bikes and feminism

[chrisamaphone]

on the bicycle as a vehicle to understand marginalizaton

if you're able-bodied enough to ride a bike and otherwise have trouble understanding, from a visceral perspective, the terminology of feminist and antioppression discourse, i have a concrete recommendation: ride a bicycle as your primary means of transportation in a city where this is not the norm.

i don't claim this is a way to automatically transport the experiences of others into your head, and obviously like all analogies it's imperfect, possibly even treading on "oppression tourism" territory, but as a set of concrete experiences to discuss, i think it can help establish some common ground for the sake of getting basic terminology. by way of example, i give the following glossary.

marginalization: when riding a bike you are literally pushed to the margins of the road. if you assert yourself and drive in the middle of the lane, you are constantly put on the defensive and have to ward off motorists challenging your audacity to be there -- even when in fact it's completely legal and the place where you are safest.

victim blaming: people will constantly question your decision to go out, saying "it's too dangerous" and concluding that therefore you just shouldn't do it; anyone who does is taking an unnecessary risk, and if they get hurt, they "should have known better." what you wear (helmet? light/reflective clothing?) will get you further blamed in the case of a traumatizing accident.

[white/male]-as-default, [hetero/cis]normativity: by analogy, car-as-default. if feminism is "the radical idea that women are people," bike advocacy is "the radical idea that bicycles are means of transport." underlying assumptions in personal conversation, marketing, business planning, and urban planning, frequently make the assumption that "transportation = car", and you'll find yourself repeatedly having to think (or say) "hey, what about me?" furthermore, the fact that personal motorized vehicles are the default thing-for-going-on-roads in cities is more historical accident than the "natural" order of things.

microagression: one or two little things that happen (someone honking or yelling at you, someone passing too close or cutting you off) might be shakeable, but if you keep this activity up and endure it constantly, day after day, i guarantee it will wear on you. the person you wind up snapping at might not have even been the most egregious instance, and they may come away with the impression that cyclists are irrationally aggressive people -- because they don't have the context of every other tiny aggression you encountered across the history of your riding, making you constantly defensive and volatile.

intersectionality: it's entirely too easy to think that the issues you have a window onto as a cyclist only pertain to cyclists. and then you start catching yourself doing the same shit to pedestrians (turning in front of them, not stopping at stop signs) that you're upset when drivers do to you, and you start hearing about cyclists being dicks to other cyclists and pedestrians, or you hear a cyclist wonder why everyone doesn't just ride a bike (including the poor, elderly, and disabled?) and you (hopefully!) start to realize that getting around the city sucks for a lot of people and is a way bigger problem than just your subjective view. this is related to the idea that a workable feminism necessarily incorporates all axes of systematic oppression, not just those that incongruently affect women.

on the bicycle as a tool of autonomy

on the flip side of all this, for me personally, the bicycle has been a hugely, astoundingly critical component of my own sense of autonomy and independence. i mean, okay, in some ways it still represents a dependence, but it's a dependence on something i own and control, rather than a dependence on male friends to wait with me at bus stops at night or on someone to give me a ride home -- in other words, having my location be subject to the whims of unreliable external factors. i don't have a sense for how this would compare to just owning a car, but honestly i think it would still win, because of the increased flexibility (ability to stop on a whim, don't have to hunt as hard for parking, can go on trails, gives access to open air/adrenaline from exercise, etc).

in that sense, i think it's an incredible instrument of feminism, and certainly of my own happiness.

Comments

[hvincent.livejournal.com]

1.) i'm not saying whether or not choice changes the validity of something as a target of oppression; i'm just pointing out that i think it's a delicate difference, and i generally try to avoid conflating them. i'm almost being purely syntactic here, but i think it's worth being careful about this.

i can also raise the level of pedanticism i'm indulging in here by saying that sure, there's a choice involved in displaying parts of your identity in certain ways and contexts, but that still makes the bikes vs feminism thing separate issues to me. then i can ask things like 'am i being oppressed because this is part of who i am, or am i being oppressed because i've chosen to display part of who i am?' most of the problems i encounter as a cyclist do not affect me when i'm not sitting on my bike (which would be choosing to open display the cyclist identity). while that doesn't make the actual problems themselves go away in a global sense, it changes how i'm able to think about them.

2.) i don't think that there exist people who have absolutely no personal points of reference to understand terms describing oppression. there might be people who are unaware of certain kinds of oppression, but i think that if there exists someone who can't understand terms when explained to them, that someone is unlikely to understand by trying to do something else that is kind of similar.

now, whether or not a person is willing to express sympathy in a productive manner is a different story.

[chrisamaphone]

2.) i don't think that there exist people who have absolutely no personal points of reference to understand terms describing oppression.

the reason i decided to actually write up and post this analogy was because someone specifically told me it helped: a friend of mine said that the process of learning to ride a bike as his primary means of transportation gave him a lot more points of reference to reach to. when they're imperfect, you can clarify - but it's a starting point; i've been able to make headway in conversations where otherwise it was just stymied by "but i have no idea what that feels like."

[hvincent.livejournal.com]

fair enough, i guess, but i think this works better if someone is already learning to be a bikecommuter, rather than 'hey if you don't understand oppression go ride a bike', since the sort of person who will open themselves up to learning about bikecommuting probably already has some internal mechanisms in place for figuring these things out. in that sense, they have the potential for building points of reference that just needed to be found; i think everyone has those, it's just that 'try bike commuting' isn't going to work as a blanket suggestion for building those.

(which, now that i'm skimming over your original post again, i guess that's what you clarified in the second paragraph anyway, so now i feel kind of silly)

and also, i'm just offering my thoughts as a counterpoint for why this analogy doesn't work for me, since i also happen to fall into both categories that are being analogized.