Civility and its Transgressions

Civility and etiquette underpin how we are expected to move, where the mobile subject—particularly in transit mobilities—is conditioned and expected to perform in certain manners. In this article, I consider civility and etiquette as more than fixed codes of conduct but a contested and situated process that is both infrastructurally mediated and affectively charged. In the context of transit mobilities, etiquette is closely entangled with not only the ways mobile subject interacts with the infrastructures of mobilities but also the bodily and affective experiences of mobilities. Drawing on the intersecting conceptual lenses of affect and infrastructure, I seek to rethink civility and etiquette in relation to the politics of the body, investigating how socio-cultural norms of mobility are materialized or transgressed at the level of the body. Moreover, I argue that attention to transgression is crucial to uncovering the power dynamics that underlie and construct the norms of civility in transit, revealing an uneven geography of bodily comportment as well as a politics of mobility across intersecting social differences.