Dykes on Bikes: mobility, belonging and the visceral

This article contributes to growing scholarship on fluidity, embodiment and the politics of festivals. Such scholarship is crucial to understanding belonging as an embodied, visceral experience. Extending on this work, this paper seeks to draw further attention to the fluidity of festival boundaries and experience, by exploring how belonging holds the potential to become detached from location, and be manifested forcefully through movement to and from events. I focus on a group of six Dykes on Bikes members, who rode motorbikes 1800 kilometres as part of a larger group from Brisbane to the Sydney Mardi Gras Parade. Through this exploration I illustrate how attention to the visceral experience of belonging on the move allows geographers to address what holds individuals ‘in place’ so to speak, when attachment takes place through movement. In doing so I argue that the visceral is crucial to understanding belonging as mobile because it provides a framework to stand against universalised discourses that locate belonging within the temporal and spatial confines of events.