Reading, Riding and Resistence:
Responses of Women Motorcyclists to Images of Women in the Motorcycle
Press
Today I want to talk about the problems I encountered when theorizing "resistance" in an Internet Web based survey I conducted to examine women motorcyclist's readings of and resistance to images of women in the mainstream motorcycle press. The survey and analysis of its conclusions are rooted in my primary belief that adherence to traditional notions of femininity are wrong. I find parallels in this enterprise with Janet Radway's study of a small community of romance novel readers. Her work discusses 'small' resistances, links them to women's positions in society, and posits the ways in which those resistances affect and are affected by a larger social structure. A definition of 'meaningful' resistance and a decision about its applicable scope are critical to deciding whether there can be efficacious forms of personal (as opposed to large-scale) resistance. Furthermore, clarification of traditional gender roles, sexuality, and sexism become increasingly important as we become aware of the subjective understandings of these terms by women respondents.
Janet Radway states in the conclusion to her book Reading the Romance that if "in concluding these chapters, the reader remains unsure as to whether the romance novel should be considered fundamentally conservative on the one hand or incipiently oppositional on the other, that is not surprising" (Radway 1991:209). Radway argues that romance reading in the United States constitutes a form of individual resistance on the part of female readers to assumptions that women alone remain responsible for the care and emotional nurturance of others and use books as barriers "between themselves and their families in order to declare themselves temporarily off-limits to those who would mine them for emotional support and maternal care" (1991:12). Additionally, the romances themselves constitute sites of resistance to gender through the predominantly female authors' reconfiguration of gender roles; heroes are sensitive and supportive, heroines are strong and capable, and most notably, a high value is placed on women's sexuality and its expression (Radway 1991). Existing within the novels and in contrast to these reconfigurations, however, are reifications of middle class American gender roles; for example, division of the world into public and private spheres with women situated in the private realm, heterosexual relationships, valorization of traditional marriage, and sexual relationships contained within the bounds of committed monogamous relationships (Radway 1991).
Radway's conclusion characterizes my own findings from an Internet Web based survey I conducted in October and November of 1997. Interested in women motorcyclist's responses and /or resistances to images of themselves in the American mainstream motorcycle press, I constructed a web site with four pages of images followed by a questionnaire with three open ended essay questions. [The site will remain up indefinitely; the URL is available after the session if anyone is interested in seeing it.] The images themselves come from five American motorcycle magazines: four mainstream magazines, Rider, Motorcyclist, Easyriders, and Cycle World; with one specialty magazine, BMWON (BMW Owners News). Most of the advertisements can be found in any one of three mainstream magazines; Easyriders is the only mainstream magazine that has specialized versions of the advertisements found in the other magazines. The versions found in Easyriders tend to use more sexually explicit representations of women. I also included images from a packet distributed at the 1997 American Motorcycle Associations Women in Motorcycling Conference.
When I designed the survey I was expecting a fairly clear set of responses from my female respondents. I expected them to dislike the sexist and sexual images of women portrayed in advertisements and editorial images and like or be able to relate to the images I saw as non-sexist. By "sexist" images I mean representations of women that show them in subordinate positions to men, i.e. as passengers and not riders of motorcycles, or scantily clad women used as decorations and playing a secondary role to the pictured motorcycles and the men riding them and sexual images. By "sexual" images I mean representations of women dressed in bikinis or other scant clothing or women shown in poses suggesting receptivity to male advances. Much to my surprise a significant number of women not only like the sexual images, but said that they fantasized about being like the women pictured in the images. A number of my respondents felt ambivalent about the non-sexist images -- while they applauded the independence of the women showed riding their own motorcycles without the assistance or company of men, they disliked the use of stereotypically pretty models who they felt did not represent them. It became increasingly obvious as I examined the data that there were problematic assumptions underlying the survey.
The first problem was my assumption about women's sexuality. The more explicit images come from Easyriders -- a magazine whose target readership is working class. Middle class assumptions about lower and working class women's sexuality affects interpretations of imagery through the labeling of overt sexuality -- sexuality in this sense meaning the capacity for sexual behavior -- as coerced or misguided; an assumption that I believe informed my placement and use of the images and may play a role in my respondent's readings. Another assumption informing my analysis of the data is that of women's roles; "roles" in this sense refers to women's involvement in motorcycling as limited to the passenger seat, exclusion of women from mechanical tasks surrounding their motorcycles, or limiting women to small motorcycles with engines that are far less powerful than those sold to men. A significant number of my respondents see themselves as resistant to negative images -- negative meaning exclusionary in the sense of limiting them to traditional roles -- and sexist treatment within motorcycling yet have no problem with middle class notions of femininity. This leads to a third assumption representing a major theoretical problem: I did not adequately define the concept of "resistance;" I had a vague notion that the images I presented were problematic but failed to think through why the images were problematic and where those "whys" were located in terms of social location.
Sol Worth argues that in order to correctly interpret a pictorial image one must possess visual competence, a concept derived from the linguistic notion of communicative competence (Worth 1981, Akinnaso 1998). In other words, one must possess cultural knowledge in order to interpret images. Worth maintains that "the world does not present itself to us directly; that in the process of becoming human we learn to recognize the existence of objects, persons, and events that we encounter, and to determine the strategies by which we articulate, interpret, and assign meaning with and to them" (Worth 1981:171). He argues that the strategies used to interpret meaning from pictures -- how pictures mean -- are chiefly responsible for what pictures mean and if we use attributional strategies, pictures can mean almost anything. It is individual psychological, social, and cultural histories that limit interpretations in attributing meaning, and these "histories interact with the sociocultural limitations we place upon what may be interpreted from pictures in specified contexts" (Worth 1981:181).
Reception ethnography provides a methodological framework in which to accomplish two important goals: first, it allows, through the process of participant observation, the ethnographer to collect cultural and social structural data about the ways in which subjects read images. Shaun Moores has argued, "If the central aim of reception ethnography is to understand the lived experiences of media consumers -- to see things as Ien Ang (1991) put it, 'from the virtual standpoint of actual audiences' -- then it has to engage with the situational contexts in which the media are used and interpreted" (Moores 1996:32). Participant observation allows for close examination of everyday interactions, negotiations of meaning, and the myriad other details of life that shape an individual's worldview.
The second goal concerns my previous question of the nature of "resistance" and teh problem of defining "meaningful" resistance. Resistence assumes a situation, a social structure, a practice, a set of beliefs, or a person against which one must resist; conflict between any of these categories depends on the social location of the persons involved and whether their interests lie with or against these categories. For example, one respondent is an executive who earns $100,000 per year. The kinds of images that she can relate to -- women with short, professional, athletic haircuts -- differ from the overtly sexual images that resonated with other respondents. Because of her high income she can afford to purchase a wider range of products and boycott products that use the overtly sexual advertising she finds offensive. If the three most economical tire manufacturers all use sexist advertising she can afford to purchase a higher priced tire that uses non-sexist advertising. Women are often constrained in their purchases of motorcycling gear and accessories by the availability of products and/or their incomes. Women who would otherwise boycott products that use offensive advertising (offensive in this case refers to images they object to on the basis of a set of beliefs received through socialization and other interactions) can not always do so either because the product is a necessary item and the only one of its kind, or because of income constraints. Women who do not find overtly sexual advertising offensive will not boycott those products because the imagery is not an issue.
A major conceptual issue facing reception ethnography is defining a discrete community or audience. Janet Radway complains of the difficulty in trying to define an "interpretive community" as elucidated by Stanley Fish -- a concept that resembles the speech communities of John Gumperz. She argues that the concept is problematic because it "is insufficiently theorized to deal with the complexities of social groups or to explain how, when, and why they are constituted precisely as interpretive communities. In other words, the theorization of 'community' in Reading the Romance is somewhat anemic in that it fails to specify precisely how membership in the romance-reading community is constituted. Thus it cannot do complete justice to the nature of the connection between social location and the complex process of interpretation" (Radway 1991:8). Similar problems arise when conceptualizing a motorcycling community, particularly one that contains members from varying social strata. Radway's approach is useful, however -- she is careful in her study to point out that her community is a very small, close knit one that is not representative of any other romance reading community. In terms of motorcyclists, differences in motorcycle types, dollar values, and the social location of the motorcyclist has an effect on how the respondent interprets the images.
Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet's notion of a "community of`practice" emerges as a response to a wide variety of abstract concepts surrounding the analysis of language and gender. They link language to identity and identity to practice rather than to location. "Communities of practice" looks at individual identity and participation in multiple communities rather than at locationally stratified speakers (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 486). This means that motorcycling communities can be defined and in terms that emphasize common practices instead of geographic location. So that when I wish to conceptualize a community of women motorcyclists I can do so based on common activities and look at how within the context of a common activity the community negotiates polysemic meanings about images of themselves in the American mass media. Roland Barthes states that variations in readings of images are "not, however, anarchic; it depends on the different kinds of knowledge -- practical, national, cultural, aesthetic -- invested in the image. . .This is the case for the different readings of the image: each sign corresponds to a body of 'attitudes' -- tourism, housekeeping, knowledge of art -- certain of which may obviously be lacking in this or that individual" (Barthes 1977:46-47). Conceptualizing communities of practice allows for these types of multiple readings because of the range of interactions among community members.
Eckert and McConnell-Ginet maintain that "in actual practice, social meaning, social identity, community membership, forms of participation, the full range of community practices, and the symbolic value of linguistic form are being constantly and mutually constructed" (492). Taking this idea and applying it to a women's motorcycling community means that I can account for shifts in membership and discourse by examining the other practices in which members participate. The survey data suggests a fairly broad range of interests, interpretations of images, and economic statuses (in spite of the middle and upper middle class affiliations of the respondents); centering the definition of "community" around practices and interactions, all set within an ethnographic framework, allows for explanations of multiple meanings.
Scholarship about motorcycle culture is incomplete, and research that doesn't take a pathological or deviance perspective tends to focus on the Harley Davidson brand of motorcycle and the men who ride them. What little ethnographic work does exist focuses on outlaw motorcycle clubs with virtually no work done on the places and roles of women in those clubs and at large (those who ride without belonging to an organised club). While my own survey raises more questions than it answers, it does chart a course of action: a qualitative ethnographic study of a carefully defined community of women riders that includes both a contemporary and historical context along the lines of Radway's study of Smithton would allow insight into how at least one group of women see themselves in relation to mainstream images and the ways in which they navigate a male dominated motorcycle subculture.