Spatial Modality and Abuse: Why Women Cyclists Die in London (Pt. 2/5)

How do culturally constructed female roles and external threats in public space play a part in the disproportionate number of female cyclist deaths from large vehicles in London from 1999 to 2014?

Spatial Modality

It is not the aim of this paper to argue that cyclist behavior is the cause for any recurring pattern of road incidents. Indeed, much of contemporary road danger reduction campaigning is built on the firm belief that environments are constructed in such a way to privilege particular road usages while excluding others (Uteng 2009; also Davis 1993, pp. 37-40). As such, this paper analyzes how the production and reproduction of femininity causes this environment to unexpectedly fail female cyclists at this particular point of conflict. In this section, I will discuss how feminine spatial modality largely adheres to a narrow personal space, with women physically occupying less space in public than men, and why this results in danger from long vehicles.

With its relatively uniform physical motion of propulsion (though gendered versions of the machinery do exist, with slightly different geometries), the bicycle appears at first glance a unisex leveler in urban motility: unlike with running, throwing, or hitting, it can be difficult to envision what the physical act of “cycling like a girl” would look like. Nevertheless, this must be our point of departure.

In her seminal text, Throwing Like a Girl, Iris Young argues that “feminine movement exhibits an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings.” (Young 2005, p. 35) When considering the urban cycled street, I contend that one must consider this “inhibited intentionality” with which the feminine subject uses her space. The London Cycling Campaign offers two suggestions to avoid the disproportionate threat from long vehicles, both of which involve moving beyond the regular boundaries of cyclist road usage: the campaign advises cyclists to a) stay out of the space to the left of the lane when trucks are present (“the more inviting it looks the more dangerous it is”); and b) when stopped in front of a truck “position yourself well forward of the cab and to the centre [sic], so the driver can easily see you.” (Lcc.org.uk, 2015) Thus, one can consider that to adhere to this advice is to move beyond the normal bounds of bicyclist road occupancy both in motion and when stopped at junctions. It is no doubt that the combination of both factors presents the most serious risk: a cyclist occupying the concealed space ahead of a truck cab when stopped, and then occupying the left curb of the lane when in motion, is most at threat from a left-turning long vehicle. This act of occupying only the acceptable bounds of road space, rather than infringing on the area used by cars, is common bicycling behavior, yet the contingent acts of moving beyond this restricted space in order to preempt or defend against potential road danger is less familiar to many women, because “a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space.” (Young 2005, p. 33) The double hesitancy Young describes frames feminine spatial modality in direct opposition to the advice for safe bicycling motility when sharing road space with long vehicles. One may thus consider the social construction of femininity, and specifically feminine bodily comportment, as a direct cause of this phenomenon of disproportionate road violence. London’s roads are a gendered space that contains a danger that results in the seemingly unlikely and aberrant statistic that the vehicles that make up 5% of motor traffic make up 50% of all cyclist fatalities (Lcc.org.uk, 2015), the majority of which are women.

As such, it becomes clear that the female cyclist on a public road is not only a physical vehicle, but also “a vehicle of gender-based emotions and reactions” (Papadopolulou, 2014, p. 2). Young’s double hesitancy of feminized bodies, born of bodily comportment and lack of mirroring, constructs a reactive female cyclist, who is less confident in her desire to proactively dominate road space in the way that the LCC advises. In this sense, their “no matter how inviting” qualifier seems especially apt, though seemingly insufficient to encourage new female cycling behaviors.

The ontology of femininity is a gendering process based on habit and experience, bound to cultural meanings that are performed and reproduced through social transactions (Sullivan, 2001; building on Butler 1990, pp. 129-130), leaving the female body (particularly when used normatively) as “a material reality that has already been located and defined within a social context” (Butler & Salih, 2003, p. 28). Young’s discussion of the ways this body has been defined, especially with regard to the immanence overlaid onto the female body and the ways it reproduces self-identifications of objectification (Young 2005, pp. 36-39) allows insight into the way this causes women to use space and their bodies with caution, allowing movements to act through them (Ibid, p. 34). While there is no uniform expression of this modality, we can understand that it largely adheres to a narrow personal space, in which women physically occupy less space than men, and are also be less committed to using their entire bodies to perform actions.

This phenomenon sees women less likely to take the preventative measures that greatly improve chances of exiting a point of conflict with a long vehicle without incident. Further, leaked memos from Transport for London explicitly attribute these particular road deaths to internal statistics that demonstrate women are less likely to break the specific road laws—particularly those around red lights—which would simultaneously remove them from the point of conflict and increase their visibility in the public space (Rudi.net, 2015). If we understand these issues as part of a larger gendered project, we can see that women are, in general, unwilling to commit to the physical actions of road dominance that would make them hypervisible on the urban street and therefore less likely to be forced to share diminishing road real estate with large vehicles.

Finally, it is important to point out that while many authors in this section have discussed feminine spatial modality in terms of sporting activity, this paper has resisted such an approach, first because one of the key challenges of broader road safety discourse has been to separate recreational cycling from transportational cycling, and secondly because there is little in any of the data analyzed for this paper that suggests female athletic ability—whether ascribed to physical traits or feminine socialized traits—has any impact on road safety (though the third section will argue that this is an underlying implication within the public discussions of this phenomenon). However, Garrett (2005, p. 142) does take a more literal view of the body, linking bodily appearance to the construction of the self and claiming it as the site of an active self-identifying process. In the sense that fitness is secondary benefit of bicycle commuting, and also in the sense that bicycling is in a very literal sense a way to produce or develop the contemporarily desirable female bodily shape, I argue that the sport-like motions of transportational cycling share many of the gendering and self-identifying processes evident in the more explicit sporting environments discussed by Garrett (2003) and Young (2005).

More parts next month.

Spatial Modality

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