Kin-aesthetics, ideology, and the cycling tour: the performance of territory in the Israeli Giro d’Italia

Abstract

Addressing the strange case of the Israeli Giro d’Italia–wherein the opening stages of the Italian cycling tour’s 2018 edition were hosted 2000 km away, by a country with little cycling heritage–the paper poses the question, not ‘Why Israel?’ but ‘Why cycling?’. In response, it draws on theory at the intersection of mobilities, aesthetics, and ideology, together with an empirical analysis of the Israeli Giro’s TV coverage, to claim that the cycling tour–both historically, and in its contemporary form as a mediatised ‘mega-event’–is characterised by a uniquely ‘kin-aesthetic’ capacity. This capacity performs and orders territorial identities as coherent, self-evident wholes, thus enacting an ideological ‘illusion of closure’. Consequently, the article calls for greater critical attention not only to mega-events in general, but to the cycling tour specifically: the ways in which it performs territory, and the potential of such kin-aesthetic devices to work ideologically, concealing division and debate.