When riding a Harley out on an isolated, open road for several hours, it’s easy to start imagining yourself differently. You have finally escaped from all of the subtle mud and oppression of everyday life, to experience selfhood and solitude in nature. There are no telephones. No crowds, no barking dogs or other obnoxious noises. Just you with your powerful engine, the Road, and the sound and feel of the wind. As you become one with the machine, you may feel like a centaur, a roaming creature of the forest. Or a siren, as your pipes play your compelling, alluring music. Or Robin Hood on an ancient proletarian mission. Or you may see yourself as debonair Pancho Villa, empowered Cher, Billy Idol or Britney Spears, or Jesse James on the ultimate chopper.
Yet, no matter how twentieth- and twenty-first-century riders have imagined themselves while operating their motorcycles, these self-identities and fantasies have been socially ignored and reworked by a variety of nonriders, institutions, and social power structures. The result has been a stifling, negative set of stereotypes and attempts to alienate motorcyclists.
You probably have an idea what I’m talking about here. We’ll get into some interesting examples later. Bikers, in turn, individually and collectively responded to these negative stereotypes. While such processes have taken many forms over the years, in this chapter we’ll focus on how the world of motorcycling has become sexually charged largely because of how larger societal explanations, studies, and descriptions of biker sexuality have exerted their influence. This sexualization of bikers by larger sociopolitical forces has occurred for many decades and continues up to the present day.
The shifting relationships among actual motorcyclists, imagined bikers, and nonriders are very revealing. The ideas of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) will help us look at how particular public images of motorcyclists slowly developed, how they became sexual stereotypes, and a few ways in which these myths interacted with real bikers and nonriders.1 We will see that there are forces out there that are larger than motorcycling, and that these forces seek to control and eventually dominate riders. These forces work their mojo partially through specific sexual explanations and images of bikers.
Foucault’s terminology, or anything having to do with his theories, is called “Foucauldian.” Thus, Foucault’s theories applied to social dynamics is known as “Foucauldian discourse.” “Power center” means the causes, effects, and workings of an institution as well as the institution itself. A power center could be governmental, private, corporate, or special interest–oriented—for example, the American Medical Association. A Foucauldian “power structure” consists of two or more power centers working with each other or in opposition to each other, within the same system—such as the American Medical Association working toward its goals that coincide with those of both the Food and Drug Administration and social rules and values, resulting in uniformity of norms and conformity. American capitalist society is another example of a power structure, and a big, complicated one at that.
The “deployment of sexuality,” one of Foucault’s key terms, refers to the ways in which power centers cause sexuality to be talked about, published, displayed, thought about, or imagined. An example of a deployment of biker sexuality would be the California Attorney General’s 1965 official report stating that bikers commit “sex perversion” and a subsequent Newsweek article, which mistakenly reports that the Attorney General “accused” the male bikers in question of being gay.2 Such governmental and media-generated deployments of sexuality convey information or dis-information concerning sex and bikers for specific purposes.
Some examples of Foucauldian power centers include the medical profession, the movie industry, the print media, the Harley-Davidson Motor Company, and police agencies. These all try to exert various kinds of control over, among others, motorcyclists, people who consider their self-identities in terms of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered (LGBT), or those who regard themselves as members of both categories (namely, LGBT riders).
Foucault considers the psychiatric and psychological professions’ role as a power center. Applying this to motorcycling, a prime example of Foucauldian biker sexuality discourse would include an article published in Time magazine on December 7th, 1970, titled “The Motorcycle Syndrome.” Reading the article with Foucault in mind, the psychiatric profession and the weekly news press attempted to medicalize the desire to ride motorcycles as a mental illness. According to the anonymous Time author, who describes the work of a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, enthusiasm for motorcycle riding is “a hitherto unrecognized emotional ailment” and the psychiatrist “found the same basic symptoms in all his sick cyclists.” Such supposed symptoms included promiscuity, impotency, and being “always worried about discovering that they were homosexuals.” The article claims that riders “used their motorcycles to compensate for feelings of effeminacy and weakness” (p. 65).
One may think that mainstream medical professionals couldn’t possibly take such ideas seriously, but they actually did. In fact, this doctor’s theories about motorcyclists were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and he was also cited in Dun’s Review (January 1972, p. 44). Such acceptance and dissemination of his research represents a significant deployment of sexuality by one power center, the psychiatric profession—as part of a larger power structure, the medical profession in collusion with the press—against motorcyclists. The results for the power structure at hand—the medical profession—included individual and collective prestige and power enhancement, increased subjugation, and control. By identifying and exploiting motorcyclists, the power structure gained knowledge and profit for itself, while at the same time it marginalized riders as a group.
Sexuality deployments take other forms as well, including the objectification of women who ride motorcycles. We can find a colorful example back in 1916, when Adeline and Augusta Van Buren rode across North America to prove that women are capable of serving as U.S. army dispatch riders. (Swift messenger service was an important military concern in the days before the development of radio technology.) The Van Buren sisters dressed the part: they wore military-style leggings and their riding breeches were made of leather. However, the Foucauldian discourse generated by their visit to Denver, Colorado, is mean-spirited. The Denver Post printed a degrading article about the riders that read, “The [national] preparedness issue was serving as an excellent excuse for women to stay away from home, to display physical prowess in various fields of masculine superiority, and to display their feminine contours in nifty khaki and leather uniforms.”3
Due to nonmotorcyclist reactions to these “feminine contours,” several times out in the middle of America, in small towns between Ohio and the Rocky Mountains, “the Man” incarcerated the Van Buren sisters. They were accused of bogus infractions such as “wearing men’s clothing.” But each time they were arrested, the cops—after detaining them for a while—released them, advising them to leave town immediately.
One wonders whether the women’s corporate sponsorships—by Firestone Tires and Indian Moto-Cycles—had anything to do with their relatively quick releases and immediate expulsions. Hmmmmm. Could this be a case of Foucauldian collusion between two power centers—the town leadership and the transportation industry—within one power structure?
First, there were arrests in order to restrain and control women within established gender roles. This served as a warning to local town women not to try what those two city women are doing. Then, a quick release of the sisters under the condition that they leave immediately. This ensured that few other women in town would see them. Also, the quicker they got to California, the sooner Indian and Firestone could sell more products. This is a classic example of how Foucauldian discourse and a deployment of sexuality operate. (See? It’s really quite simple. We’ve all witnessed deployments of sexuality, though maybe not as dramatic as this one.)
The Denver Post article certainly betrays the author’s sexual objectification of women, if nothing else. By the 1920s, photographers were already selling pictures of women posing provocatively, mounted on bikes in a style that would later become typical of an Easyriders centerfold. This emerging exploitation of an imagined biker sexuality was gradually increased and intensified in the second half of the century by the power structure known as the media, following the Foucauldian model. According to Foucault, “The deployment of sexuality has its reason for being in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way” (p. 107).
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that, by the end of the century, Teah Chadderdon of Northern Arizona University statistically demonstrated extensive sexploitation of women in motorcycle magazines. After compiling statistics using 2,653 images of females in twenty-two recent publications, she found that 46.1 percent of the subjects were either nude, wearing swimming suits, or barely dressed.4
Pictorial images of scantily-clad women are indeed problematic, although it is worth mentioning another aspect beyond Chadderdon’s field of analysis: the fact that this represents exploitation of “motorcyclists”—in this case women who are supposedly motorcyclists—by the media, a Foucauldian power structure. Because 1970s and 1980s magazines such as Easyriders, Iron Horse, and Biker, which supposedly depicted the post-hippie motorcycle lifestyle, sold far more copies than the small population of hardcore bikers could have purchased, it becomes obvious that the readership of these biker rags must have been predominantly nonbiker. Pictures of so-called biker chicks were popular among nonriders from the 1960s through the end of the millennium. Late in the century, mainstream advertising campaigns capitalized on such sexual discourse by featuring female “bikers” in conjunction with themes like sadomasochism, bondage and domination, and lesbianism. The press promoted an objectification and erotic imagining of women motorcyclists, by riding and nonriding men, through the deployment of biker sexual stereotypes.
Another print media–based deployment of sexuality stems from certain literary descriptions of how the ride feels. Harley-Davidson typically utilized an antiquated, dual-fire ignition system with a 45-degree V-twin configuration for most of the century, until 1998. It vibrated. In fact, it vibrated very nicely. Some authors describe the sensation of riding in language that was overtly sensual or sexual.5
But how intensely a small percentage of Harley enthusiasts may have enjoyed its unique vibration is irrelevant. What is important in a discussion of Foucauldian discourse is that such authors either sensationalized a largely unknown phenomenon, or they confessed a description of their own sensuality, or they interviewed women to solicit confession of their sensual and sexual experiences. These personal moments were published, distributed, studied, and relished.
This dynamic matches the Foucauldian deployment model as the authors disseminate information, perpetuate a myth or mystique, and set up motorcyclists as sexual objects to be exploited and controlled. “Mystique” is a word that Harley-Davidson Motor Company uses to refer to its version of this and other imaginary constructions of riders and the ride. A 1993 video, produced by the Motor Company to narrate the history of the company and its bikes, deploys this concept repeatedly. Actor James Caan mentions the mystique as he slowwwwly mounts a late model Harley and refers to visual features of the V-shaped engine and sensual elements—“how great it feels to ride.”6 Caan uses the word “erotic” and connects the Harley Mystique to the product itself and what it might do to make people happy. (Since the Harley-Davidson Motor Company made the film in order to make people want to buy Harley-Davidson motorcycles and related products, naturally Harleys are portrayed as having attractive qualities.)
But there is something else to consider. Cultural philosophy and history are partly influenced by commercial films like this one, so they too must be examined as tools for deploying sexuality, to tighten the control over riders (and their spending habits) and, thus, increase the company’s power (while maximizing the accumulation of wealth). The Harley video is important because it mentions sexual elements, shows that they started early on, and portrays them as something desirable. It actually deploys sexuality to increase company control of a target market and population through sales, followed by automatic membership in HOG—the Harley Owners Group, another power center. Since the purpose of the film footage is to increase the power-knowledge-pleasure of a Foucauldian power structure, the video must be taken seriously.
Thus, capitalist power centers such as Harley-Davidson Motor Company, HOG, the media, the psychiatric profession, segments of nonriding society, and motorcyclists interacted with each other, leading to the development and redevelopment of customs, norms, rules, and stereotypes. Considering the popular, nonriding societal myth about bikers that slowly changed from the 1950s through the rest of the century, their biker sexual images may be considered as increasingly defined social constructions for the purpose of alienation, marginalization, and domination. The power structures attempted to control bikers by placing them at a social distance away from everyone else, via the tactic of developing the definition of “biker” more precisely.
By the 1980s the main biker male stereotype became that of the “scooter tramp.” Examples of scooter tramp archetypical figures include Captain America and Billy in the film Easy Rider (1969), the 1970s underground comic character Easy Wolf, Gar in Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask (1985), Harley from Harley-Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991), and the earlier legendary versions of Sonny Barger and of Spider from Easyriders magazine. Because he is imagined as a “tramp,” this automatically creates a social distance separating “scooter” people from everyone else. Once separated, a group may be more easily controlled.
Of course, not all bikers were male. Anthropologist Barbara Joans describes two other mythic gender constructs that emerged during this era in her 1997 essay “Women Who Ride: The Bitch in the Back is Dead.” According to Joans, if the woman rode on the back, she was stereotyped by the public as a “sexual outlaw”: sexually promiscuous, insatiable, and possibly bisexual. If she operated her own bike, she was also labeled a “gender traitor” who transgressed gender norms by taking control of a “masculine” machine. The “gender traitor’s” imagined ambiguous sexuality made her scary to nonriders.7 Thus, female motorcycle operators were relegated to the margins of society.
The public display of a woman’s body, clothed but fully visible at eye level, on a motorcycle—whether on the back or the front seat but especially as operator—was a symbol of excessive mobility, especially after the end of World War II when gender roles were redefined and car seat heights were lowered. According to this anti-gay, misogynous world view, a woman on a motorcycle had placed a phallus between her legs and had no legitimate business on that bike.
One Foucauldian power center, the movie industry, further developed motorcyclist images and perpetuated a more clearly-defined, stereotypical “biker chick” from the 1960s through the 1970s even while actual riders adopted elements of her attitude, her fictional imagined lifestyle, and her costume as their wardrobe. Stereotypical sexual elements of this creature were portrayed in film. For example, in Teenage Gang Debs (1966), female characters create sexual chaos in a love triangle, convince one man to kill another, and enact lesbian sexuality in front of god and everybody. The female rider is depicted as a crazed, dangerous bisexual.
Other movies such as Jack Cardiff’s Girl on a Motorcycle, released in 1968, catered to straight male–centered fantasies such as sadomasochism, predation, and unbridled sexuality. The entire movie consists of actress Marianne Faithfull’s character Rebecca leaving her nonriding husband and traveling on her Harley to meet her lover. She stops and gets drunk at a road-house, then continues onward. She rides along on her saddle, intoxicated, and starts to become aroused. As her body writhes and moves, she addresses the bike. “My black devil, you make love beautifully . . . Take me to him, my black pimp!”8 (Although the motorcycle’s paint was solid gloss black, the dual entendre also refers to the “African-American, street-level, sex broker” racial stereotype.) She becomes so aroused that she nearly crashes. Dozens of biker flicks sexualized the female biker image as an irresponsible, brainless nymphomaniac.
Even so, at least one of these productions might be described as empowering during the 1960s, a time of gendered inequality and resistance. The 1968 Hershell Gordon Lewis movie She-Devils on Wheels is a landmark biker film in terms of the fictive portrayal of gender role inversion. The all-female gang members regularly race each other to find out who gets first choice of the passive, hang-around males for the night.9 This movie was so different from the other forty-some odd biker movies released between 1966 and 1972, especially in its inversion of genders, that She-Devils alone has recently been selected to be reproduced and will probably come out soon, with the same title. (Pun intended. But I may be wrong about that; we’ll have to wait and see the movie to find out. . . .)
Virtually all of the biker films made during this era included sexual content that made them integral to a Foucauldian deployment of sexuality.
Such portrayed images, along with other types of Foucauldian discourse, historically led to legal restrictions. According to Foucault:
The law would be secure, even in the new mechanics of power. For this is the paradox of a society which . . . has created so many technologies of power that are foreign to the concept of law: it fears the effects and proliferation of those technologies and attempts to recode them in forms of law. (p. 109)
Joans discusses socio-legal, nonrider backlash against motorcyclists and explains that because the predominant masculine biker image was one of danger, courage, and a lifestyle of liberty, the public targets them for elimination.10 Put in Foucauldian terms, the legal and legislative power centers fear biker sexuality and crack down on motorcyclists as an entire community.
Queer male biker imagery—along with much of the power-structural fear of motorcyclists—can historically be traced to The Wild One, a 1954 László Benedek film classic. When the movie was released, some straight males complained about Marlon Brando’s biker character Johnny; his leather costume, cap, and body language were considered too effeminate. Viewers called Johnny a “fag” and instead rooted for Lee Marvin’s character Chico, who was considered to resemble a real biker. Nonriders feared both gays and bikers, while some riders also used homophobic language.
Yet, the image of Brando as Johnny became a fetish in gay male culture for the rest of the century and, in the long run, also became a dominant straight biker image. Thus, The Wild One was a queering of motorcycle imagery and culture by Hollywood, a major media power structure, since the antihero did not dress like or act like the typical motorcyclists of the period but, instead, influenced later motorcycle fashions and iconography as well as queer pleasure.
In the Mexican American Borderlands, however, Brando’s machismo was considered realistic. As Eric Zolov writes in Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture, Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley were thought of as rebeldes sin causa, “rebels without a cause.” But it was Presley who fell from graceland (Sorry about that; it was too tempting. I promise not to insert any more silly puns), after the media in Mexico reported a remark that he allegedly made in an interview—something to the effect that he would rather kiss three African American women than “a Mexican.”
The report (which later turned out to be false) was a smear tactic enacted by a traditional, older generational power center trying to turn younger people away from rock ’n’ roll. Nonetheless, the immediate public reaction against Presley centered not on race but on his sexual preferences. Young people in Mexico and the borderlands dismissed him as gay. As an imagined joto, he was thereafter permanently considered effeminate in a culture that valued machismo.11
Presley and James Dean were bikers, while Brando played the role of a motorcyclist in the movies and is more widely imagined as a biker. Whether macho, joto, effeminate, or queer, the three are forever icons in the development of biker sexual myth and popular culture.
Cops didn’t care for, or about, such sexually charged, complex icons. Yet, the sexual aspect of biker images seems to have attracted the interests of police personnel from the 1960s through the 1990s. “Third space feminism” relates to a variety of lifestyles for people who are not at one of the two extreme ends of the spectrum that runs between “female” and “male,” or “feminine” and “masculine.” LGBT people live in all kinds of different third spaces in various places between these two poles. Many members of Raw Thunder, an all-female riding association, tend toward such alternative life orientations. Char Zack, the Road Captain of Raw Thunder, mentions one incident that relates to third space realities and police agency deployment of sexuality. She went to the Laughlin River Run event once—and only once—in the mid-1990s. For like every other motorcyclist that weekend riding on the desert highway that crosses the Colorado River, she was required to go through what bikers call “the gauntlet,” a roadblock out in the middle of nowhere consisting of a line of Arizona police gang officers.
All bikes were pulled over, yet cars were exempt and could just drive on by. The regional police power center stood out in the desert heat, drawing overtime pay, waiting for bikers to scrutinize for detention and special treatment. That day, Zack had been riding in an all-male group of riders and was packing another woman on her back seat, a friend who had never been to a run before. As they slowly edged their way through the gauntlet, one officer asked, “So what do we have here, a couple of lesbians?”
This was one of many inappropriate incidents that led to another Foucauldian measure of resistance within the power-structural grid: the routine videotaping, by riders’ rights organizations, of police encounters with motorcyclists beginning in the late 1990s. Zack’s experience at the river led to a Foucauldian dynamic in which both the gauntlet incident and the biker-organizational response to it are two sides of the same coin, two parts of the same power-knowledge-pleasure system. After all, the intention of the motorcyclists’ rights video project is to generate evidence to be used within legal and governmental systems, instruments of the same power structure.
Another reason the gauntlet incident is part of a Foucauldian deployment of sexuality is that it involved detainment of imagined sexually deviant “Others” (both bikers and “lesbian” bikers), state agency naming of imagined rider sexual orientations, and an individual officer getting his psychosexual rocks off through an unprofessional, rude, homophobic comment. Zack vowed never to return to the Laughlin Run. As often happens, police gangs, Harvard psychiatry professors, and other nonriding outsiders to the pleasure of motorcycling lack any real understanding of the ride. They “don’t have a clue,” as most riders will attest.
Some bikers appropriate the language used by the power centers. Foucault calls this the “rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses.” Accordingly:
discourses can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also . . . a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. . . . often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories. (pp. 100–01)
Employing such discourse in a resistance within the power structure, some riders would say that, in fact, it is the Harvard doctor, the police agency leadership, and other nonriders like them who are mentally disturbed, frustrated, and jealous to the extent that they have sexual issues with bikers.
Although moto sexuality was a subtle but increasingly significant undercurrent during the twentieth century, gay motorcyclists also emerged with a tactical discourse of their own as early as 1921, when the magazine Motorcycle and Bicycle Illustrated published an article. It included the spotlighting of someone who was probably the first lesbian motorcyclist commentator. The anonymous author of the article interviewed several heterosexual women who rode their own bikes, as well as Evelyn Greenway, a West Coast biker who was also a news reporter. Greenway said:
It makes me disgusted with my sex when I see so many baby dolls lolling back in great clumsy limousines, dependent as a toy poodle on the ability of some “mere man” to get them there and back. For myself, I really pity them. Grace and I enjoy our machines. We both like swimming and fishing and the outdoors generally. We are planning some dandy winter trips. . . . To all red blooded girls I’ll say “Do it with a motorcycle.” (October 27th, pp. 43–48)
In addition to the moto press, other media productions rubbed against the grain of conventional, straight hetero-normality. For example, in the 1940s Robert Hughes wrote gender-alternative, fictional radio sketches about a female police motor sergeant, inspired by Sappho imagery. These are empowering statements that promote collective liberation, rather than mere defensive stances.
Foucault tells us that the accuracy of different biker sexual descriptions is irrelevant. Bikers seem to agree. Foucault would instead call attention to the power centers that build gendered and sexual stereotypes and their strategies. He would ask which companies, corporations, governmental, medical, and other power structures are involved in the construction and perpetuation of labels such as homosexual, sexual outlaw, gender traitor, motorcycle syndrome, lesbians, or mystique. Who benefits from the acceptance of these labels as categories of identity and analysis? Who is it that feels a need to control bikers and queer people? Tactical discourses, rider activists, and others are critical responses to marginalization, within a power structural dynamic, on behalf of everyone that power centers seek to dominate, including LGBT people and riders.
Media, police, and other power centers portray motorcycling as a sexually charged world. Although their images interacted with biker realities for generations—resulting in the alienation and marginalization of both motorcyclists as an imagined sexually deviant social class and of gay, lesbian, and queer bikers—Foucault points out that these definitions are continually contested. He writes, “Confronted by a power that is law, the subject who . . . is ‘subjected’ . . . is he who obeys” (p. 85).
So, what about those who refuse to obey? Queer voices and the music of Harley engines may help to extend the limits of tolerance as alternative discourses of sexuality continue to engage the interplay between riders, activists, elite authorities, and structures of conformity.12
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1 Unless otherwise noted, page numbers in parentheses will refer to Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1990).
2 “Accused” is the term used by Hunter S. Thompson in his own published contribution to this deployment of sexuality. See Thompson, “The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders,” Nation 200, No. 20 (May 17th, 1965), pp. 522–26, especially p. 523.
3 Anne Tully Ruderman, “The Daring Escapade of 1916,” Ms. 6–8 (February 1978), pp. 54–55; Anne “Tulle” Ruderman and Jo Giovannoni, “Adeline and Augusta Van Buren . . . Pioneers in Women in Motorcycling,” Asphalt Angels 74 (September–October, 1998), pp. 11–15.
4 Teah Chadderdon, “Marketing Gender: Bodies or Bikes?” A paper delivered at the Southwest / Texas Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico (March 9th, 2001), p. 33.
5 Gail DeMarco, Rebels with a Cause: We Ride the Harley (Santa Rosa: Squarebooks, 1994), p. 120; Brock Yates, Outlaw Machine: Harley-Davidson and the Search for the American Soul (New York: Little, Brown, 1999), p. 133. Trisha Yeager, How to Be Sexy With Bugs in Your Teeth (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1978), pp. 2–3.
6 Joel T. Smith, director, Harley-Davidson: The American Motorcycle, featuring James Caan, David Crosby, and Wynonna Judd (Cabin Fever, 1993), video-cassette.
7 Barbara Joans, “Women Who Ride: The Bitch in the Back is Dead,” in Anne Bolin and Jane Granskog, eds., Athletic Intruders: Ethnographic Research on Women, Culture, and Exercise (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003 [1997]).
8 Jack Cardiff, director, Girl on a Motorcycle, featuring Marianne Faithful, Alain Delon, and Roger Mutton (Warner Brothers, 1968), videocassette.
9 Hershell Gordon Lewis, director, She-Devils on Wheels, featuring Betty Connell, Nancy Lee Noble, and Christie Wagner (Mayflower Pictures/Western World Video, 1968), videocassette.
10 Barbara Joans, “Dykes on Bikes Meet Ladies of Harley,” in William L. Leap, ed., Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Imagination, and Appropriation in Lesbian and Gay Languages (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1995), pp. 87–106.
11 Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
12 I would like to thank Ernesto Chávez and Héctor Carbajal for responding to drafts of this chapter.