'The Drama of Going to the Toilet’: The Gendered Politics of Sanitation in Mobile Work

Women worldwide are familiar with the frustration of queuing for the women’s restroom. For women drivers whose work depends on remaining continuously mobile, however, this everyday frustration takes on different meanings. In occupations organised around continuous movement, availability, and speed, the capacity to stop without penalty is closely shaped by gendered norms and infrastructural provision. This article examines how access to sanitation operates as a form of gendered infrastructure in mobile transport work. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic research with 35 women taxi and app-based drivers (Uber and Cabify) in Malaga, it analyses how bodily needs intersect with urban space, platform management, and the temporal organisation of work. Conceptualising toilets as gendered infrastructure, the article shows how difficulties accessing sanitation generate everyday disruptions that translate into lost income, health risks, and heightened exposure to algorithmic control. These effects are intensified by norms of modesty and privacy that constrain women’s ability to improvise bodily relief in public space. In response, women develop everyday strategies to remain mobile, but these practices ultimately shift the temporal, emotional, and bodily costs of inadequate infrastructure onto them. The article demonstrates that mobility is sustained through embodied and infrastructural support that is unevenly available.