Agentive Green Mobility: Everyday Performance Training for Women on Wheels

Through the lens of everyday performance, I examine how females on bicycles are marked as both highly visible spectacles and invisible ‘others’. In developing the feminist promise of the mechanically monstrous cyborg, I offer a new revolutionary figure of hope – the cycleborg – who puts her otherness to use. In painting the image of the cycleborg, I suggest that she offers a position for the cycling female to make subversive use of her patriarchally-assigned image of the monstrous other. As she rallies against her training of feminine comportment, the cycleborg simultaneously welcomes her instinctive gendered training to navigate hostile, patriarchal climates. She joins her feminist killjoy allies in training to be a seen and heard nuisance. As our fast and fuel-less cycleborg pedals between exhaust fumes and traffic-jammed revving motors, she performs her honed physical, spatial and sensorial skills in an agile and agentive mode of environmentally-friendly mobility. An awareness of performance training offers this daily practice of green living a toolkit from which to understand the complex positioning of her embodied and gendered urban mobility and to carry out her spatial act of resilience. I argue that as an unfamiliar and more-than-human hybrid, she has the potential to make use of her performative hypervisibility to emphasise both a re-thinking of hegemonic attitudes whilst also presenting the potential for human agency and responsibility in the future of the environment.