Home often appears in opposition to travel. Throughout the road movie genre in particular, we encounter male protagonists who undertake self-reflective quests away from home, with ‘home’ often representing a conservative lifestyle that they hope to escape. In their Road Movie Book, editors Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark write that ‘the road movie promotes a male escapist fantasy linking masculinity to technology and defining the road as a space that is at once resistant while ultimately contained by the responsibility of domesticity: home life, marriage, employment’ (1997: 3). Home becomes at once a space of conventions and one of lost intimacy that the protagonist hopes to regain on the road. The road thus becomes an alternative to ‘home’ where the main character searches for self and for a more authentic space of intimate relations.

In contemporary cinema, and in road movies in particular, the notion of home often signifies a familiar domestic space associated with women, and that stands in opposition to mobility and the ‘masculine’ (see de Lauretis 1984; Frederick and Hyde 1993; Robertson 1997; Bruno 2002; Rollet 2003; Mazierska and Rascaroli 2006; Royer 2011; Fullwood 2015; Blum-Reid 2016). Giuliana Bruno describes how the notion of home, of one's origin, of domus – domesticity, domestication – in male narratives of travel ‘continues to be confused and gendered feminine’ (2002: 86). As such, home has acquired a meaning of ‘the womb from which one originates and to which one wishes to return’ and has become ‘the very site of the production of sexual difference’ (Bruno 2002: 86). In travel narratives, returning to and ‘repossessing’ home often emerge as repossessing the feminine subject or ‘re-housing gender’ in Bruno's words.

Spaces such as the home and the road carry a whole different meaning when we consider the mobility of women in films. When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own (1929), she expressed the difficulties women experienced when they sought to inhabit both ‘public’ and private spaces (whether a public library, a park or a private house), as all were dominated and ruled by men. In a way that recalls Woolf's essay, women protagonists in road movies tend to leave the domestic space to find a space for themselves elsewhere; outside of confining gendered binaries situating women into stasis, passivity and dependance, in opposition to men's mobility, activity and independence.