How you get there matters: mobility and meaning amoung U.S. motorcyclists
Date
2002
Authors
Ackerson, Kristin
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Abstract
Motorcycling has been a mode of mobility in the United States since the early twentieth century. U.S. motorcyclists throughout the twentieth century tell stories of mobility and what it has to do with culture and capital, as well as what riding a motorcycle means to riders personally. In order to look at mobility, as opposed to place, culture, or community, as a part of wider structures of capital that affect personal mobility, such as health and health care, work, and family, I discuss social science work about and by riders, stories told by riders from 1909 to 1912, and the stories told by two contemporary U.S. riders. To make sense of riders' mobility, and of motorcycling as a leisure pastime for men and women of different classes. I have used a historical materialist perspective. Several questions flesh out this central theme of a historical materialist perspective of motorcycling: How does mobility shape the context of who rides and why? How does capital influence mobility? What are classed and gendered notions of riding? Attending to local. regional. and global spatial scales as interconnected fields where capital limits or facilitates mobility through space-time compression allows a picture of culture to emerge that is not based on identity or ยท'lifestyle," but material connections.