Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on a women's motorcycle club in Delhi - the Bikerni - to explore, from a gendered perspective, the subjectivity-making potential of roads and bikes both locally and transnationally.

Paper long abstract:

The paper investigates the experiences, practices, identity configurations, and ideologies of the members of a women-only motorcycle club in Delhi, the Bikerni. Drawing from feminist geography and mobility theory, in the paper the road is explored as an avenue for self-expression over models of womanhood and femininity, and the bike as the medium through which the she-centaur is brought to life. This both imaginary and real creature, half human and half machine, resonating of Haraway's cyborg, cruises through often contradictory understandings of the self that find reconciliation in the "mud" (Haraway 2016) of the everyday. Sexuality, gender, family relationships, and careers are transformed thanks to the temporary manifestations of the she-centaur, an alter-ego who shapes the subjects in new and yet familiar ways. Mobile subjectivities (Ferguson 1995) stem out of processes around geographies of power that mark the often ambivalent boundaries of patriarchy, neoliberalism, consumerism, and postcolonialism, and that link the members of the Bikerni to a broader, transnational community with its own rules and ideologies that reinforce and shape those very same subjectivities. In a city that has gained the reputation of being India's rape capital, and where women's mobility encounters obstacles and limitations, the experiences of the Bikernis reveal how roads are more than just dangerous territory: they exist within a network of thoroughfares where transcultural practices are shaped locally and recast globally.