Every month I post links to the most recent research into motorcycle culture, subcultures, clothing and identity. Here’s what caught my eye this month — most of it from the new Volume 22 of the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies, which has just landed.
Book review: The Ambiguities of European Comic Book Bikers
Jason Wragg (University of Lancashire) reviews David Walton’s study of European biker comics — Ogri, Joe Bar Team, MOTOmania, Les Fondus de Moto, Steve McTwin and others — as cultural texts that both reflect and shape motorcycling identities across Europe. A useful pointer to a category of source material that motorcycle studies has mostly walked past.
https://motorcyclestudies.org/volume-22-2026/book-review-jason-wragg-ambiguities-of-european-comic-book-bikers-by-david-walton/
Film review: The Taming of the Biker, Ad Nauseam
Sarah Hoiland’s review of Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders (2024), the dramatisation of Danny Lyon’s 1968 photo book about the Outlaws MC. Hoiland reads the fictional Vandals MC through the figure of Kathy and questions how convincingly the film handles one-percenter culture and the women adjacent to it. Worth reading if you’re thinking about how MC subculture gets translated for a popular audience.
https://motorcyclestudies.org/volume-22-2026/film-review-the-taming-of-the-biker-ad-nauseam-sarah-hoiland/
At the Boundary of Beauty and Truth: The Motorcycle as Aesthetic/Ontologic Vehicle
Steven Burr argues that motorcycling reconciles the subjective experience of beauty with the objective being of truth, working through Keats, Heidegger and Pirsig. Less about subculture than about the phenomenology of riding, but a useful read if you’ve ever tried to put the experience into philosophical language and come up short.
https://motorcyclestudies.org/volume-22-2026/at-the-boundary-of-beauty-and-truth-the-motorcycle-as-aesthetic-ontologic-vehicle-steven-burr/
That’s it for this month. If you’ve come across research I’ve missed, feel free to email me.