The first thing people asked Bernadette Murphy last summer after she started riding a Harley-Davidson at age 48 was, “When are you going to get tattoos?”
The question offended her.
“It sounded like they were reducing motorcycling to this stereotype,” she says, “that I was just copying some cultural trope.”
So what led the creative-writing professor and mother of three to slip away this month from the biennial meeting of the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies to get a pair of literary references tattooed onto her wrist and forearm?
Ms. Murphy’s answer arrived embedded, like the ink still fresh in her skin, in a paper she delivered the next day at the small, interdisciplinary conference here at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her work dealt with death, risk, and her own two-wheeled redemption from the numbness of midlife, which is to say that it fit comfortably into a lineup of presentations on gender, history, philosophy, and fashion.
Although the meeting, which drew some 40 scholars, was only the second under the motorcycle journal’s banner, academe’s not-so-wild ones have been trading ideas for a while. Several of the journal’s founders first gathered a dozen years ago, at a regional popular-culture conference, to examine motorcycle culture and myth through their respective disciplines.
The journal had its debut five years later, with Suzanne Ferriss and Steven E. Alford, humanities professors at Nova Southeastern University, as its editors. In 2007 the couple published Motorcycle (Reaktion Books), a cultural history of a machine they deemed the “exemplary Modernist object.”
“We realized we could use the motorcycle to open people’s eyes to larger ideas,” says Ms. Ferriss, a specialist in Romantic literature. “We wanted to use it as a window onto the world.”
The journal and its conference tend toward the cultural-studies perspective, a legacy of their popular-culture origins. But Mr. Alford, a scholar of literature and film, notes that the conference welcomes papers from engineers and others in more technical fields.
At the group’s core is a mix of men and women, tending toward middle age and favoring BMW’s, Harleys, Triumphs, and Ducatis, with the odd Honda, Suzuki, or Yamaha thrown in. Most use their bikes to commute to their jobs, and several ride marathon distances. They regard themselves as “riders” or “motorcyclists,” but rarely as “bikers,” an image that has been alternately vilified and commodified since 1947, when sensationalized media reports about a motorcycle rally in Hollister, Calif., cemented the outlaw-biker stereotype in the American mind.
While most of the attendees own one or more bikes (often with at least one in some state of disrepair), no bouncers stood at the door checking driver’s licenses for the telltale “M” (motorcycle operator) designation. Skin-tight denim mingled easily with casual khaki.
But as at any gathering involving scholars or bikers, trouble can erupt at any moment. One presenter, speaking on how motorcycles are depicted in the children’s cartoon The Transformers, lost his audience by veering into an unintentionally condescending aside on the cultural significance of the seminal motorcycle film The Wild One. Later he referred to motorcycles as “inherently masculine,” sending his listeners into an embarrassed cringe. (“Bikes are inherently empowering, regardless of gender,” someone said later by way of correction.)
Camaraderie and acceptance, however, are the abiding spirits among the motorcycle scholars, and there is good reason for that, according to D. Mark Austin, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Louisville and one of the group’s most prolific travelers. Communities that are based on recreational pursuits tend to be less restrictive and judgmental than those based on things like residential or religious ties, he says.
To be sure, motorcycling can be extremely recreational: Solitude, adrenaline, and enhanced sensory awareness are a just a few of the benefits Mr. Austin derives from riding.
“You can smell the rain coming,” he says. “In Kentucky you might smell the tobacco hanging in the barns.”
The work still has to get done, however, and Mr. Austin says riding helps that process along. In 2001-2 he spent eight months of a sabbatical riding around the country on a BMW and interviewing motorcyclists who live on the road or spend extended periods of time there. With no cellphone to answer and no e-mail to respond to, he could spend his time meditating and working out problems inside his helmet.
Ms. Murphy, the newly tattooed writing professor, reached the same conclusion from a wholly different starting point. At 16 she was a talented skateboarder, placing third in the nation in the downhill slalom. Then she got married and became a soccer mom and a part-time author, publishing three books and writing a novel. When her youngest entered high school, she began taking on challenges again. She’s twice climbed Mount Whitney and run a couple of marathons.
A year ago, as part of her research for a novel in which the female protagonist was to ride a motorcycle, Ms. Murphy signed up for a course, given by Harley-Davidson, that culminated in two days of hands-on riding. The experience coincided with the final days of her 90-year-old father’s losing battle against cancer. That was tough, but the juxtaposition proved fortunate. As she struggled to cope, she gained solace and confidence from the realization that she could handle a large, powerful machine.
The morning after her father died, she bought a 2009 Harley-Davidson Sportster Iron 883. She had begun teaching creative writing just a year earlier in the M.F.A. program at Antioch University Los Angeles.
“There’s something really cool in having come to academe, which is sort of new to me, and coming to the motorcycle world that gives me a sense of strength that I didn’t have for many years,” Ms. Murphy says, “because I had to subsume my desire in order to work for the family.”
She suspended work on the novel and began writing a nonfiction narrative about women such as herself who gain confidence by embracing risk at midlife. The new book will alternate between memoir and interviews with scientists about the positive neural changes that occur in middle-aged women who take various types of risks—whether emotional, spiritual, physical, or financial.
Getting the tattoos was part of her own transformation, she says. “I no longer worry, ‘Are people not going to hire me because I’ve got tattoos on my arms?’”
On her right wrist is Samuel Beckett’s line “Fail better,” to remind her to take more risks in her writing. On her left forearm is “This Is Water,” the title of David Foster Wallace’s acclaimed commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 and a metaphor for our inability to recognize and discuss life’s most obvious realities, even as we are swimming through them.
The Wallace quote is particularly apt for motorcyclists, says Ms. Murphy. Riding focuses her thoughts and makes her more aware of her own mortality. “The fact that the motorcycle makes me think about it regularly makes me more conscious of the choices I’m making in the rest of my life.”
Ms. Murphy wears her new look with confidence, keenly aware that her 12-inch leather boots with a reinforced left toe for shifting, her motorcycle jacket with body armor, and a couple of barely dry tattoos place her dangerously close to the cliché of the biker chick. “Just walking in the boots gives me attitude,” she confesses in her paper, which is the opening chapter of her new book.
She commutes to Antioch through downtown Los Angeles an hour each way, and has learned that her gear, while stylish, is also practical. In February her oldest son totaled the bike on the winding Angeles Crest Highway when a car in front of him stopped abruptly. He shredded the leather jacket down to the armor but emerged with just a couple of bruises.
“My helmet was scratched all along the side,” Ms. Murphy says. “That would have been his skull.”
(Nearly all of the motorcycle scholars are steadfast helmet proponents. “This is how we make our living,” says Ms. Ferris, pointing to her temple.)
With the check from the insurance company, Ms. Murphy bought the 2012 model of the same bike. Her son will not be riding it, she told her new colleagues at the motorcycle-studies conference, people with whom she says she immediately felt comfortable.
Mr. Austin, the Louisville sociologist, has an explanation for that, too.
“The sociology of risk-taking shows that when you share and take risks with people, it creates a bond that sometimes transcends social class, gender, race, and other things that might divide you in other settings,” he says.
Mr. Austin sees evidence of that not only in the motorcyclists he studies but also among his colleagues who ride and publish on the topic. “Most of the time I go to academic conferences, and it’s the academics that tie you together. This group has two bonds.”
But which comes first—motorcycles or scholarship? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. In 2007 several of the scholars met for the centenary of the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, a legendary time trial on the island’s perimeter road. In 2010, at the inaugural conference of the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies, everyone who had ridden bikes (as well as those who had flown in and rented them), went on a group ride in the mountains above Colorado Springs. No such ride took place this year.
“The ride was really enjoyable,” says Sheila Malone, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in performance and theater studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, but it consumed time that might have been more productively spent talking with one another and exchanging ideas, she says.
This year she, Mr. Alford and Ms. Ferriss, Mr. Austin, and three others were the only out-of-staters who rode their bikes to the conference.
One of those who left his bike at home this year was Christian Pierce, a part-time doctoral student in history, technology, and society at Georgia Tech who fused his scholarship and his passion for motorcycles into a gig as the journal’s review editor. Mr. Pierce grew up in Laconia, N.H., famous for its annual motorcycle rally, in which 200,000 people descend on the town.
Two years ago he turned the drive from Atlanta to Colorado Springs into a clever wedding proposal to his longtime girlfriend, Jessica Keesee. He scrawled “Will you marry me?” on a sheet of paper, then had someone photograph him twice at each stop—once with the sign and once without it. Back in Atlanta, he winnowed some 1,000 photos down to 50 and pasted them into a notebook, which he presented to Ms. Keesee. The first half of the book shows him at various scenic spots without the sign, and in the back were the identical shots but with the signs included. The two sections were divided with a page that read, “3,700 miles, 9 states, 1 man, 1 motorcycle, 1 true love.”
“I think she thought I was talking about my bike,” he laughed. It was a Suzuki Bandit 1200, a workhorse, to be sure, but far from his favorite.
When she came to the pages with the signs, he dropped down onto one knee and offered up the ring.
The couple have five bikes between them, but a long ride to Colorado wasn’t possible this year. They flew to Denver together and rented a car.
