Bike Lust: Harleys, Women and American Society - Tapa dura

"Joans takes the reader inside the minds and hearts of an emergent, important, and underreported American subculture." Allucquere Rosanne Stone, author of "The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age"" "Move over, Robert Pirsig and Hunter Thompson! Women are bikers, too, and Barbara Joans is one of them. "Bike Lust" shatters myths and introduces us to a new generation of gender traitor bikers, many of whom are wives, mothers, lesbians, feminists, and anti-feminists. Barbara Joans has found her tribe and she loves them." Phyllis Chesler, cofounder of the National Women s Health Network and author of "Women and Madness ""

Bike Lust roars straight into the world of women bikers and offers us a ride. In this adventure story that is also an insider's study of an American subculture, Barbara Joans enters as a passenger on the back of a bike, but soon learns to ride her own. As an anthropologist she untangles the rules, rituals and rites of passage of the biker culture. As a new member of that culture, she struggles to overcome fear, physical weakness and a tendency to shoot her mouth off - a tendency that very nearly gets her killed. ""Bike Lust"" travels a landscape of contradictions. Outlaws still chase freedom on the highway, but so do thousands of riders of all classes, races and colours. Joans introduces us to the women who ride the rear - the biker chick, the calendar slut straddling the hot engine, the back-seat Betty at the latest rally, or the underage groupie at the local run. But she also gives us the first close look at women who ride in their own right, on their own bikes, as well as a new understanding of the changing world of male bikers. These are ordinary women's lives made extraordinary, adding a dimension of courage to the sport not experienced by males, risking life and limb for a glimpse of the very edge of existence. This community of riders exists as a primal tribute to humanity's lust for freedom.