Dykes on Bikes: mobility, belonging and the visceral

abstract

This article contributes to growing scholarship on fluidity, embodiment and the politics of festivals. Such scholarship is crucial to understanding belonging as an embodied, visceral experience. Extending on this work, this paper seeks to draw further attention to the fluidity of festival boundaries and experience, by exploring how belonging holds the potential to become detached from location, and be manifested forcefully through movement to and from events. I focus on a group of six Dykes on Bikes members, who rode motorbikes 1800 kilometres as part of a larger group from Brisbane to the Sydney Mardi Gras Parade. Through this exploration I illustrate how attention to the visceral experience of belonging on the move allows geographers to address what holds individuals ‘in place’ so to speak, when attachment takes place through movement. In doing so I argue that the visceral is crucial to understanding belonging as mobile because it provides a framework to stand against universalised discourses that locate belonging within the temporal and spatial confines of events.

KEY WORDS:

• Mobilities
• visceral
• belonging
• Dykes on Bikes
• festival
• sexuality
• womyn

Acknowledgements

I am incredibly thankful to the research participants for being so generous with their time and sharing their world with me. I am indebted to Gordon Waitt, Lynda Johnston and two anonymous referees for their insightful and thought provoking comments on earlier drafts of this article—thank you.

Notes

[1] ‘Womyn’ is one of several alternative spellings of the word ‘woman’, used to avoid the suggestion that females are dualistically defined through reference to ‘man’.

[2] Queensland Dykes on Bikes Chapter is state-based and inclusive of the urban areas of the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast, which are close to the city of Brisbane.

[3] Motocross is a form of motorbike racing held on off-road circuits, designed to be physically demanding and competitive.