For many bike messengers, working as a courier is not only a job, but an all-encompassing lifestyle. If you are unfamiliar with the messenger subculture, you can get a glimpse of it by following the links to the left. Through three years of ethnographic research, working and socializing with messengers in New York City, San Diego, and Seattle, I address the question of why a low-paying and dangerous job would generate such strong subcultural attachments. The answer to this question, I argue, requires incorporating emotions and space into cultural analysis.

First, working as a bike messenger can be exciting. Specifically, speeding through dense urban traffic on bicycles requires riders to continually monitor and adjust their actions in an effort to find the most efficient route to their destination. Unlike most entry-level service jobs, therefore, messengering involves creativity and spontaneity. In fact, it is an occupation that often requires the same sort of mental and physical challenges individuals look for in leisure time pursuits (e.g., mountain biking or skateboarding). The creative and spontaneous nature of the labor, therefore, allows messengers to feel that their work involves a degree of “authenticity” rarely found in modern employment. This authentic action is inherently emotional—its significance resides in the body and is understood more as an affective sensation than as a discursive expression.

Second, for messengers fully submerged in the subculture, darting in and out of traffic does not stop with the workday. Instead, lifestyle messengers take part in illegal street races held in open traffic—events called alleycats. The creative and spontaneous action required during the messenger’s workday is a largely individual experience. Alleycats, however, are public celebrations of those experiences. The individual’s subjective emotions become objectified by the group. Alleycats, thus, function as rituals bonding messengers to the subculture—in much the same way that religious ceremonies consecrate the beliefs of a church’s congregation.

Third, the emotions messengers generate during work and in alleycats are realizable only through the courier’s particular engagement with the urban environment. I call this interconnection of emotions and the material world “the affective appropriation of space.” Which is to say, an essential part of the messenger's creative and spontaneous activities are manipulating traffic laws and taking advantage of the bicycle's liminal position in the urban environment. Ultimately, incorporating emotions and their physical emplacement into cultural analysis underscores the dialectic of structure and agency.

I highlight the relevance of studying the affective appropriation of space by analyzing bike messenger style. From nuanced modifications to their clothing to riding brakeless fixed-gear bicycles, messenger style is directly connected to the messenger’s spatial positioning within the city. Specifically, couriers symbolically differentiate themselves from other urban inhabitants by displaying themselves as liminal members of society.

A book from this project is forthcoming with ILR Press (an imprint of Cornell University Press).