Cycling Lungs: Understanding Mobile Subjectivity as Enfleshed

Abstract

Scholarship and advocacy on mobility justice needs to attend carefully to how presumptions about mobile embodiment are reproduced. This paper critically assesses some of the presumptions about the mobile subject within cycling interventions that focus on behaviour and infrastructural change. Bringing material and Black feminist theory together with ethnographic fieldwork on urban cycling in Los Angeles in 2014–2015, I suggest mobile subjectivity can be understood through the process of enfleshment, rather than centring on individualised cycling embodiment. Imagined through the cycling lungs, enfleshment allows for a mobile subjectivity that is inherently exposed in highly uneven ways; configured through matter and meaning; and a materialisation of relations of power distributed across space and time. Thinking with enfleshment contributes to cycling advocacy, mobility justice and geographical theory on the body by shifting how mobile subjects are understood and how difference, justice and the politics of the street are imagined and practised.