Genre as mobilities infrastructure: how U.S. and Scottish solo hiking memoirs grant or withhold outdoor access

This paper examines how narrative genre functions as affective infrastructure within mobilities assemblages, shaping who feels entitled to walk alone in outdoor spaces. Drawing on autoethnographic vignettes of solo hiking in Australia and Scotland alongside critical autoethnographic readings of fifteen contemporary U.S. and Scottish solo-hiking memoirs (2012–2024), the study demonstrates how memoir narratives travel iteratively and co-constitutively between pages, trails, and bodies, shaping would-be walkers’ sense of legitimacy. I trace how different literary traditions produce contrasting moral atmospheres around outdoor legitimacy. Post-Wild American memoirs cultivate an inclusive grammar in which vulnerability becomes credential, extending imaginative rights to solitude beyond masculine heroism to include women, queer people, and people of colour. Scottish hillwalking memoirs, by contrast, tend to reproduce colonial-era codes of conquest and endurance that symbolically gate access, even as physical access policies hope to diversify the outdoors. These findings demonstrate the discursive construction of intangible mobilities affordances through memoir texts, which inform social imaginaries and mediate which outdoor mobilities feel possible or prohibited. Understanding genre as infrastructure matters for policy, as increasing outdoor leisure participation requires not only skills programmes but also narrative transformation, relinquishing inherited grammars of mastery that regulate who feels they belong in the outdoors.