The politics of emotion as affective judgement: bike-and-ride transit in Greater Sydney, Australia

Abstract

The promotion and uptake of commuter cycling as part of economic revitalisation plans has been critiqued by feminist scholars for its gendered, classed and racialised dimensions. What is often missing from these conversations is feminist knowledge on affect to analyse the politics of emotion. We aim to help fill this gap by building on feminist geographers’ engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘lines’ is a guiding tool to analyse the politics of emotion as affective judgements. The article draws on online semi-structured interview data and sketches collected from 19 people who bike-and-ride transit in Greater Sydney, Australia. To illustrate what emotions do, the article focuses on two events narrated by our participants, peak hour railway carriages and ascending station stairs. We argue that the concept of lines that focuses on the emotive/affective body extends feminist knowledge on the politics of emotion by engaging with both structural macropolitical forces and micropolitical transformations that occur through events and encounters when commuting. In conclusion, we argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of lines is valuable for feminist geographers’ research on the politics of emotion as affective judgements by drawing attention to the transformative possibilities of extraordinary affects.

Keywords:

• Cycling
• mobility
• molar lines
• molecular lines
• online qualitative methods

Introduction

Recently, scholarly attention has been given to matters of emotion, affect, and commuter cycling (Cox 2019; Jones 2012; Waitt et al. 2021a; Waitt et al. 2021b). Our aim is to expand upon insights within this literature by connecting it to recent work drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking, and specifically their concept of ‘lines’. Feminist scholarship has demonstrated a strong interest in embracing Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking which dovetails discussions of the politics of emotions and affect with the importance of social position and the unevenness of power (Probyn 1996, Grosz 2008). Our contention is that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of molar and molecular lines offers a framework for analysis that can address the micropolitical transformative capacity of the body. More specifically, it does so in ways that build upon feminist scholarships’ insistence that individual emotional subjectivities are never distinct from the wider macropolitical social formations and public agendas (Davidson and Bondi 2004; Thien 2005).

To illustrate the entanglement of the macropolitcal, that is understood here as the taken-for-granted rigidities of political and social worlds, with the micropolitical, that is the new imagined or practical possibilities generated through affective forces of the events and encounters of the journey itself, we draw on empirical research with people who bike-and-ride transit in Greater Sydney, Australia. In doing so we address a knowledge gap identified by Ravensbergen, Buliung, and Laliberté (2019), who called for feminist embodied geography to ‘delve into the nuance of individual experiences … to broaden possibilities for both research and policy’. We illustrate the ways that the concepts of molar lines and molecular lines can help make sense of the bike-body relationship in the context of peak hour railway carriages and stations. Bike-and-ride transit initiatives seek to encourage personal health at the same time as reducing fuel costs, traffic congestion and carbon emissions. Commuters pedal to the station, catch a train, and then pedal to work. Bike-and-ride transit is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but in Australia, Europe, and North America it has gained momentum in the converging contexts of the obesity pandemic, traffic congestion and a changing climate (Pucher and Buehler 2009). More broadly, commuter cycling advocacy has been critiqued by academics regarding issues of gender, race, class, and neoliberal ideology (Xie and Spinney 2018; Goel et al. 2022).

The article is structured in four sections. We begin by reviewing the geographical literature on commuter cycling. Through this discussion, we highlight key scholarship on affect and emotion to draw out the interplay between the social and material dimensions that exist in the production of diverse bike-body encounters. We specify the importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of lines in understanding the entanglement of the macropolitical with the micropolitical that is attentive to pedalling bodies senses, sensations, and sinews. Our analytical framework that combines molar and molecular lines facilitates an interpretation of the always affective/emotional body that is simultaneously material and discursive; past and present. The methods are then outlined, including recruitment and participants. Next, drawing on our empirical material we illustrate the utility of molar and molecular lines as an analytical framework to rethink bike-and-ride transit in bodily terms. Our discussion of the affective/emotive body highlights how the concept of lines helps to make sense of bike-and-ride transit through the changing intensities of the encounters, and the statis and movement of the unfolding commute itself in the contexts of peak-hour railway carriages and stations. To conclude, the final section discusses the implications of this work for future feminist geographical research related to the politics of emotions.

Rethinking bike-and-ride transit

Bike-and-ride transit has emerged within the broader rubric of commuter cycling initiatives. Indeed, the bike is imagined by Infrastructure Australia (2019, 277) at the ‘heart’ of a future integrated transport network, like elsewhere in the Global North dominated by motor vehicles (Pucher and Buehler 2009). Like so many other commuter cycling projects, bike-transit integration has emerged within a broader context of reducing reliance of fossil fuel vehicles. Therefore, bike-transit integration projects are encountered as a distinctive ‘good’ from a normative ethical perspective to address climate change, reduce economic inefficiencies and address air pollution (NSW Government 2020). Furthermore, in Greater Sydney, the creation of the regional transportation authority, Transport for New South Wales, established in 2011, has helped to naturalise these tenants of commuter cycling. For example, Transport for New South Wales has designated cycling infrastructure provision as a funding priority, including the provision of lifts, bike sheds and cycleways. Furthermore, riding a bike to work is portrayed in Transport for New South Wales policy documents as a taken-for-granted and apolitical practice, rather than something that is both questionable and radical. In contrast, within the public realm, to recognise someone as a cyclist is mediated by the histories of car cultures. Osborne and Grant-Smith (2017) argue, utility cycling is often portrayed as something that only environmentalists or poor people do in Australia, and the move from cycling to driving is benchmarked as a transition to adulthood. Therefore, Fuller et al. (2022) argued, there is a social agreement amongst many drivers that the body of a person riding a bike on a road is perceived as radical, dangerous, or deviant, judgements that can have lethal consequences. Some individuals in car dominated western societies find cyclists ungrieveable (Butler 2009). Cycling is constituted as an unliveable life given the powerful social norms surrounding driving, including narratives of citizenship and the ‘good’ life. The important point for our research is that the body of the bike rider may already be perceived by many individuals as deviant (Aldred 2010).

Transport for New South Wales policy documents convey commuter cycling as equally accessible to everyone despite the strong socio-cultural connections in Australia between cycling and white, male, middle class, sporting culture (NSW Government 2020). Furthermore, pre-pandemic journey to work statistics show cycling, let alone bike-and-ride transit, is an extremely unusual activity in the everyday lives of most Sydney commuters. While there are no statistics on bike-and-ride transit, Table 1 illustrates the ongoing embodied disposition to driving in Greater Sydney, Furthermore, the highest embodied dispositions of long-distance car commuting are in the outer Western Sydney Local Government Areas (LGAs), Here is where bike-and-ride transit has the greatest potential, given commuting distances of more than 5 km. However, less than 0.2% ride a bike to work and only 14.5% rail commute in Western Sydney LGAs (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016). Our research was underpinned by such pre-pandemic trends.

Table 1. How employed people aged 15 years and over travelled to work in Sydney, Australia, 2016.

	Greater Sydney		City of Sydney		Inner West City Councils		Western Sydney (Outer LGAs)
	Number	%	Number	%	Number	%	Number	%
Car, as driver passenger	1,197,269	52.7	23,348	19.9	35,225	35.4	617,613	60.9
Car, as passenger	162,598	7.1	2,579	2.2	2,636	2.6	47,615	4.7
Train	247,051	10.9	25,708	21.9	24,786	24.9	147.597	14.5
Bicycle	16,476	0.7	3,500	3.0	2,633	2.6	1,703	0.2

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census of Population and Housing 2016.

In transport geography, bike-and-ride transit is predominantly framed in the literature as a problem of human behaviour. For the most part, the research agenda is seeking to specify causal relationships by identifying the determinants of pro-bike-and-ride behaviour (for example Graystone and Mitra 2020). The extent to which people adopt bike-and-ride transit is explained by identifying and listing the positive and negative factors involved in changing transport choices (Lu, Prato, and Corcoran 2021). In this research, drivers and barriers to bike-and-ride transit are predominantly framed through psychological and economic models of individual transport behaviour and ‘rational’ choice. Consequently, attention turns to personal attitudinal variables (e.g. socio-demographic characteristics, including gender, and preferences towards sustainable active transport) and contextual factors (for example, financial costs, weather related comfort, safety, secure and accessible bike parking facilities, an integrated cycle infrastructure, and a well-established cycling culture). The embodied practice of rail commuting with a bicycle rarely features in the transport literature on bike-and-ride transit, despite acknowledging that bikes often travel with rail commuters for fear of theft from stations. It was this gap that inspired us to seek out socio-cultural research on the affect and emotion of mobility to better understand the role of sensations in the politics of bike-and-ride transit.

Feminist geographical scholarship has underscored the benefits from examining the emotive/affective responses to riding a bike that arise out of the power-laden social relations of gender, ability, class, race, and aged-based hierarchies (Heim LaFrombois 2019; Ravensbergen 2022; Yuan, Xu, and Cui 2022). We argue the case for understanding bike-and-ride transit as an abled, gendered, racialised and classed practice, the performance of which draws on a socio-material assemblage, including discourses, other commuters’ expectations, policies, physical contexts, and bikes themselves. Assemblage thinking provides a relational framework in which any object or person is afforded agency. In doing so, we join efforts to move beyond individual commuters and their behaviour to acknowledge the sense and sensibilities of how, where, and why commuters routinely perform bike-and-ride transit practices. We argue that capacities to ride a bike are embodied through the senses, muscles, sinews, skills, and competences (Jones 2012). In turn, regular commuting bike-and-ride practices can be understood as articulated through the affective/emotive intensities of socio-material assemblages that comprise journeys themselves (Waitt et al. 2021a). Consequently, the affective/emotive response to doing bike-and-ride transit is not only about the ideas that circulate within a social context about taking a bike on a train or riding a bike. An individual’s capacity to habitually perform bike-and-ride transit is also a process that is continuously being transformed by the affective force of socio-material relations that are particular to the time-space of the journey itself. Extending this discussion, we put forth a conceptual framework that is embodied. The practice of bike-and-ride transit is as much habitual as it is unpredictable, shifting, and haphazard. We argue that how to make doing bike-and-ride transit more ‘available,’ alongside the social we need to begin to recognise the affective/emotive impetus to rail commute with a bike. This inquiry led us to feminist scholarship engaging with the work of Deleuze and Guattari that allows us to discuss bodily judgments of cycling in ways that account for how the macropolitical is entangled in the micropolitical by being attentive to both structural and random events.

Feminism, bodies, emotions, affects

Feminist claims to knowledge are about challenging the normative, social norms and the normal. To this end, feminist scholars draw on Marion Young’s gendered and embodied phenomenological perspective on masculine and feminine movement (Lam 2020), Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (Heim LaFrombois 2019) and on Michel Foucault’s notions of regimes of truth and knowledge/power to challenge how cycling is often based on a politics of common-sense ideas about masculinities and femininities (Bonham and Wilson 2012). What unites strands of feminist research with the work of Deleuze and Guattari is the political, and a feminist questioning of power and how the world works through power structures, affectively and emotionally. We agree with Thien (2005), Smith et al. (2016) and other feminist geographers that argue feminist theory might most productively engage with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of affect. This is not a question of whether an affective movement, (that diminishes or enhances the bodily capacity to act and sense) is experienced by the subject below the level of consciousness, or not (see Thrift 2008). Rather, feminist scholars are attuned to the political effects of affective shifts initiated by experience and articulated as emotions often identified as feelings (Ahmed 2004; Hemmings 2005; Wetherell 2012). To feminists researching emotional practices, it is the politics of emotion that matters and if the political outcome ruptures, reinforces or reproduces inequalities.

An emerging feminist scholarship engages with Deleuze and Guattari (1987) notion of lines (Ringrose 2011; Tamboukou 2010; Waitt 2022). In this paper, we draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of lines that takes the social and affective into account to conceptualise the politics of emotion. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) point is to show how emotional experiences matter to an individual’s lifeline. Fundamentally, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) understands an individual’s lifeline as comprised of three conceptual lines: molar lines (break lines or segmental lines), molecular lines (crack lines) and rupture lines (lines of flight). A rupture line is conceived as living without a lifeline or liveable order. In practical terms, these are ‘breaks’ from which there is no return because they destroy all connections to the past. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue while there are potential benefits to living without a lifeline; such as creativity, there are also dangers associated with despair and anxiety. For example, our past relationship with commuting may be broken through the loss of a driving licence that presents itself in terms of loss of freedom and independence. The clean break of the driving licence loss may generate either creativity, or despair, from losing the existential means of freedom, security, comfort, and sense of self associated with automobility.

Molar lines (segmenting lines) are conceived through ideas of social construction to operate as affective forces of order, along taken-for-granted social norms or “shared perceptions’ (Ahmed 2014, 208) by ordering and categorising public space and maintaining socio-spatial hierarchies (Buchanan 2020). The important point that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) make through their discussion of the concept of molar lines is that the body of the cyclist is already constituted through social norms before it is encountered. Therefore, researchers must focus on the cultural histories of mobility to augment understanding of how the affective encounters between and within bodies are mediated. This allows us to conceive how the relative social positioning of cyclists in hierarchies (age, gender, race, ability, and class) in different contexts (stations and railway carriages) has an influence on the affective and emotional experiences of bike-and-ride transit. Moreover, the affects and emotions of pedalling cannot be separated from the socio-spatial contexts of our past, present, and future. In bringing biked bodies into relation with unencumbered bodies at stations and on carriages, a feminist approach to the politics of emotion is about the investment in transport social norms, and how the affects and emotions may maintain the status quo by reinforcing social and geographical differences. Some transport molar lines may be so rigid they are difficult to break because the power arrangement is understood as inevitable, timeless, and legitimate.

On the other hand, the force of affect and emotions may create exciting new possibilities to transform our lifeline (molecular lines). Deleuze and Parnet (2007) argue that molecular lines capture the flux in a body’s power, understood here in terms of its changing capacities to do and sense in the unfolding of everyday experience: rising and falling through the impressions of different situations. Deleuze and Parnet (2007) argue that molecular lines operate beneath molar lines to create new potential through self-reflection on the common-sense foundations of our world-views. Thus, molecular or crack lines trace transformations in the body’s capacity to sense and act. The molecular line is in our lifeline. Buchanan (2020) develops the concept of molecular line as the foundation for a politics of transformation from an affective shift initiated by experiences of discord. The point that Buchanan (2020) emphasises through the concept of molecular line is characterised as affective moments in which we can no longer live with what that which previously confirmed us in what we already knew. This is like Hemmings (2012, 157) discussion of affective dissonance as ‘the judgement arising from the distinction between experience and the world”. The sense of dissonance might be felt as a social injustice and inspire critical thinking to imagine a different practice of politics. Molecular lines demand that we understand pedalling as a relational activity, bound up in the rhizomatic and often haphazard and ongoing unfolding of the everyday. We propose that the concept of molecular lines is useful to better understand the political implications for bike-and-ride transit arising from moments of affective dissonance. Such moments are conceived to generate self-reflection from the felt misalignment between rail commuters’ sense of self and social expectations with respect to commuting and rail passengers.

Methods and participants

This research is part of a larger study to help transform Greater Sydney into a cycling-friendly city. Sydney is notoriously traffic congested and notoriously hard-to-cycle. To help bring cycling perspectives from the ground, fieldwork for this article began in March 2020 as New South Wales entered its first lockdown. It was immediately apparent that face-to-face interviews that bring insights to bike-and-ride transit experiences and expertise on the everyday navigation of Greater Sydney railway network would be impossible. Furthermore, work from home health orders disrupted commuter patterns and possibilities to deploy performative mobile methods including video-diaries or rail commuting with participants (Harada and Waitt 2012). Instead, we combined online synchronous interviews with sketches to co-produce knowledge with participants. Like Aldred (2013), we understand the dialogue as a shared process of meaning-making. Given the dominant Australian discourses that stigmatise riding a bike, helping to put participants at ease was the sharing the social identity of the interviewer as a non-disabled, white migrant married women with two pre-school children and a cyclist.

The pragmatic and theoretical issues involved in internet interviews are widely discussed in the literature (Hanna 2002; Longhurst 2016). ‘Zoom’ was selected for ‘real time’ semi-structured interviews. Overall, there were few glitches in the use of Zoom, given the familiarity of our participants with the software that was already installed on their computer. The concept of lines was deployed as a methodological tool. Our research design combined synchronous interviews with sketches to enable participatory analysis of pre-pandemic experiences of bike-and-ride transit practices to occur online. We understand sketching as simultaneously a creative and methodological practice. Drawing on discussion in creative geographies, sketching as a practice-based method offered a possible entry point to the non-cognitive and multisensory ways of knowing on-the-move (Straughan and Hawkins 2016). The aim is not to produce a masterpiece, rather to widen participants’ awareness of how bodily relationships of doing bike-and-ride transit are negotiated, contested, cultivated, and mediated (Veal and Hawkins 2020). Participants’ sketches offered a way of opening conversations about how they experienced bike-and ride transit, and how claims over railway carriages are felt, negotiated, and represented. Interpretation occurred with participants rather than starting when empirical data collection finishes and the researcher assumes control.

The semi-structured interview was built around 5 sections: ‘getting to know you’, ‘getting to know your bike, ‘regular patterns of bike-and-ride transit’, ‘positive and negative moments’ and ‘the future’. As Bissell (2009) and Dewsbury (2010) argue, well-conceived semi-structured interviews are effective in accessing the emotional and affective intensities of everyday practice. At the same time, we were drawn to combining semi-structured interviews with sketches as a ‘live’ or performative methodology (Veal and Hawkins 2020). Participants were invited to sketch their ‘regular patterns of bike-and-ride transit’, ‘positive and negative moments’ and ‘the future’. Inviting participants to sketch takes seriously non-verbal interactions as a way of capturing meaning-making beyond words. Sketches were deployed to better understand the affective working of bike-and-ride transit practices as a social norm. These combined methods enabled participants to guide the conversation. The sensuous, temporal, and situated affective intensities of commutes in relation to their individual affective capacities were evoked evoke through sketches, emotions, gestures, and/or tone of voice. Synchronous online semi-structured interviews with sketches lasted between 60 and 120 minutes, were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim and then made available to participants on request.

Recruitment occurred through the Sydney Bike Commuter social media platform and ‘snowballing’ contacts of people working at the City of Sydney. This led to a group of 19 participants but only10 were interpreted. This is because we identified that bike-and-ride transit practice is multiple. How bike-and ride transit practices are performed is differentiated by embodied skill sets, self-identities, distance, and dress. Set aside from our analysis are the 5 participants who considered themselves ‘serious road cyclists’. These participants dressed in Lycra and incorporated bike-and-ride transit into training routines of more than 50 km. Omitted are also the 4 participants that are regular bike commuters living in the inner city, journeying less than 5 km, who occasionally journeyed with their bike on the train because of rain or fatigue.

Here, we focus on 10 long-distance rail commuters precisely because bike-and-ride transit has great potential to reduce traffic congestion. Little is known about the experiences of this group of rail commuters, which includes people living in places of transport poverty in the outer suburbs of Greater Sydney. Equally divided by gender, the participants’ ages ranged from 29 to 45 years old. They were all tertiary educated, salary employed white-collar employees in sectors such as universities and government departments that offered free end of trip facilities. All commuted more than 30 km, spending at least 1 hour on the train. The majority travelled the South Coast Line between Wollongong and Sydney. Household travel surveys report that commuter cyclists in Sydney tend to be in professional white-collar services and earn over $100,000 per annum (Hughes 2020). They dressed in work clothes rather than Lycra. They worked flexible hours and rail commuted at least three times a week. All ten participants narrated childhood biographies of cycling and a love of the exhilaration of pedalling. They considered themselves as ‘capable riders.’ Each distanced themselves from definitions of ‘athletes’ or ‘sporty cyclists’ that, in an Australia context conflate cycling with the figure of the MAMIL (Middle Age Man in Lycra), constituted by white, affluent, male sensibility aligned with athleticism and risk-taking (Daley and Rissel 2011). With one exception, all held a driving licence. All participants were given pseudonyms.

Echoing previous research, none of our participants parked their bike at railway stations for fear of theft (Austroads 2008). All cycled both the first and last kilometre of their outward and return commute. They rode on a diversity of inexpensive and expensive bikes. Routes were carefully selected to avoid the physical effort required to cycle uphills and the discomfort of traffic. Each had a wet-weather routine. None were novices to this practice, with a range of experience from 1 to 5 years. All conveyed feeling singled out by the affective judgements of fellow passengers as an ‘annoyance’, ‘outsider’ and ‘deviant’. In what follows, we draw on feminist knowledge of affect to pay attention to the emotional in two moments as a way to augment understanding transport politics; peak-hour railway carriages and ascending station stairs. Our interpretation starts by discussing how participants conveyed that something was amiss when it came to bike-and-ride transit in Greater Sydney.

The politics of emotion and bike-and-ride transit practices: being emotional about bikes, cycling and ‘cyclists’

Our curiosity in long-distance bike-and-ride transit was heightened by the impression conveyed during the online synchronised semi-structured interviews that something was amiss. In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed (2017, 22) writes:

Feminism often begins with intensity: you are aroused by what you come up against. You register something in the sharpness of an impression. Something can be sharp without it being clear what the point is … Things don’t seem right.

For our participants, what ‘didn’t seem right’ was the gap between their own sense of self and fellow passengers’ judgements upon them. All our participants articulated a strong affective investment in the social norms that confirmed bike-and-ride transit practices as efficient, productive, healthy, and sustainable. The political logic of bike-and-ride transit practices (and identities such as environmentalist, fit, young professional) is personally felt and expressed as ‘good’, ‘freedom’ and convenience. For example, Thomas, who is a thirty something, academic, lives with his partner and daughter, and rail commutes with an urban commuting bike around 75 km between Thirroul and Paddington, said:

It’s the fact that I can be at the train station in seven minutes, and then I can get to uni in five minutes at the other end. It reduces my commute, but also it’s hugely about sustainability. I don’t drive, because I want to have a low environmental impact when I commute. And it’s also a freedom thing, like when I'm there, if I need to go to a meeting or I need to go and see a supplier or whatever, getting around Sydney is a freaking nightmare any other way …Trying to park a car in Paddington every day, I don’t know how my colleagues do it. It [parking a car] would drive me crazy. I just take my bike into my office, which then leads into the next point, it’s convenience. In my panniers on my bike is everything that I need. My bike is like a travelling office, so everywhere I go there’s everything there that I need. My laptop, raincoat in case it rains, everything, a tape measure.

Similarly, Neil, who is thirty something, a graphic designer, lives with his partner and rail commutes with a ‘cheap’ second-hand fixed gear bike around 85 km between Wollongong and Ultimo explained that:

It’s very convenient for me, to be able to do that [long distance bike-and-ride transit], and another is simple, it’s exercise, for me. On the days that I go to Sydney to work, I don’t really have a lot of time to go to the gym as well, so it ensures that I've done a little bit of exercise that day. I enjoy physical activity. I feel good, having ridden my bike. And then, the third is that it’s massively timesaving. It allows me to save a load of time. I guess maybe I'd put a fourth thing, which is environmentally friendly.

Thomas and Neil illustrate how participants situated their experience of bike-and-ride transit practices confirms political ideals of efficiency, productivity, sustainability, and exercise have a strong hold over the body and confirm their sense of self as productive, environmentally conscious professionals.

In contrast, bike-and-ride transit practices are not something deemed by fellow commuters or rail passengers as ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’ which ‘goes-without-saying’. Participants explained that the presence of a bike did not gel in the context of their commuting journey. This made it easy for fellow passengers to routinely judge participants as ‘weird’ or ‘odd’, and thereby deviant to normative commuters (Aldred 2010). Our participants highlighted automobility as a molar force affectively felt as discomfort because of the experienced difference between their own sense of being and fellow commuters’ judgement upon them. For example, Mary, who is thirty something, an academic, married and commutes with her hybrid bike some 76 kilometres from West Wollongong to Camperdown, Sydney, tells a story about coming up against opposition to bike-and-ride transit in her workplace.

People don’t like it [bike-and-ride transit]. People question it. They find it socially uncomfortable that I do it, especially because it’s weird. It’s like, "Why don’t you have a car like normal people?" Even when there are people that understand the environmental issues around reduced emissions, or who have been to Europe and stuff. It’s [bike-and-ride transit] still uncomfortably out of context and it annoys them … I was asking to borrow the uni car, and I don’t use it a lot but I use it to move art around. We were told they’d take it away from us if we didn’t use it. I used it about 10 times last year. And then on one occasion my boss said, "Why don’t you just get a car?" I'm like, "I don’t want a car", and it’s none of your business really.

Mary illustrates how the molar line of automobility generates mobility hierarchies that operate to exclude and alienate those journeying with bikes (Aldred 2013; Jones 2012; Waitt et al. 2021b). Mary was attuned to how commuter cyclists in the Australian social context become the objects of other drivers’ shared affective response. For those, like her boss, invested in automobility, dislike orients and mobilises drivers against commuter cyclists and for car ownership. Mary conveys the feeling of anger she senses from encounters with drivers being against bikes. Importantly, when conceived as a molecular line, rather than diminishing her capacity to act, her discomfort translated into strengthening her commitment to bike-and-ride transit practices creating opportunities to wear heals at work, exercise, and a more sustainable future.

Likewise, Michael, who is thirty something, an accountant, single, and commutes after living in London with a Brompton (a folding bike) some 18 kilometre between Stanmore and Macquarie Park for work, conveys the affective judgement of bike-and-ride transit:

Whether you like it or not, you’re going against the grain when you ride a bike. We’re the ones on the outside. Riding a bike is already a bit odd. To then be using a bicycle somewhere unexpected, like taking it onto the train is even more odd. It’s like double jeopardy, and I do feel that sometimes.

Michael tells how his behaviour and appearance with a bike does not seem to fit with the rigid molar lines or taken-for-granted cultural ideas of commuters in the contexts of either roads or stations. Michael expressed a feeling of ‘double jeopardy’ coming up against the world. Like Mary, Michael illustrates how cycling is not deemed natural in the context of roads that serve the interest of automobility rather than vélomobility. In the context of railways, Michael confirms the affective investment of rail passengers in the rigid molar line or social norm of rail commuting discussed by Waitt and Phillips (2021) as unencumbered, productive, and professional bodies. This is because agility plays a fundamental role in how the social world of commuter railway travel works. Michael felt the political logic of the affective judgement of the encumbered biked-body judged as abnormal in the peak hour railway carriage. Michael’s biked-body disrupted the social norms of peak-hour commuting. In Michael’s words, those commuting with a bike on public transport at peak-hour are judged as ‘outsiders’ and made to feel as if they are ‘going against the grain’ of social expectations occupied with respect to rail commuters.

Next, we offer two examples where a politics of emotion occurs, where the ‘cultural landscape vibrates with surface tensions spied or sensed’ (Stewart 2007, 45). The two seemingly ordinary events of heightened affective dissonance are: commuting with a bike on peak-hour railway carriages and ascending station stairs. The aim here is to offer a detailed analysis of these events to demonstrate how the macropolitical is entangled with the micropolitical through emotional and affective forces. Our conceptual approach is about how molecular lines may put into question, or reinforce, molar lines that mediate rail commuting. The quotations provide examples of affective judgements in the context of rail commuting with a bike that help to understand what emotions do politically.

Peak hour railway carriages

Legally, bikes can be transported on Sydney Trains free of charge at any time. However, there are no special accommodations for bicycles. The New South Wales Transport Department recommends that bike riders stand their bike in the ‘multi-purpose’ areas of the first and last carriage. Yet, all participants conveyed the discomfort felt from the affective judgements of fellow passengers’ stares, derogatory comments, and intimidating gestures. Biked-bodies were singled out as ‘out of place’ to the physically unencumbered rail commuters. The bike constitutes a potential threat to the subjectivities, worlds and anticipated movements of those unencumbered passengers that dominate the railway carriage at peak hour. A biked-body in a crowded peak-hour railway carriages was felt to compromise the comfort of fellow passengers. Here, bikes disrupt the anticipated ways of moving-together; efficient, and agile movement; and expectations of physical distancing. For example, Michael, illustrates the affective judgment involved when telling of the implications when a fellow rail passenger accidently collided with his bicycle:

I have one person who banged into it. The carriage was pretty busy. I had it in front of my feet and then obviously, he’s not looking down at the floor because it’s a busy carriage way, he actually shins into it [the bike] and he’s like, "What’s that doing there?" … Sydneysiders are not used to seeing commuters with bikes, and people are thinking about who you are? What are you doing here? Why are you in my way? You don’t belong here. You haven’t paid for that. Public transport’s already a sort of quite uncomfortable experience. You don’t need to do anything to make it any more uncomfortable.

Michael’s impression of the effect of his body’s encounter with railway carriages is affective discomfort. In this context, Michael conveys his impression of fellow passengers’ heightened negative affective response to the presence of his bike. Crucially, at the heart of this affective judgment is Michael’s biked-body, including what biked-bodies’ stand for (far-left greenies, hipsters, childhood) configured by molar lines. Michael’s legitimacy of journeying with a bike is questioned because it does not align with what rail commuter bodies should, or should not, be doing to travel in a railway carriage. Michael underscores the social value of the unencumbered paying passenger is integral to the reciprocal affections between rail commuters. Michael communicates his experience of bike-and-ride transit through feelings of discomfort at being constituted as an outsider. Importantly, Michael illustrates the affective logic about biked bodies that demonstrates the unencumbered politics involved in verbal attempts to ban bikes from trains, despite their legal status.

Likewise, Paul, who is forty something, an academic, married with 2 school-aged children and long-distance bike-and-ride transits with his second-hand bike some 91 km from Coniston to Ultimo, conveyed the unease about normalising the presence of biked-bodies during peak hour in railway carriages:

I had one person swearing and cussing. I generally have a feeling that, when it’s busy, and when I get on, people, without saying anything, are just a little bit pissed-off that there’s this bike in the way. It would be better for them if it wasn’t there. Whenever I get on in the peak time, there is that sense.

What Paul describes as ‘that sense’, we interpret as the eruption, circulation and impression of a disruptive affective intensity stemming from the anticipated threat of bikes to unencumbered bodies in peak hour rail carriages. From the perspective of assemblage, biked-bodies in rail carriages during peak hour generate a molecular line, or affective dissonance, becoming a potential threat to the subjectivities, worlds and anticipated movements of the unencumbered rail passenger. The sensed disdain for encumbered passengers, like Paul commuting with a bike, is testament that the shared logic of rail commuting (molar line) is no longer making sense. The molar line is felt by Paul because he is limited by how the unencumbered boundaries are reinforced through an affective judgement, manifested as a feelings or ‘sense’, consciously or non-consciously.

Furthermore, in a context of culturally shared ideas that rail commuters should not travel with bikes at peak hour, Neil tells of moments of affective dissonance that emerge from the ambiguity surrounding the formal procedures:

There’s this risk of being in an uncomfortable situation. There’s a lack of clarity around the rules for commuting with a bike. I don’t even know what the rules are. I know at some points you’re supposed to buy a ticket for your bike. I don’t think that’s ever enforced. I don’t know if that’s even still in play. I don’t know… I assume that it’s fine to even have the bike. I think maybe that lack of support for commuting means that sometimes, passengers aren’t… They’re probably like, "Look at you, dickhead," and that lack of social support. And then, also, not knowing what my rights are, or anything like that.

In this quotation, it is shared ideas, or molar lines, about what commuter bodies should, and should not do, that affectively flow in the marginalising representation of rail commuters with a bike as a ‘dickhead’. In the ambiguity of formal rules, Neil illustrates how the investment in culturally shared ideas about biked-bodies are employed by fellow passengers to police and reinforce societal boundaries (molar lines) mediated as apolitical through an affective force that is manifested here as a sense of ‘being uncomfortable’.

The sense of affective discomfort conveyed in participants’ narratives travelling at peak hour inspired some to imagine an alternative politics of bike-and-ride transit. For example, Neil illustrates how the affective discomfort of being interpellated as a ‘deviant’ made it possible to imagine rail commuting with designated rail carriages (Figure 1). However, the affective force conveyed as discomfort did not lead to an affective solidarity nor advocacy for designated railway carriages. Instead, interest to challenge the presence and force of this marginalisation operated within the status quo of molar lines through experiments with train schedules and storage. For example, Thomas told how to avoid the affective dissonance sparked by his bike, he avoided commuting in peak hour:

Figure 1. Neil’s imagined cycling utopia.

The way back can be an issue. I definitely try to time my commute on the way back. If I can be on a train by 3:00 or 3:30, I will be, because the peak hour is just a nightmare. Town Hall at peak hour is a nightmare at the best of times, and people with bikes are not super popular at peak hour.

In the political puzzle of bike-and-ride transit, Thomas points to what emotions do that render the body as ‘other’, evoking unwanted sensations of bodily surveillance. Working with the status quo, Thomas reschedules return trips before peak hour to avoid the judgemental, objectifying and antagonistic gaze of fellow passengers that brings his biked-body to the foreground of consciousness as a problem.

Likewise, in Figure 2, Mary conveys how biked-bodies animate the railway carriage at peak hour through their capabilities to affect and invoke dissonant atmospheres. Without a designated space, biked bodies are prone to stigmatisation from fellow passengers as they limit the designated space for unencumbered passengers. Mary conveyed the negative affective sense of the crowded peak hour railway carriage as embarrassment and becoming an ‘invader’. Like Thomas, Mary conveys how the unwanted sensations of bodily attention that render the body as ‘other’, cause a body to do something. In this story, working with the status quo, she alighted the train and caught a later one to generate commutes felt as efficient and comfortable.

Figure 2. Mary’s experimentation with the experience of scheduling return rail travel.

Participants with less flexible work-life schedules spoke of a process of trial and error of boarding rail carriages, and bike storage, to avoid being judged by fellow-passengers as annoying. Thomas, for example, illustrates being recognised as an annoyance is an affective judgement (Figure 3). The important point that Thomas illustrates is that the affective process between and within biked-bodies and unencumbered bodies is already social through the molar lines that constitute rail commuters as agile and efficient. Before alighting the peak-hour train, the affective investment in the social norms of rail commuting means that Thomas’ biked-body is already judged as a threat to unencumbered fellow-passengers’ safety, comfort, and efficiency. Thomas conveys how his biked-body changes the mood on the platform and railway carriage in negative affective ways. Thus, crucially, it is Thomas’s desire to avoid his sense of affective discomfort that sparks experiments with storage options. However, rather than challenging the status quo, the micropolitical affective force operates within the molar lines that privilege unencumbered and productive bodies. Stories of bike-and-ride transit in Sydney peak hour were dominated by the social risks (embarrassment and threat of alienation). At the same time, these socio-political narratives reinforced a legacy of rail commuter productivity that shaped rail carriage use, gestures, and norms, including sitting down to work (Waitt and Phillips 2021).

Figure 3. Thomas’s experimentation with the experience of alighting a rail carriage.

Ascending station stairs with a bike

Our second moment of affective dissonance is how participants narrated ascending station stairs carrying their bike in the absence of lifts or escalators. Participants’ impressions were that something was amiss when carrying bikes up station stairs. For example, Paul, conveys his impression as follows:

Redfern’s not good. Central’s worse. Central, there’s so much activity, but also no platform is close to the street level, so it’s a lot of hassle. That’s why I go to Redfern, because it’s simpler to get in and out, but it doesn’t have any lifts, which is incredible. I have to carry the bike, depending on which platform it goes to. If it’s platform 1, which is most often, then I have to carry the bike upstairs. But Redfern’s not great. It’s much, much better than Central. It’s extraordinary. Every day you see people struggling up those stairs. It’s not so bad for me because I'm not super old and it’s not hard for me to do that, but that would be a massive impediment, I think for a lot of people.

Paul illustrates Ahmed’s (2017, 22) argument that sensations of affective dissonance matter because: ‘Things don’t seem right’. Paul conveys the affective and emotional impression that physically carrying a bike up stairs at Central and Redfern railway stations was ‘extraordinary’. Paul’s experience exemplifies, Bissell, Vannini, and Jensen (2017, 796) argument that sites of commuting ‘are places of seemingly ordinary but actually quite extraordinary intersecting processes and practices shaped by variable intensities of statis and movement’. In this case, Paul felt the ordinary station infrastructure as extraordinary. Paul’s sense of irritation is because the commute did not gel with Paul’s anticipation of bike-and-ride transit as ‘hassle’ free, through bike-access to street level. Paul’s own sense of self as an efficient and productive rail commuter that is configured by molar lines is not matched by Transport New South Wales’s judgement upon him through infrastructure provision as a rail commuter with a bike. The affective dissonance resulted in Paul alighting the train at Redfern rather than Central. Furthermore, Paul makes us aware of how the heightened affective dissonance named as extraordinary, operates within the molar lines as a micropolitical force by generating heightened conscious awareness of age and gender. Paul reflected on how the affective dissonance of carrying a bike up the station stairs while confirming his sense of self made visible the hampered movement of older, less muscular, and fit bodies.

For Mary, the affective dissonance generated by carrying a bike up station stairs is caught up in gender, ability, and age. Ascending station stairs carrying a bike enables the performance of a specific able-bodied masculinity.

The trains that leave before 9:00 AM always stop at the platform 11 at Redfern, which is underground. Then you can put your bike on the lift or on the escalators. Whereas if it stops at platform one, in the middle of the day, or even after 9:00 AM, you have to carry my bike up those stairs, two flights of stairs. I'm not very big, and it’s really hard. It’s really hard for women, not men, so it’s kind of sexist. I actually struggle when I've got that bike and the panniers with stuff in them. I'm not sure if I could do it if I was 50. Once I went to Central instead. Then I went from Central on another train back to Redfern that I knew had a lift, because some of the Redfern platforms have them and some don’t.

For Mary, this singular intensive moment reveals how ascending platform stairs with a bike validate a gendered, aged, and able-bodied socio-spatial order. Mary illustrates how this sense of affective dissonance operates within molar lines as a micropolitical force through her heightened sense of gendered mobility injustice and a desire to rectify by reassessing her route.

Conclusion

Integrating bikes with public transport is usually framed in transport policy as something people ought to do for their health and future of the planet. Any future transport policy attempt to foster integrating bikes with public transport to create more liveable and rideable cities must also pay attention to the politics of emotions surrounding bike-and-ride transit practices. We build on feminist scholarship on the politics of emotion to offer an argument for how bike-and-ride transit could be different. The politics of emotion discussed here involves the bodily capacity to act and be affected alongside ‘sensations that have found a match in words’ (Brennan 2004, 19). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) concept of lines is a helpful analytical tool for providing insights to the politics of emotions. To this end, what Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of molecular and molar lines offers as a framework for analysis is twofold. First, the concept of molecular lines offers a way to identify the micropolitical through how the affective capacity of the body may generate questions about how the world works, and possibilities for acting differently. Second, the concept of molar lines insists that individual emotional subjectivities are never distinct from the wider macropolitical policy and public discourses. Our approach to the political is about the affective investment in cycling as a social norm.

To illustrate what the politics of emotion can do, our analysis discussed two moments of heightened affective dissonance narrated by participants that sparked heightened self-awareness and experimentation with bike-and-ride transit practices: peak-hour railway carriages and ascending station stairs with a bike. In the context of peak hour railway carriages, this paper has identified the political in the policing of biked-bodies performed by fellow-passengers. We illustrated how molar lines that constitute cyclists as a threat to automobility or full paying rail passengers, mediated as apolitical common sense, operated to exclude biked-bodies. The politics of emotions is communicated as affective judgements through stares, gestures, and verbal threats. We demonstrated how different practices of rail commuting with a bike occurred, following an affective shift in peak hour railway carriages. A shift initiated in the moment by the experience of affective dissonance between participants’ sense of being (as productive, sustainable, and efficient commuters) and fellow passengers’ judgements upon them as ‘weird’, ‘odd’ or ‘intruders.’ Such an affective shift generated experiments to rectify the sense of exclusion within the molar lines of rail commuting, by rescheduling commutes outside peak hour. Thus, the status quo of the peak hour railway carriage was maintained that privileges the unencumbered body on the Sydney rail network and ongoing lack of provision of designated cycling storage on Sydney trains.

The second example, the event of ascending stairs within the dysfunctional station infrastructure illustrates moments of affective dissonance conveyed as extraordinary. In these examples, the political is illustrated in how the affective dissonance, named as extraordinary, sparked an awareness about social injustice either consciously or non-consciously, along the lines of gender, ability, and age. In our case, rather than challenging the macropolitical power structures of how railway infrastructure is designed, and budgets prioritised, our participants again worked within the existing molar lines that constitute the social-spatial order through experimenting with journeys to incorporate stations with lifts.

We argue that there is considerable potential for feminist geographers to work with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of lines to contribute to analysing the politics of emotion. The notion of molar lines continues a rich field of feminist investigation in how the ordinary escapes attention because it understood as apolitical, taken-for-granted, everyday, or common sense. Such scholarship is exemplified in Stewart’s (2007) book Ordinary Affects. The notion of molecular lines complements this feminist scholarship by conceiving how social injustices in the ordinary are made felt/visible and may generate a desire for change. Molecular lines are a valuable analytical tool to better understand how the micropolitical force of affective dissonance generated by the unfolding of events that do not ‘gel’. Feminist research on the politics of emotion cannot overlook the affective dissonance of moments conveyed as extraordinary by how they make felt the taken-for-granted. That said, the desire for change may work within the macropolitical force of molar lines that retains the status quo or sets in motion possibilities beyond what is already assumed and known.

Acknowledgements

We thank our anonymous referees, Theresa Harada for the constructive critique of earlier drafts, Margaret Walton-Roberts for her editorial support and all participants who shared their stories of rail commuting with a bike in Greater Sydney, Australia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Project funding was through an Australian Research Council Discovery Project entitled ‘Pedalling for change’ (DP190100185). The research received ethical approval from the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC no 2017/318). University of Wollongong.

Notes on contributors

Gordon Waitt

Gordon Waitt is Associate Dean (Equity Diversity and Inclusion) and senior professor of the Australian Centre of Culture, Environment and Society, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Gordon’s research is focussed on everyday experiences as a lens through which to better understand inequalities

Anna Lewis

Anna Lewis is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Australian Centre of Culture, Environment and Society, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Anna’s research combines both environmental and social sciences to inform management policy and has been applied across the coastal and marine sciences, ecology, tourism and sustainability sectors.