The cycling subject on the bicicle: considerations on the bike-ativism discourse in the São Paulo of cars

Abstract

In this paper we intend to identify an emergent discursive phenomenon in the city of São Paulo: the bike activism. It rises from a medley of disconnected voices towards an “articulated speech”, in the discursive eld about the meanings of the urban mobility. The bike activism constitutes a new subject position insofar as it defies, as an antagonism, the stabilized discourse related to the hegemony of the individual motorized transportation. The paper is divided into four sections: a) a description of the automobile city as a semantically normalized horizon; b) the conceptualization of politics as an articulation of speech, in Rancière terms; c) the discursive analysis of texts published in bike-mobility specialized websites; d) considerations about the partial re-absorption of the cycling into the symbolical equivalence chains of liberal-capitalism.