This study's focus on mobility reflects the highly visible physical movement of Sambas Malay women as they pursue socioeconomic, cultural, and political objectives. Earlier chapters have examined the implications of women's socioeconomic mobility for the composition of Sambas Malay culture, adat, and identity. In considering the consequences of women's mobility, some effects on Sambas Malay gender relations have become apparent. In this chapter, I revisit the discussions of female cross-border migrants and traders, public sector employees, NGO staff, and cultural producers to reflect upon the interplay between key gender relations and norms, and women's socioeconomic mobility. Evident here is the paradoxical way gender relations both enable and constrain women's mobility by establishing the terms and conditions under which women's socioeconomic mobility is deemed normative. As Tamarkin observes, ‘Theories of mobility are also necessarily theories of constraint’ (2017, p. 306). There are also indications of the loosening of such gender norms as women's socioeconomic mobility deepens in response to broader social forces, including the policies of the new regency, transnational capitalism, a cultural urbanism coloured by Islam and consumption, national and international community development, and—not least—the geography of Sambas’ border-zone location.

Despite their common experience of living in a border-zone, the significance of geography for the gender norms governing women's mobility was not uniform. Proximity to East Malaysia, as much as distance from recognised centres of politics, education, and culture, variously impacted the acceptability of women's mobility. So, for example, historical precedent and cultural proximities supported the geographical horizon of rural workingclass cross-border mobility in which women's informal crossings could be sanctioned along with those of men. In this context, women's cross-border mobility may not provoke anxiety or community concern to the same extent as labour migration further afield (Eilenberg and Wadley, 2009). The prestige of travelling to centres of education, training, and governance in Indonesia also provided endorsements for women travelling for training and professional reasons. NGO and public sector women revisited their early adult experiences of tertiary education when work-related travel took them to Pontianak (the provincial capital) and Java.