Event Details

The seminar will focus on affective investments in cycling objects, customisation practices and the role of bicycles in an ethic of care, especially when escorting children, drawing from research conducted in five Belgian, French and Swiss cities.

Centre for Social Futures | Centre for Mobilities Research

Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts

Dr Claire Pelgrims, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Bicycle aesthetics, mobilities of care and equipment trajectories: An international comparison of gender construction processes around cycling equipment

Since the 1990s, European cities have been developing policies to promote cycling. However, in traditionally car-centric cities, these mobility policies tend not to take account of the gendered aspects of cycling cultures, and more generally of the complexity of gendered mobility trends. Like cars, bicycles are gendered ‘attributes’, emotionally invested objects at the heart of micro-practices that respond to dominant norms of femininity and masculinity. The diversification of bicycles and accessories that has been taking place over the last decade or so has opened the door to new gendered uses and tactics. It democratises cycling, modulates the sporting dimension of cycling and creates new assemblages of bicycles and cyclists. Yet gender norms continue to hinder the development of cycling.

My postdoctoral research analyses the tensions that the aesthetic relationship between the body and the bicycle creates in the dominant norms of femininity and masculinity. It describes the assemblages formed by cyclists and their equipment within equipment trajectories that differ in the five Belgian, French and Swiss contexts studied. The original approach of this research analyses the processes of gender construction around cycling from their aesthetic dimension, linking bodily sensibility and affectivity. The presentation will focus in particular on affective investments in cycling objects, customisation practices and the role of bicycles in an ethic of care, especially when escorting children.

Claire Pelgrims is an F.R.S. FNRS Scientific Collaborator at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Her research focuses on the tension between speed and slowness in the evolution of mobility, the deployment of active mobility and social inequalities, particularly those linked to gender. She is involved in various international networks such as the International Association for the History of Traffic, Transport and Mobility - T2M. She recently published Histoire des transports et des mobilités en France (Armand Colin, 2022) with L. Baldasseroni and E. Faugier and Entre vitesse et lenteur. Tension entre imaginaires de la mobilité à Bruxelles (EuB, 2024).