A thoughtful ethnographic study about women, belonging, and empowerment.
Exploring the little-known subculture of all-female motorcycle clubs.
Hoiland, an associate professor of sociology at Hostos Community College, came to motorcycle clubs (MCs) through her long-time biker husband. When their marriage ended, she began interviewing other women with “various affiliations to MCs—including ol’ ladies, adult children of bikers, and a clubhouse stripper—to better understand their roles and my own.” That project led to the discovery of an all-woman motorcycle club that Hoiland studied between 2011 and 2019. Embedding herself in the group, the author gained access to the MC’s “initiation rituals, annual ceremonies, and extensive socialization process.” She watched as prospects ran a gauntlet of knowledge and character tests over periods that could extend anywhere from one to five years before they earned each of the patches that identified their “citizenship” status within an organization. Members were encouraged to strive for “righteousness” or “excellence,” which Hoiland points out is rooted in offering selfless service to group members. Despite the emphasis on sisterhood, “girl power,” and camaraderie, however, Hoiland discovered that the club was far from a feminist organization. When she first began her research, the MC, which lacked in ethnic diversity, admitted queer females; later, it rescinded that policy. Sisterhood and liberation appeared to be only for some and not all biker women, which indicated that the group had closer ties to the history that haunted male-dominated MC organizations. Hoiland's commitment to this project is admirable, and the stories she tells of her relationships with the women bikers are intriguing, if dry at times. Nevertheless, the details this book offers about a guarded, difficult-to-access subculture-within-a-subculture will undoubtedly prove useful to other social scientists who study the fascinating world of motorcycle clubs.
A thoughtful ethnographic study about women, belonging, and empowerment.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781439925935
Page Count: 193
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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