The University of Wisconsin Press
Women's Studies / American Culture / Motorcycles / Anthropology
Bike Lust Bike Lust roars straight into the world of women bikers and offers us a ride. In this adventure story that is also an insider's study of an American subculture, Barbara Joans enters as a passenger on the back of a bike, but soon learns to ride her own. As an anthropologist she untangles the rules, rituals, and rites of passage of the biker culture. As a new member of that culture, she struggles to overcome fear, physical weakness, and a tendency to shoot her mouth off—a tendency that very nearly gets her killed. Bike Lust travels a landscape of contradictions. Outlaws still chase freedom on the highway, but so do thousands of riders of all classes, races, and colors. Joans introduces us to the women who ride the rear—the biker chick, the calendar slut straddling the hot engine, the back-seat Betty at the latest rally, or the underage groupie at the local run. But she also gives us the first close look at women who ride in their own right, on their own bikes, as well as a new understanding of changing world of male bikers. These are ordinary women's lives made extraordinary, adding a dimension of courage to the sport not experienced by males, risking life and limb for a glimpse of the very edge of existence. This community of riders exists as a primal tribute to humanity's lust for freedom. "Move over, Robert Pirsig and Hunter Thompson! Women are bikers, too, and Barbara Joans is one of them. Bike Lust shatters myths and introduces us to a new generation of 'gender traitor' bikers, many of whom are wives, mothers, lesbians, feminists, and anti-feminists. This is an inspired meditation. Barbara Joans, an anthropologist, has found her tribe and she loves them."—Phyllis Chesler, cofounder of the National Women's Health Network and author of Women and Madness
For an excerpt from Bike Lust, visit this page of our website. Click here for excerpt.
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"Joans takes the reader inside the minds and hearts of an emergent, important, and underreported American subculture." |
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Barbara Joans is director of the Merritt Museum of Anthropology and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Merritt College in Oakland, California. She rides a Harley-Davidson Low Rider.
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