I did a couple of interviews this last year with one I wanted to share with you. These interviews are not published and I don’t know when they will be. I do know that often I have conversations that are hard, often unpaid, and usually part of that q&a doesn’t get in the conversation. So I figured I could share this q&a with you which was totally different from the conversation! I was interviewed by Gregg Deal for the From The Outside podcast in which we discussed a lot of things in cycling but especially allyship and the response of the cycling industry to the racial uprise of 2020. I won’t share all the juicy content we discussed. Hope you enjoy reading this and hopefully, you’ll be able to enjoy the podcast when it’s released!
Q: How did Cyclista Zine originate?
A. How I started Cyclista Zine starts with my cycling journey in writing about bike advocacy as a bike advocate blogger. My blog, CITY GIRL RIDES, aimed to share experiences and tips from the streets so that access to cycling would be easier for women. I was always ranting about mainstream bike culture but there was a point in which I got really frustrated with reading headlines about the rising death toll of cyclists and the same old narratives that didn’t include or celebrate BIPOC voices and DIY cycling cultures. There were a lot of issues of gender inequality and lack of diversity in cycling I found myself writing about but deep down I knew that no matter how much we talked about representation, equity, and inclusion, we needed a platform or space to educate and amplify our stories. We needed a safe space to do that. So I thought the zine format was a great way to do it. I didn’t want to create a magazine or space that sold products other than our collective stories. And I wanted to include voices other than my own so I did a call for submissions around themes and they started rolling in. We have a great community of contributors that make this space amazing.
Q: What’s your zine history?
A. I got into zines as a teenager. I went to a punk music festival in the Bay Area where I encountered my first zine. There was a grrl band that I was into so I went to check out their merch table. I saw that they were right next to a Planned Parenthood booth, and had condoms, stickers, pins, and zines that were about safe sex, rape culture, smashing the patriarchy, and celebrating women in punk music. As a teenager, it was fascinating to learn about feminism from a zine and that really led me to find into other zines like early Bitch zine, Venus zine, and Bust zine which they all later became magazines to promote women in music, DIY culture, and feminist spaces.
I had a friend in college who was a huge Riot Grrrl fan that introduced me to that world of music and zine making. So I dabbled in collecting zines that exposed to a lot of that early feminist DIY zine culture. Zines had their place in bike culture too. I followed other bike zinesters throughout my blogging years and really enjoyed Talking The Lane by Elly Blue, Velo Vixen, and Mind The Gender Cycling Gap by Tiffany Lam.
Q. Cyclista Zine is not a magazine but a zine? What are zines? What’s the difference?
A. Zines are the inextricable, life-affirming granting of permission to speak your truth in DIY print. They are physical, printed, self-published works that are usually either made from a single sheet of paper or many papers fastened together with staples; independently made by one person or with a group of people; usually photocopied and low cost or free! Zines have long been used as a method of political organizing to disseminate information in activist cultures and genre sub-cultures that can’t be censored, so this is not exactly new – it’s more a continuation of a tactic that in recent years has become important once again because of mass digital surveillance of political movements.
What separates zines from magazines is that zines don’t necessarily exist to peddle consumer agendas by corporate entities or media. Sponsored and targeted content has been growing in popularity online, and while that may be necessary for the survival of journalism, the pursuit of clicks sometimes becomes a conflict with the expression of integrity, or thoughtfulness.
So zines are much like subcultures in cycling and have been used by subcultures in cycling in political movements like Critical Mass. Cyclista Zine, is not a magazine, nor are we journalists, and we don’t sell you anything other than cool stories about subversive and radical DIY feminist culture in cycling without the piles of patriarchal layers of respectability politics glossed over it.
Q: You call yourself the intersectional response to the cycling industry? What is intersectionality?
A. Intersectionality is the acknowledgment that our social identities overlap and intersect and form new, more specific identities with new implications. The individual identity groups we belong to – race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc. – do not exist in a vacuum, and they cannot be compartmentalized. Intersectionality acknowledges that a person can simultaneously belong to multiple historically marginalized groups.
Kimberly Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality that describes the following: Racial and gender discrimination overlapped not only in the workplace but in other areas of life; equally significant, these burdens were almost completely absent from feminists and anti-racist advocacy. Intersectionality, then, was her attempt to make feminism, anti-racist activism, and anti-discrimination law do what she thought they should — highlight the multiple avenues through which racial and gender oppression were experienced so that the problems would be easier to discuss and understand. So intersectionality gives us a framework to critique and improve our analysis of oppression that includes our intersecting identities.
Cyclista Zine looks at cycling media and its products through an intersectional lens that takes into account the historical and cultural representation of race and gender in cycling culture. From magazines, blogs, comics, advertising, advocacy, and podcasts — all cycling media has traditionally reflected a narrow vision of what a cyclist is and can be. We seek to look at cycling culture through an analytical-yet-witty, sharp-yet-sympathetic lens, as well as to celebrate the DIY culture-makers who are transforming cycling culture with their unique contributions. Similarly, we encourage people to consider intersectional feminism as a necessary part of the broader social justice movement in cycling.
A. The cycling industry has seen a lot of calls for DEI in the last year? What is your response to how they are approaching this?
A lot of the time we see DEI and confuse it with just representation. And that’s also why you’ll see a lot of markers for diversity in cycling spaces as having white cishet women and a token cishet man of color. That might sound harsh but that’s often the response and the optics.
A lot of what I’m seeing is how liberalism is co-opting tools of intersectional feminism for the commodity form of representation. And what’s it’s doing is maintaining optics of inclusivity and intersectionality while turning a profit, while maintaining the status quo. And unfortunately ‘diversity and inclusion in cycling are being diluted to representation without equity and inclusion at decision-making levels. Those DEI boards of just white women or white queers aren’t diversity. It’s crazy how people truly think this.
So when it comes to critiquing their response, I see how white feminism advocates for equality and power to be equal with white men. I see how they advocate for inclusivity but for themselves. We see this all the time in women’s professional cycling. The only thing is that this equality is reserved for cis straight women (usually white). What we see clearly happening now is that attitudes, science, and policy that introduce anti-trans laws and attitudes in sport, are usually from cis-straight women who are not concerned with the integrity of girls/women’s sport but rather use them as a microphone to air their own internalized misogyny and bigotry cloaked as “fairness”.
And while athletes, advocates, or board members are supposedly advocating for equality and change, they ultimately still use the same set of values that the oppressor uses towards marginalized genders and races to assign or create value for themselves. Their desire is less about creating a different system than it is about believing and getting the dominant system to agree that they have value should be the goal.
One of my contributors talk about this as “racing is a cop”. When we talk about dismantling oppression, we also see how reluctant people are in giving up their privilege and gate keep (or police for their benefit). My contributors from issue four places this as “my own desire to perpetuate the feeling of worth that I find in a power system is more important to me than the harm that system of valuing marginalized bodies ultimately always perpetuates”. If what you value is what your oppressor values at the end of the day (a structure where some bodies will be judged ‘better’ than other bodies) then it doesn’t really matter which angle you come at that end result from– you perpetuate the same system that you say is toxic because the feeling it gives you is more important than the harm it perpetuates alongside it.
So or any Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) effort at any organization to be truly impactful, we all need to better understand and apply the concept of intersectionality but also how holding certain privileges even amongst oppressed groups will also uphold their privilege to be part of that system. To go back to representation, it does matter, but so that we can radically uproot systems that harm us rather than commodify us so that we are decentering dominance and building more inclusive spaces that don’t project the status quo. For my BIPOC, we must be careful to not be coopted as tools of representation to perform the same things as our oppressor or for performative optics of allyship, which we are seeing everywhere in this community and industry right now through black squares, chocolate chipping, and rainbow washing efforts without actively fighting alongside of the communities they claim to support.
Q. We’ve seen a lot of Black squares and pledges from the industry this year? We’ve also seen rainbow flags waved at races? Do you think they are being performative?
Displays of allyship have its place. Issues and voices can be heard, maybe some small version of justice may even be served as a result. But we have to be careful to not be lulled into believing that posting a black square or wearing a rainbow flag as a kind of allyship is enough to dismantle the conditions that made it possible for an innocent young Black girl to be shot four times and for trans rights to be stripped. And we must not let the kind of performative allyship that begins and ends with black squares, waving pride/trans flags, or hashtags take center stage in the quest for equality.
Simply “saying stuff” is easy. Do you know what’s hard? Revoking your memberships, not going to those races, organizing a counter-event, not buying stuff you want because the brands’ supply chain is violent. Rejecting a problematic bike brand as a sponsor, turning down an opportunity because the company rather tokenize than share power in decision making. Not attending an event race because it’s exclusive or celebrates colonial violence. Boycotting an institution and sport that refuses to fight against patriarchal legislation. Starting a petition or campaign to get a race to change it’s anti-indigenous slur of an event name. Calling out other people when they say something clearly racist. Calling out other people when they say something clearly sexist or transphobic. That shit is hard. But if you want to be a true accomplice, you have to be willing to lose privilege, you have to be willing to hold difficult conversations to hold people accountable.
When our allyship does more for ourselves than for the people it professes to help, that’s when we have a problem. I get that this can be a real hard pill to swallow but the best medicines are bitter. I understand we are all learning and healing and that the marker of our humanity is not how perfect we are, but how far we are willing to go as down-for-cause co-conspirators. So pretending BIPOC or trans, non-binary, and queer people are something separate from our spaces or in cycling sport – really illuminates a persons position.
It speaks volumes of cishet male privilege. Of white women’s privilege. Or white proximity privilege. It speaks volumes of how one stands on issues that affect others rights to access an activity or sport that doesn’t affect them.
And for those who are asking USAC to do better or divest from Arkansas, why not build something else? Why not work towards building an alternative from the norm which IS exclusionary by default with barriers to access. Like we have to start organizing under the frameworks of intersectionality to make BIPOC and trans queer and nonbinary athlete inclusion and safety matter in this activity.