so she can guarantee her most basic necessities, frequently trading work for housing, staying in squats or rough sleeping, getting to know communities and territories and establishing extremely large networks. Unlike the solo travellers, these aren’t trips, this is her everyday life. At the time of our interview with MS she hadn’t been to a house she could call her own in five years. It is important to note that MS practices a hobo lifestyle out of personal choice, not out of economic necessity, but mostly because she was enthralled by its way of travel. Because of this, like our other travellers, if she is ever in a dire situation, she has access to resources other hobos do not, like her family house in her home country.

MS describes a cycle of travel that involves making money in high-income countries, travelling to low-income countries, maintain work practices to help stretch the collected funds, and when those run out, returning to high-income countries to replenish. This is only possible because she is a polyglot with European nationality, which grants her considerable freedom of movement and employability in the Global North, as well as the confidence to demand certain labour rights that are much rarer for workers from the Global South. She makes the following caveat:

It's not necessarily for the money, but to have that security, because living like this, you kind of don't have a safety net – you have no job, no house, no place that's stable for you. Your safety net is the people that you know, who could give you shelter, who could help you find work.

The ways she has found to make money, with developed skills, such as tattooing, singing or crafts, or with employability, thanks to her multilingualism and soft skills, also a result of her extended community building practices, are in line with the anarchist ideology that often circulates in these milieus, as noted by Turner (2010) and Tapley (2014), as well as with DIY practices, as listed by Guerra (2021).

Unlike solo travellers, most hobos don’t have a home base, moving around because they need to, more than because they planned to. There is no liminality in their lives, as they are constantly itinerant, similarly to Romani people, for example. MS's prolonged stays in foreign countries, unlike solo travellers, are defined by how long it remains profitable and pleasant to stay there, not how long the visa lasts. Similarly, solo travellers’ work arrangements are negotiated with hostels or NGO's. Hobos often resorts to selling their crafts or busking, for which they don’t have a licence, nor an employer who can answer for them. This puts hobos in a more vulnerable position facing law enforcement.

Sophie Rosa, in her book ‘Radical Intimacies’, writes about the ways capitalism imposes a norm of living and working, making it exceptionally hard to exist outside of that frame. This is the process that MS is describing. She is doing different kinds of work to get the means to sustain herself, yet, because it is not within what the State recognizes as work, she gets no security or recognition. Rosa speaks at length about ‘the ways capitalism psychically and materially predetermines, infiltrates and thwarts our intimate lives’. A couple of lines down, she cited the filmmaker Susan Stryker who says, ‘[states and its ideologies] determine what kinds of lives are deemed livable and or useful and shut down the possibility of imaginative transformation where people's lives begin to exceed and escape the state's use of them’ (2023: 8). This, I feel, applies exceptionally well to the ethos of MS's living.

In his 2019 book, ‘Necropolitics’, Mbembe (2019) describes how the ultimate indicator of power resides in being able to decide whose life is worth grieving and whose is not. Butler (2009) describes ungrievable lives as those which are already perceived as lost, lives whose grievability a government or an institution cannot recognize if it is to continue functioning. This is what in management philosophy is called organizational ignorance (Hedberg, 1981). People who live as hobos do, in the margins of society, cannot be deemed grievable by the State. They are left to die, their only support being the DIY networks in the community.

At the time of the interview, MS was travelling with a companion, which is common temporary practice to combat loneliness. Turner (2010) already warned that, contrary to the image of the solitary hobo, travels were often made in a group. It is interesting to hear about how the presence of a second person creates a sense of responsibility in MS, that pressures her to enforce safety measures more rigorously: not travelling at night or taking rides from white vans. The protectiveness that she expects from her community she is also willing to offer.

MS doesn’t hesitate to stress the precariousness of the hobo way of living, but she also speaks with a noticeable tenderness and awe of the people in her community, bringing us back to the concept of illusio we looked at earlier. Her description of the risks inherent to this kind of living convey the depth of these subjects’ commitment to their beliefs, refusing a safer, more comfortable life that, however, would make them complicit in all the mass consumption and capitalist ways of the current mainstream system they so ardently do not want to be a part of.

When do it yourself becomes do it ourselves

MS talks about the need to create more spaces for travellers, to make the environment more welcoming to people who do not fit the backpacker stereotype (young and able-bodied). Another issue is the ‘expiration date’ that this kind of life has. Youth has privileges that an aging body does not, in terms of vigour and resistance to discomfort; but also in terms of appeal – young people are seen as worthy of help, while older bodies suggest someone that should already be established. Haenfler (2018) talks about ‘life after subculture’, i.e., the recognition that subculture careers do not end with youth. That said, Gilbert (2019) states the following:

As travellers become road weary, a return to sedentary life can become attractive, resulting in an inner tension between the freedoms afforded by traveling and the relative stability of settling down. Many travellers experience numerous instances of attempting to settle down, only to return to the road.

We can tell from her testimony that a community and DIY practices are not an aesthetic ideal, they are a survival imperative. This is a community who will not have access to whatever they do not build themselves and whose life very much depends on each other.

Conclusions

The young women we interviewed aimed to remove themselves from the context they grew up in to seek an environment more conducive to the crafting of identities more aligned with their aspirations and ideals, echoing Foucault's (1990) concept of techniques of the self. This is a joyous artful process in response to the alienation they feel from the dim prospects that await them at home (considering their high levels of education and the reality of a below-average income and depleted housing market in semi-peripheral Portugal–Wallerstein, 2004). They further refuse to engage in mainstream ways of travel, resorting to a DIY ethos that allows them to turn their existence into resistance and overcome all the difficulties their travelling poses, emboldened by the illusio that their pursuit is an existential imperative (Bourdieu, 1996).

Their practices are also the result of ecofeminist intentions to establish new territorialities by (re)narrativizing Othered places and the traveller identity, which they immortalize in digital DIY, contributing to the tradition of imagined communities (Anderson, 1983). The enlargement of their community network, expanding their knowledge and experiences is indeed the driving force for all our interviewees.

Solo travels, then, though they may have started as liminal periods, soon became what the interviewees saw as their real life, while their home stays felt liminal. Hobos don’t experience that duality, being itinerant. While they are both marginalized ways of travelling, hoboing positions itself, in our opinion, further out from the centre.

Finally, existing as a woman in these spaces implies a complex collection of protection mechanism, such as the adaptation or full rejection of inherited scripts about how to behave in harassment situations, strategic deployment of gender to better manage their projected image of welcoming help or self-reliability – another instance of identity DIY, and a community they can rely on to have their back. Their status as Europeans allowed them to circulate more freely and find work, due to the privilege attributed to whiteness and Western features. We believe these women are building gender in the sense they are expanding the horizon on what woman can and can’t do, while also doing gender (West and Zimmerman, 1987; Butler, 1997), when performing strategical traditional femininity as a protection. Research of this kind, with women who are so dependent on strangers for such long periods of time, really feels to us like and important and useful line of work.

Although this is an exploratory study, still we hope this to be a fertile step in the study of such a marginalized reality. It is essential that more research is conducted about these communities, whose art of existence/resistance shows how capitalist realism can be circumvented in fulfilling and productive ways. Practices seen as feminized or deviant, especially in peripherical territories, must not be undervalued, as they provide great contributions to the development of gender studies and alternative resisting cultures studies. This work aimed at bringing the voices of traditionally ignored marginalized and feminized subjects, in an effort to decolonize academia and knowledge through its subject, but also its methodology, privileging counter-storytelling and minor theory.