Embodying inequality: Diversity and difference in the transnational lifeworld of mass transit

The introduction of a mass transit bus system into Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, has revealed new ways of being mobile that challenge established certainties of embodiment in urban daily life. Through post-war development, Vietnamese social spaces have become more privatized and more globalized. As a free flow of ideas and practices across boundaries generates transnational modes of mobility, the social spaces in HCMC in which embodied practices of mobility are experienced can be interpreted as a transnational lifeworld, or habitus, in which strangers interact. Drawing on 134 journeys on the Saigon Bus network undertaken in 2012, the article argues that within this transnational habitus certainties about the stranger-body’s presence become contested, as non-normative and stigmatized bodies negotiate social space differently. Their contrasting subjectivities and differentiated abilities mark embodied inequalities that may have been previously made invisible from an historically homogenizing public space but which now are revealed via hyper-visibility. Contrasting responses to the stranger-body are characterized by co-existing mixophilia and mixophobia that generate degrees of social cooperation and exclusion. Yet, arguably, the non-normative and stigmatized body retains control over which and how aspects of the self are presented.