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Copyright by David Castner Croke 2015 The Dissertation Committee for David Castner Croke Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Bikers and the Counterculture: Technology, Masculinity, and Resistance in America, 1965-1975 Committee: Jeffrey Meikle, Supervisor Janet Davis Mark Smith Shirley Thompson John Hartigan Bikers and the Counterculture: Technology, Masculinity, and Resistance in America, 1965-1975 by David Castner Croke, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2015 Dedication This work is dedicated to my father, Mark Ignatius Croke; his contrarianism and his integrity shaped me and inspired me to pursue this peculiar path, and his passion for history in all its delirious perversity has informed my own approach: to this project and to life. My godfather, Jim O'Brien, called him “kind-of a hippie and kind-of a redneck,” and this project is kind-of a biography of him. Acknowledgements Thank you to Jeff Meikle for taking me on as an advisee knowing full well that I would be a shameful laggard, for employing me as his T.A. and providing inspiration with his brilliant lectures, for letting me pursue this demented project as I envisioned it and pushing me in the right direction when I needed it, and for his patient efforts as an editor. Thank you to my blunderbuss cohort and all of my peers and friends at UT; our community, with it humor, intellect, and endless convivial arguments, is what I wanted most out of graduate school, and it's why I stayed in spite of various inhospitable realities and why I have no regrets. And thank you, especially, to my L.A. friends, who literally housed and fed me as I struggled to finish this thing: Isaac Laskin and Sophie Cassidy, Dave Richman, Katie Feo Kelly and Kevin Kelly. Most of all, thank you to my mom, Peggy Croke, who somehow continues to believe in me and support me, listening to me whine about my protean inadequacies, cat-sitting, letting me use her house as a writing retreat, helping me work on my own house, and a thousand other forms of support both small and large. v Bikers and the Counterculture: Technology, Masculinity, and Resistance in America, 1965-1975 David Castner Croke, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: Jeffrey Meikle During the 1960's a subculture of American motorcyclists became the subject of a intense media attention, its members quickly cemented in popular representation as lurid anti-heroes by virtue of their stylized embrace of danger and their efforts to live radically contingent lives of sublime depravity. Working within an anti-modern tradition that dated back to the turn of the century, the student counterculture of the period, in particular, found this figuration of the biker subculture to be seductive, adopting the biker as a model of its own ethos of insurgent presentness and an icon of its carnivalesque aesthetic. The counterculture responded to the biker particularly insofar as he represented the type of marked whiteness that this new generation of youthful insurgents was attempting to cultivate; he was identified as a hybrid, liminal figure and closely associated with the entropy of the frontier, which played a central, if ambivalent, role in the counterculture's critique of technocracy. And it is in this capacity that the biker has remained a fixture of popular discourse. His uniquely customized motorcycle, or chopper, offered a rebuke to Detroit and its priorities, becoming symbolic of an alternative relationship to the mechanized world that was fundamentally nostalgic and hostile to the hegemony of technologized rationalism. The chopper provided an evocatively paradoxical piece of undomesticated technology, elaborating the American tradition of vernacular engineering and serving as another avatar of the frontier, even as it embraced certain elements of the vi postwar years' populuxe aesthetic. It was a bit of bricolage, a strangely ephemeral and intimately personal machine that, like pop art, combined mass-production and handcraft, and its enthusiasts expressed a nostalgic desire to experience the technological sublime and the dislocations of nascent modernity. vii Table of Contents Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Antimodernism.................................................................................................28 Presentness.............................................................................................................33 Risk............................................................................................................42 Counterculture Icon...................................................................................48 Discomfort.................................................................................................60 Masculinity............................................................................................................71 Authentic Misogyny...................................................................................78 Violence.....................................................................................................84 Competition................................................................................................91 Conclusion.............................................................................................................96 Chapter 2: Carnival..........................................................................................................101 The Grotesque......................................................................................................117 Indexical Bodies.......................................................................................120 Pained Bodies...........................................................................................128 Drugs........................................................................................................131 Sexuality..............................................................................................................132 Gang Rape................................................................................................133 viii Cunnilingus..............................................................................................144 Homoeroticism.........................................................................................151 Liminality.............................................................................................................161 Pragmatism..............................................................................................168 Conclusion...........................................................................................................172 Chapter 3: Frontiers.........................................................................................................176 Deconstructing Whiteness...................................................................................187 Bikers and Race.......................................................................................201 The Linkhorns..........................................................................................208 Counterculture Cowboys.....................................................................................216 Masculinity..............................................................................................220 Frontier Apocalypse.................................................................................225 Entropic Technology............................................................................................230 Bush Fixes................................................................................................235 Technological Sublimity..........................................................................242 Conclusion...........................................................................................................257 Chapter 4: Chopper..........................................................................................................263 The Automobile...................................................................................................272 Vernacular Functionalism....................................................................................284 Tools Without Handles............................................................................302 Conspicuous Dysfunction........................................................................319 ix Rat Bikes..................................................................................................325 Japan's Big Four...................................................................................................329 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................342 Conclusion: Biker Exceptionalism: Risk, Post-modernism, and the Insane Doctors of the Button......3 x Introduction In 1965, an emerging subculture of American motorcyclists was suddenly ubiquitous. In the wake of the Monterrey