Still I Ride : How Women of Colour are challenging discourses in and through Cycling

Abstract: In a cultural context in which the car dominates and has become normalised, cyclists are often marginalised. For a Woman of Colour, cycling can introduce an additional layer of othering. She is already invisible as a Woman of Colour in broader society that privileges whiteness and maleness and she is not seen to belong to the cycling culture, which has tended to peddle narrow stereotypical representations of cyclists. She may also be breaking gender norms within her community. The project pairs Stuart Hall’s theories of representation and reception and bell hooks’ concepts of ‘talking back’ and the ‘oppositional gaze’ with tools and frameworks from critical discourse analysis, to explore the question of how, in the UK context, dominant discourses around cycling, gender and race play out in the experience of Women of Colour who cycle, and how these discourses are being challenged. With ‘rolling ethnography’, or participant observation on bikes, as its method the project finds that masculine sporty representations in cycling have concrete and material effects on the experience of cycling for women. At the same time, the lack of race and ethnic diversity in the cycling culture heightens the visibility of Women of Colour cycling in public spaces and raises questions about belonging. Women of Colour who cycle use various strategies to challenge this erasure: by rejecting the connotative meanings that centre White masculinity in cycling; by inversing gendered representations; by assimilating into the dominant discourse in cycling and by displaying joy. Applying approaches and frameworks more familiar to the study of communication, the project aims to contribute to the existing body of research on cycling culture in the UK. In doing so, it seeks to move beyond just discussing barriers faced by under-represented groups to critically exploring meanings attached to cycling and what the fluidity of these could mean for efforts to increase diversity in cycling.