While my Vis-Ability paper addressed the intra-action and entanglement of the bicycle and the body from a broad perspective, the prompt to consider a feminist critical race interpretation of the bicycle has allowed me to focus on the relationalities of the bicycle on the bodies of females, people of color, and specifically women of color. Michael Hames-García (2008), as quoted in van der Tuin (2011), explains that "the body is something more than an inert, passive object on which ideology inscribes meaning, but rather it is an agential reality with its own causal role in making meaning" (pg. 327). The agential reality of the human body entangles with the agential reality of the material bicycle. subRosa (2011) is a feminist art group that investigates the post-human body. They suggest that the post-human body "manifests simultaneously as the distributed body, medicalized body, socially networked body, cyborg body, citizen body, virtual body, laboring body, soldier body, animal body, and gestating body" (p. 16). This suggestion from subRosa causes a consideration of how the material bicycle can both support and negate these qualities of the post-human body.
Bike League of America (n.d.) reports that the fastest growth in bicycling is among the Hispanic, African American, and Asian American populations. Why is it that people of color are becoming more interested in cycling? Could it be the intra-action of the material bike and the bodies of people of color that provoke a sense of empowerment, belonging, and self confidence?
There are many organizations and clubs around the United States that are created specifically for people of color and even women of color. For example in New York, Black Girls Do Bike is a cycling group whose goal is to invite women of color to ride bikes and to never drop anyone on a ride (Cuevas, 2015). Friends on Bikes is a Portland, Oregon that was recently re-launched "for women and women-aligned people of color" (Woodstock, 2017, n.p.). Lastly, there is the Los Angeles based Ovarian Psycos, "a collective of young women of color who bike through the streets of East L.A. (and beyond) as a way of taking them back" (Lloyd, 2017, n.p.). There are countless groups with similar objectives of empowering women through collectivity and the entangled relationally with the material bicycle.
Reference List
Bike League of America. (n.d.). The new majority: Pedaling towards equity. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from http://www.bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/equity_report.pdf (pp.1-15).
Cuevas, K. E. (2015, September 1). Black girls on bicycles tear down stereotypes of women of color. Retrieved December 11, 2017, from https://www.metro.us/new-york/black-girls-on-bicycles-tear-down-stereotypes-of-women-of-color/zsJohE---bSAT9lNn5anE
Hames-García, M. (2008). How real is race? In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 308-339), Indiana: Indiana University Press.
SubRosa. (2011). Bodies unlimited: A decade of subRosa’s art practice. n.paradoxa, 28, 16–25.
van der Tuin, I. (2011). “New feminist materialisms.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 34(4), 271–277.
Woodstock, M. (2017, March 20). A New Portland Cycling Group Invites Women of Color to Pedal Together | Portland Monthly. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from https://www.pdxmonthly.com/articles/2017/3/20/a-new-portland-cycling-group-invites-women-of-color-to-pedal-together
Woodstock, M. (2017, March 20). A New Portland Cycling Group Invites Women of Color to Pedal Together | Portland Monthly. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from https://www.pdxmonthly.com/articles/2017/3/20/a-new-portland-cycling-group-invites-women-of-color-to-pedal-together
