Abstract
Reading Glen Norcliffe’s Critical Geographies of Cycling: History, Political Economy and Culture is rather like listening to one of those ‘best of’ playlists that compile popular songs released over the course of one year, the reaction of the listener ranging from: ‘Oh, I loved that song!’ to ‘How did that one make it on the list?’ Indeed, Norcliffe’s book is compiled in a similar way: unified by the topic of cycling, he has brought a number of ‘fugitive essays together’ written over the course of 25 years (p. xiiv). I recommend treating the text as a handy sampler – exactly as Norcliffe intended, allowing his readers to ‘choose to read [each essay] according to individual interest without losing the thread’ (p. xiiv). Sacrificing depth in any one area for breadth, Norcliffe examines cycling through frameworks that rely on a geographical construction of technology, post-structuralism, political and economic analysis, cultural and performance studies, and a neoliberal critique of global production networks. To orient his reader in this massive undertaking, Norcliffe organizes his text into two major sections: Spaces of Cycling, and Places of Cycling. Thus, the narrative structure is not chronological, but thematic, looking in part one to the production of cycles, the activity of consumption, and the cycle trade, and in part two to an analysis of social, cultural, and political geographies in the specific places of cycling clubs, trade shows, and the street. Although the essays address a period of over one hundred years, and span the globe from Canada to China, Norcliffe succeeds in providing a close examination of how the bicycle exists as a symbolic artifact of both modernity and anti-modernity (p. 3).
This tension between modernity and anti-modernity is explored especially well in chapter six on bicycle club membership as an expression of technological modernity, and chapter 10 on the relationship between modernity, anachronisms, and sustainability in historical and contemporary contexts. These chapters also emphasize the importance of class and gender to the history of cycling – a lens that is more fully developed in chapter 7, which makes gender, the Victorian ideology of domesticity, and the crisis in masculinity its focus, arguing that, with the growing ridership of women in the 1890s, the bicycle became a ‘feminized tool of domestication’ (p. 164). Norcliffe situates the bicycle within the newly feminized public spaces of the street and within the exclusionary, private spaces of masculinized bicycle clubs, both contributing to discourses of a highly classed cycling citizenship. It is here, however, that a more robust feminist and class analysis of the bicycle and its link to domesticity becomes necessary. For example, I remain unconvinced that early men and women cyclists were making vastly different demands upon space through use of their bicycles. I seek clarity on how a feminized ‘domestication of public space’ (p. 163) of early women cyclists is significantly different from the kind of ‘masculine morality’ (p. 170) of male cycling club members, committed to maintaining an orderly public space. Indeed, while I appreciate Norcliffe’s attention to the ways in which gender and class intersect, I wonder if the domestication of space that Norcliffe describes is less a gendered phenomenon and is instead more closely linked to classed uses of the bicycle as a means to extend ‘middle-class values and spatial and social control’ (p. 167). In addition to the need for a more careful analysis of how class and gender interact with and are transformed by the bicycle, Norcliffe neglects to analyze how the bicycle, both historically and today, enters into discourses of race and racialization. An inclusion of race as a key framework of analysis would be especially useful for his discussions of the economic and political influences of empire and more recent globalization upon the bicycle and the communities who ride. Thus, while Norcliffe is generally successful in demonstrating who rides, where, and why, he is less critical of how power operates in these various spaces.
While there is room for Norcliffe to engage more deeply and critically with each of the topics he addresses, it is nevertheless an impressive and useful collection of key moments in the geography and history of cycling, and an excellent source for cycling enthusiasts, students, and scholars.