1Promising freedom and individualism, mountain bike magazines are an important source of narrative and visual pleasure. The dominant themes built in are technophilic desire, communion with nature and technical progress. While offering such pleasures, the illusion of technological determinism is maintained. Here mountain bike magazines are seen as independent variables in social change, existing within a "culture of no culture" (Haraway), a space in which events, races and so on can be objectively described and evaluated. However, when looking a little closer, it becomes clear that this is not the case. Rather, magazines such as Australian Mountain Bike (AMB) and Mountain Bike are shaped by, and implicated in guiding the use of the mountain bike and the variety of possible social arrangements this makes im/possible. With this in mind I want to make clear some of the ways magazines have an important role in negotiating the boundaries between the 'inside' and 'outside' of mountain biking practices, specifically in relation to riders' sex.
2Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, I argue that these magazines construct what sex can be, or not be a mountain biker. Magazines are particular technical objects which do more than simply describe events in mountain biking. For Haraway, humans and nonhumans (in this case magazines) must be seen as "socially ... active partners" (8). That is, magazines are not only technical objects, but are also socially active at the level of discourse. Thus they are at the same time material and semiotic actors that are productive of gendered social relations. They function to tell a particular story about how the world is, and how it is understood. They can be seen to operate within a paradigmatic field which both shapes and bounds im/possible worlds. They also serve to inform 'us' about who we are as human subjects.
3Mountain biking magazines construct what it is, or not, to be a mountain biker through the process of interpellation. Interpellation is the process through which subjects are re/constituted through ideology through mis/recognising oneself in the address of a discourse (Haraway 50). Readers are invited to self-identify with a range of narratives that make up each magazine. This self-identification process operates through the hailing of the subject. Readers are hailed as mountain biking subjects when they can self-identify or recognise themselves within mountain biking magazine narratives. For example, in photographs of mountain bikers riding in 'nature', the viewer may be positioned in such a way that s/he can see things from the perspective of the rider. The subject's position is one where the viewer can understand the experience of mountain biking as the rider does.
4 It is through the process of interpellation that a particular type of reader is hailed by these magazines: an individual, particularly a male individual, who exists within the mountain biking community. This community is discursively produced through shared values, beliefs and assumptions. For example, in a letter to the editor, Peter writes asking the questions: "Why is my wife so upset with me whenever my latest copy of AMB arrives? Could it be that I interrupt our marriage for the latest instalment of mountain biking news and stories?" To this, the editors respond "Maybe she gets mad because you never let her in on what you're on about. In the end, though, we're guys just like you, man ... -- what was that, darling? Yes, I'm listening..." (Peter 10).
5 "We're guys just like you, man" constitutes mountain biking as a collective male activity. Such narratives are productive of a particular type of readership. On average, men make up 95% of the readership. Readers and riders represented in these magazines are predominantly male, white, heterosexual, middle class, and in the United States, urban. Readers are assumed to be technically literate, understanding the differences between different braking and suspension systems for example. Men also dominate in terms of narrative and visual representation. Most articles and photos are by men, designed for a male audience. For example, in race reviews, there are full page and half page photos of male riders while women, if pictured at all, might take up quarter of a page.
6 Magazines also construct mountain biking as a collective masculine activity through normalising women's absence. According to the following review, the lack of women riding has to do with the problematic mix of bike saddle and women's genitalia, rather than with a range of practices which are constituted in women's absence. The reviewer comments:
Forget mountain biking's ruffty-tuffty image and male domination, what actually stops most women from riding more is simple: most saddles put lots of pressure on the female genitalia, right where it's least welcome. The resulting abrasion and bruising is more than a bit of a turn-off... (Anonymous 24)
7 It is in these types of accounts that the lack of women riding mountain bikes is constructed in such a way so that women's absence is seen as part of the "normal" operation of gender relations. That is, it is seen to be a sport in which mainly men participate because that's "what men do", while women continue to sit on the sidelines for fear of discomfort. Forget about wider social, political and economic considerations.
8 Wives and female partners, while generally marked as absent, are simultaneously constituted metonymically, standing for all the limits men experience in being able to follow their 'true' desires. Women, simply put, disrupt men's complicit and illicit relations with their mountain bikes. Men's pleasure of riding, of engaging with mountain bikes on multiple levels is largely constituted as natural. Many narratives take on a confessional quality. As one writer notes "I did it. I cheated on my wife. I felt so dirty, so impure. Behind her back I went out and bought a full suspension bike ... . When she discovered my treachery, she had the right to be angry" (Hamelman 20). The bike becomes the sole object of desire with the wife remaining nameless in the background.
9 Understanding magazines as material-semiotic actors in the production of social relations enables a questioning of dominant gendered narratives in mountain biking magazines. In utilising theorists such as Haraway, the political project becomes an interrogation of discourses which produce social relations of inclusion and exclusion. This shifts the focus from examining how mountain biking magazines simply maintain male technical relations to how material-semiotic actors are implicated in their shaping more broadly.
