Negotiating the ‘plastic rocket’: masculinity, car styling and performance in the Swedish modified car community

Abstract

This article adds new knowledge on the ways that car modifiers negotiate their cars in relation to design, power and performance as qualities that make cars attractive. In order to understand the complex ways in which masculinity and cars co-constitute masculine subjectivities and communities, the article uses the modifier-car as a tool to discuss how certain ways of modifying and personifying cars create links between masculinity and cars at risk in male-dominated communities. Despite the fact that modified cars may share the looks and sounds of typical racing cars – and therefore appear to encompass some of the most convincing elements of power in automobile systems, namely the capacity for risk-taking – it is rather an alleged lack of power ascribed to some versions of modified cars – the plastic rocket – that stand out as a risk to constructions of modifier masculinity. Viewed as a feminized car, the plastic rocket has come to be negotiated as an inauthentic, foreign, powerless and vulgar example of modifying cars compared to the Swedish modified car community's working-class self-image. At the very core of the plastic rocket is a threat to modifier masculinity which is the inability to back up one's looks with strength. It is argued that the discourses formed around the plastic rocket indicate ‘queer’ possibilities in the ways cars extend male bodies.

Keywords:

• masculinity
• risk
• car design
• car modification

Acknowledgement

This article is based on the author's PhD dissertation (Balkmar, 2012).

Notes on contributor

Dag Balkmar has a PhD in Gender Studies (Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities) and is currently conducting postdoctoral research on intersectionality, policy and violence at the Centre for Feminist Social Studies, Örebro University, Sweden. His research interests, apart from intersectionality and violence, are gender constructions in relation to cars, car modification, and dangerous driving practices.

Notes

1. Pimp My Ride is a TV show produced by MTV. In each episode a car in poor condition is restored and customized.