Mechanical Intuitions: The Origins and Growth of Mountain Biking.

详细信息   

• 作者：McCullough ; Sarah Elizabeth.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2013
• 毕业院校：University of California
• Department：Cultural Studies.
• ISBN：9781303443343
• CBH：3596921
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：1786319
• Pages：275

文摘

This dissertation seeks to account for the emergence,growth,and ongoing popularity of mountain biking. Mountain biking emerged in the 1970s and entered the national scene in the 1980s. Within ten years,this new style of riding changed the popular imagining of what a generic `bike' looked like. I argue that a large part of the success of mountain biking can be contributed to an apparently simple yet quite powerful and complex affective experience: fun. This dissertation explores precisely why and how fun became a compelling organizing principle around which to explain the allure of mountain biking. Fun,rather than being an intuitive and obvious emotion,is multiple,mobile,and wrapped up in the social,cultural,and material conditions of the moment. I study the fun of mountain biking as a triad assemblage of the riding body,the bicycle,and the trail. To produce mountain biking required teaching the body new ways of moving and feeling. It also required a re-articulation of what counts as a bicycle,and in what spaces the use of such a technology is appropriate. In this process,mountain biking contributed to the reimagining of wilderness nature as a playground space. A combination of ethnographic and archival methods---including riding with mountain biking innovators on historic trails---gave me insight into how mountain biking transformed from a counterculture practice designed to escape "the cops,the cars,and the concrete" into a flashpoint for the uses and abuses of nature. Depending on how people liked to play in nature,mountain biking was either an escape or a destructive and threatening act. This research demonstrates that the ethics and aesthetics of subversive play are intricately entangled with embodied experience.