Female ride-hailing drivers’ lived mobilities: gendered mobilities, Intersecting infrastructures, and emotional frictions in China’s electromobility transition

China’s electromobility transition is often framed as a reconfiguration of power relations, yet electromobility scholarship has frequently under-theorised how power operates through gender and intersectionality. Drawing on three years of Chatnography with 40 Chinese women ride-hailing drivers, this study contributes to scholarship on gendered mobilities and China’s electromobility transition by showing how infrastructures intersect with women drivers’ intersectional positions to shape ride-hailing work and everyday mobility choices. These intertwined conditions also give rise to emergent emotional infrastructures that foster discovery, friendship, and networks of care among women drivers, while also producing emotional frictions. Crucially, these frictions are not experienced uniformly; they vary with women drivers’ intersectional circumstances and are further structured by broader forces, including electromobility’s physical infrastructure, capitalist digital infrastructure, patriarchal social infrastructure, and spatial gender norms. Finally, the study calls for a fundamental reimagining of just electromobility systems, one that prioritises reducing emotional friction, strengthening networks of care and solidarity, and expanding temporal and spatial autonomy.