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Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018: 44–63 © Transfers
doi:10.3167/TRANS.2018.080105 ISSN: 2045-4813 (print) 2045-4821 (online)
Masculinity and Autonomous Vehicles
A Degendered or Resegregated
Future System of Automobility?
Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
Abstract
is article addresses the anthropomorphization and interpellative experi-
ence of cars and trucks, in order to meet future mobility challenges. Autono-
mous vehicles o er an emancipatory opportunity within a wider movement
of degendering and regendering motor vehicles. We argue that autonomous
vehicles can challenge the foundations of a gendered economy founded on
masculinity, speed, pleasure, and embodiment. Rather than thinking in terms
of a process of demasculinization, this article anticipates a regendering and
resegregation through which certain forms of masculine gendered economies
of pleasure will lose ground and others will gain. A core question in this article
asks who will be in the driver’s seat of future systems of automobility as the
control of the vehicle is gradually being transferred from the driver to digital
control systems and intelligent roads.
Keywords: anthropomorphization, autonomous vehicles, degendering,
interpellation, masculinity, resegregation, trucks
As car-intensive societies move into an era in urgent need of sustainable mo-
bility, there are many pressing political concerns that need to be addressed,
one of which is the gendering and usage of motor vehicles. e appeal of cars
in particular and of motor vehicles more generally has historically been re-
lated to masculinity through associations with wild, untamable animals (i.e.,
anthropomorphization), as well as through the car’s associations with power,
speed, driving pleasure, and technical precision.1 From the work of, for in-
stance, Enda Du y, we learn that such anthropomorphization has deep his-
torical roots and has overwhelmingly been a masculine enterprise, although
no di erences are implied between men and women in their ability to an-
thropomorphize machines, motor vehicles, and technical gadgets in general.2
Anthropomorphization refers to how humans project human qualities into
nonhumans such as animals and artifacts. Some contemporary scholarly
work instructs us on how cars should feel, thus suggesting the conjoining of
human and machine bodies and the depiction of the car as responsive and
seductive.3 Critically considering how such links are not only gendered but
Masculinity and Autonomous Vehicles
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also changing is therefore important, and perhaps even more so today when
more energy-e cient forms of mobility are called for.
e literature on autonomous cars and vehicles has engaged with con-
cepts such as gender, anthropomorphization, and emotions to discuss what
predicts trust in such vehicles and a willingness to use them. It is suggested
that the more humanlike the appearance of an unmanned system, the greater
the level of trust in that system is.4 For example, Adam Waytz and colleagues
showed that drivers were more likely to trust and enjoy an anthropomor-
phized vehicle that was given a name (Iris), gender, and voice.5 Others sug-
gest that driver models of autonomous cars should be customized to mirror
human dynamics based on gender, age, and emotion.6 Studies on sex di er-
ences in opinions and willingness to accept and use automated cars usually
argue that men are more likely than women to express an interest in auto-
mated cars7 and to anticipate pleasure, rather than anxiety, about using au-
tomated cars.8 However, these studies, often based on quantitative surveys,
rarely discuss the impact that autonomous cars might have on the car as
symbol of masculinity, or, for that matter, interdependencies between the
automation of driving and masculinity. While contemporary car cultures re-
lated to control, risk taking, and emotions are discussed as being lost with
cars programmed to follow tra c regulations,9 such typically gendered prac-
tices are rarely explicitly related to men and masculinities. One exception is
Anna-Lena Berscheid’s work on masculinity in the German media discourse
on automated driving.10 She argues that autonomous cars might be consid-
ered a “game changer” that puts masculinity in danger, not least when con-
sidering control, self-determination, and driving fun as key aspects not only
in car driving as a masculine practice but also in constructing cars as symbols
of masculinity.11
While previous studies argue that men tend to show higher usage intention
than women do for autonomous cars, handing over control of the steering
wheel to a computer can also, as Berscheid suggests, be viewed as changing
“the gendered roles of cars and their drivers as well as their relationship with
each other.”12 e new technology is about to repudiate drivers’ power over
their vehicles and reassign it to the car designers and computer and other en-
gineers. As drivers lose their right to decide how to drive, Eric Laurier and Tim
Dant suggest “the possibility of personal expression through driving would
disappear.” While future drivers hand over their embodied control over ve-
hicles to engineers and the cars’ networked computers, radars, and sensors,
cars will not only free up time for them to do other things; cars transform driv-
ers into passengers. Simultaneously, cars are reduced from a ording driving
pleasure to vehicles that take them where they want to be in a safe and legal
way.13 By focusing on the implications such redistribution of agency might
have for men and masculinities, our study contributes to this understudied
aspect of autonomous vehicles.
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Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
With the car and systems of automobility being “redesigned” and “reengi-
neered,” gendered practices are also likely to change—the question is how and
in what ways.14 We see two tendencies that will constitute the framework for
our discussion: rst, the degendering of the close connection between mas-
culinity, cars, speed, and driving; and second, a resegregation of a gendered
economy of pleasure in which certain forms of masculinity will gain ground
at the expense of others. What new and/or recon gured masculinities can we
imagine being in the “driver’s seat” in future systems of automobility?
An important point of departure for us, in line with Julia Hildebrand and
Mimi Sheller in this special section, is a critical inquiry into how social cate-
gories such as gender and race are connected to space, mobility, and subjec-
tivity and how they are “embedded in material traces, objects, and spaces of
transportation that are increasingly automated.” e question of autonomous
vehicles is a major future challenge for the automotive industry as well as the
complete system of automobility, and the gendered practices of autonomous
vehicles cut to the core of questions about what sustainable mobility possibly
can be. Will transportation systems still be overwhelmingly male dominated,
or can we anticipate emancipatory openings with regard to gender equality?
As automobility changed mobility patterns and systems of transportation
fundamentally in the twentieth century, self-driving cars are imagined as the
next major transportation technology revolution in the twenty- rst century.15
Much future optimism is invested in this technology, not least in the assump-
tion that it will solve problems associated with the current automobility sys-
tem. Even though self-driving vehicles are described as a question of “when,
not if,” there remain technical, legal, ethical, and sociocultural obstacles to
overcome.16 e main bene ts of autonomous vehicles are described as in-
creased safety and convenience for users, increased road capacity, reduced
congestion, and improved fuel economy. e commonly addressed hin-
drances for introducing autonomous vehicles are user acceptance, social fac-
tors, laws, regulations, and insurance.17 However, our concern here lies more
with what Laurier and Dant point to, namely, that the price for autonomous
vehicles is that “the emotional satisfaction of mastery and control of the vehi-
cle, along with the ‘quest for excitement’ are pleasures of driving that would
be lost.”18
Against this backdrop, our aim is to (a) analyze the changing relation
between men, masculinity, and motor vehicles and (b) discuss the eman-
cipatory challenges in the context of autonomous vehicles. First, we focus
on the theoretical backdrop to our article, namely, anthropomorphization,
machinic interpellation, and masculinity. Second, we discuss di erent ver-
sions of the cultural imaginary of autonomous vehicles and how they may or
may not challenge gendered relations. Here we draw on (a) popular debates
on autonomous vehicles and (b) research material on autonomous vehicles
generated by the project “Developing Disruptive Norm-Critical Innovation
Masculinity and Autonomous Vehicles
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at Volvo,” a pilot study conducted by one of the authors that focused on fu-
ture designs of long-haul trucks and their imagined users.19 By analyzing
these examples, we seek to nd out how representatives for the car and truck
industry imagine their future users and mobility, and what that might imply
in terms of regendering and resegregation of masculinities. ird, in our con-
cluding discussion, we return to the question of how autonomous vehicles
can be part of a wider degendering of car and motor cultures and/or how
masculine gendered relations possibly can be resegregated with the advent
of this new technology.
Theoretical Backdrop
roughout the late industrial age, automobiles have been objects of fascina-
tion, objects of desire that have transcended the borders between human and
machine.20 Such “automotive emotions” have through the history of automo-
bility been channeled through, and culturally embedded in, di erent forms
of a ective economies and emotional geographies.21 As such, car cultures
have been deeply entrenched in systems of emotionality and embodiment
ever since the introduction of this loved—as well as hated—icon of industrial
achievement.22 In order to understand the wide-ranging social and cultural
consequences of automobility, as many mobility and automobility scholars
have consistently argued, we need to understand and attend to automotive
passions and pleasures as conditioned by and entangled in di erent layers of
identity, citizenship, status, risk taking or aversion, and the scalar dynamics of
di erent organizational hierarchies.23 For instance, in the history of automo-
bility and the wide repertoire of feelings connected to car use, we learn that
passion, desire, sexuality, and eroticism have long been constitutive ingredi-
ents in car cultures.24 But we also learn that automobility and the use of cars
early on were transport practices that caused much hatred and even recur-
ring violence against motorists: “A journey by automobile through Holland is
dangerous, since most of the rural population hates motorists fanatically …
German motorists’ handbooks before World War I routinely advised drivers
to carry weapons for their protection.”25
So, in historical and contemporary accounts of automobility, we see that
intense emotional expressions have been connected to the use of cars and
other forms of vehicles, such as trucks and motorcycles. We also learn that
these practices have been conducted within a gendered economy of pleasure
and hatred, not least closely connected to the production of masculinity at
di erent stages of life.26 In this context, we focus on the pleasure of machinic
interpellation. Such interpellation is something that we encounter in per-
sonal narratives as well as histories of large-scale engineering projects.27 is
overwhelmingly masculine love a air seems to carry an interpellative force
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Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
in the production and negotiation of subject-object distinctions, and gener-
ally in the material-semiotic assemblages or networks of actors-actants that
comprise humans and nonhumans. ere are many forms of interpellations
that often connect back to an Althusserian understanding of the powers of
subjecti cation.28 However, what we refer to here is a form of interpellation
that is connected to the pleasurable embodiment of knowledge, “an intimate
connection between the pleasures of the body and those of the technological,
the machinic, in which the machine becomes an object of desire.”29
In our own work, we have come across a range of such stories reaching
from the Global South to our own Scandinavian context. ese stories of in-
terpellative forces involve experiences of one-to-one personal engagement
with machines, as well as more mundane and collective experiences of tin-
kering and engineering in large-scale projects in the automotive industry.30
Speed is here often used to crystallize the interpellative force of a close, inter-
twined, and pleasurable relation between subject-object, human-machine.
Paul McNaughton and John Urry point to the multilayered pleasures of speed
as a mystical experience, as competition, and as overcoming natural and
machinic forces in interaction with a vehicle.31 is interpellative connection
has been presented almost entirely as a male desire, although speed culture
as a general phenomenon “has accentuated, and twisted, the sexism and the
gender anxieties of modern culture: its intensities and thrills have made for
moments when the forces in the great twentieth-century gender con icts
have been starkly outlined.”32 If we extend Du y’s argument, we can also see
that the thrilling excitement of speed is closely connected to other core values
in a masculine economy of pleasure such as escapism, risk taking, masculine
prowess, and technical dexterity. Such values often form the narrative core of
the stories we have gathered in our work on masculinity and motor vehicles
in particular, and technology and masculinity in general.33 Furthermore, such
experiences are, as Catharina Landström and John Law have pointed out, not
only a matter of pleasure and attraction but also a process in which subjects
come into being.34 We argue that processes of pleasure, anthropomorphiza-
tion, and machinic interpellation are at the constitutive core of masculine
identity formations in relation to automobility.
Many of these core values, which constitute certain masculine regimes
of meaning, are at stake in relation to autonomous vehicles, as the imagined
futures of self-driving vehicles possibly challenge the entangled relation be-
tween power and pleasure, control and joy.35 In other words, we can anticipate
an incipient demasculinization of certain forms of masculinity with regard to
automobility. is could be, for instance, trucking, which, in popular culture
and ethnographic accounts, has been a paramount con guration of hard-
core masculinities. ere is, however, a possible enhancement of other mas-
culine gender con gurations.36 Hard-core masculinities are here de ned as
forms of masculinity that have resisted gendered change and reform and that
Masculinity and Autonomous Vehicles
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cling to traditional patriarchal core values in social communities that exclude
women and nonhegemonic forms of masculinity.37 We argue, as has been ar-
gued previously, that it is important to understand all such forms of mascu-
line relations (female relations as well) with machines of all di erent kinds
as a story not only about power, control, and mastering, but also about plea-
sures and joys in artifacts.38 Although many of the male-dominated technical
professions we have studied are separated by status, prestige, and technical
specializations (for instance, engineers in car design and motor mechanics),
they nonetheless all rely on an interpellative connection to technology that
combines pleasure and power, mastering and enjoyment.
We also see that this two-sided analytical framework is crucial in under-
standing the complexity of power and power resources in relation to tech-
nology and technical systems more generally. e balance between power
enforcements by state bodies and motor organizations, and power enact-
ments by individuals such as reckless driving and generally violent and ag-
gressive motoring, is thus to be combined with stories of the embodied range
of emotions connected to the interpellating experiences of, for instance, driv-
ing a car or a motorcycle.
In a similar vein, we argue that it is impossible to understand large-scale
transport engineering projects such as highways and bridges without also
considering the interpellative emotions of passion, sociality, and pleasure in-
volved in such projects.39 Central actors in such projects are to an overwhelm-
ing degree men of power who often enough harbor a deep-seated passion for
technology or in other ways are a ectively involved in their mission dressed
in a language of instrumentalism. Such projects often encapsulate glorious
future predictions. is is also what we observe in the contemporary imag-
inary of self-driving cars and automated mobility. Indeed, there is, as Kath-
arina Manderschied points out in this special section, an enduring vision of
autonomous cars that dates back to the 1920s, and di erent versions encap-
sulate more or less grandiose visions of transforming the system of automo-
bility. In the European arena of the 1980s and 1990s, the characteristic spirit
of passionate futuristic engineering was, for instance, displayed in the Eureka
PROMETHEUS Project (PROgraMme for a European Tra c of Highest E -
ciency and Unprecedented Safety, 1987–1995).40 At the time, it was the largest
R&D project ever in the eld of self-driving cars. A parallel story of passionate
large-scale engineering can be found in a Swedish study of the project man-
agement of Volvo’s XC90, in which the importance of emotional involvement
directs the “master” story, as well as more mundane histories of the project
management and the development process of this model. ese are stories
of hard work, passion, heroic men, and rational thought.41 e range of emo-
tions involved in such projects is naturally multiple, multilayered, and het-
erogeneous, and growing empirical attention has increasingly been paid to
the deep-reaching constitutive implications of such emotional investments
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Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
with regard to studies of technology and masculinity, transport, mobility, and
masculinity.42
However, we also argue that cars and trucks are objects that not only ex-
press and reproduce but may also challenge traditional connections between
men, masculinity, and motor vehicles. In a project on gender, design, and
consumption, Magdalena Petersson McIntyre studied one of Volvo’s concept
cars, the Your Concept Car (YCC), designed by women for women drivers.
is particular car, just like the autonomous truck discussed in the next sec-
tion of this article, may be understood as both con rming and provoking re-
de nitions of technology and gender—and their co-constructions. e fact
that the YCC was designed by women and for women may, as the authors
suggest, be understood as problematic, since female drivers are thereby con-
structed as being di erent from male drivers. However, a car that provokes
through its design may also be interpreted as generating a “productive inse-
curity” that challenges and contributes to changes in the apparently stable
and taken-for-granted nature of gender and car design.43
Material and Methods
One possibility for understanding the cultural production of meaning around
autonomous vehicles is to study the signi cance of the imagined. erefore,
we draw on how the imaginary is used in cultural studies to characterize the
fantasy images in which a culture mirrors itself, and which thereby come to act
as points of reference for its identity production.44 Graham Dawson suggests
that the notion of the cultural imaginary may be used to theorize both social
relations and an individual understanding of the self. He claims that “mas-
culinities are lived out in the esh, but fashioned in the imagination.”45 Here,
we refer to the “autonomous vehicle imaginary,” which gains importance as
a shared frame of reference for the production of meaning—in other words,
what autonomous vehicles are about and how their users are imagined and
(re)con gured.46 Our hope is to map out the contours of a more or less shared
imaginary of autonomous vehicles and discuss how this in turn generates
particular gendered positions, identi cations, and embodied practices asso-
ciated with autonomous vehicles. e popular debates on autonomous vehi-
cles often contain di erent levels of speculation and opinions about what this
new technology will entail.47 Even though we have picked out some illustra-
tive examples, we also nd similar patterns in other scholars’ contributions.48
e empirical material we draw on has been produced through (a) popular
debates on automated driving as re ected in the media and a keynote talk on
autonomous cars by a Volvo car representative held at Transportforum, the
largest transport conference in Scandinavia, and (b) a pilot project on norm-
critical design.49 is material has been generated through two workshops
Masculinity and Autonomous Vehicles
Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018 • 51
held at Volvo in Gothenburg, Sweden, as part of a collaborative project aim-
ing to foster disruptive norm-critical innovation at Volvo Group Trucks Tech-
nology (Volvo GTT). In 2014, one of the managers at Volvo GTT contacted
the gender studies department where one of the authors was employed at the
time, and this led to a pilot project (on which the data for this article is based)
that was later developed into a research project on norm-critical innovation
at the Volvo Group.50
e background to the pilot project is that Volvo, as the designer of future
trucks, needs to consider how automation and related systemic changes may
come to fundamentally challenge contemporary motor cultures and domi-
nant views on driving, mobility, gender, and bodies. Such changes include
social interaction and everyday life in and around trucks, as well as the com-
munities/societal contexts in which trucking in the future is expected to be-
come embedded. erefore, this pilot project focused on future designs of
long-haul trucks and their imagined users.51
e pilot project used workshops to bring together three parties: (1) rel-
evant Volvo sta (key sta involved in product design, engineering, and the
management of design processes at Volvo); (2) unexpected stakeholders
(gender studies students and activists from norm-critical social movements
or NGOs working with norm-critical practices within frameworks de ned
by, for example, LGBTQ rights, feminism, dis/ability issues, and age); and (3)
a research team from Tema Genus at Linköping University and the Gender
Studies research team at Örebro University. Two workshops were organized
at Volvo where the participants were asked to imagine and discuss trucks be-
yond the traditional able-bodied model male user and contemporary truck
designs. Hence, the empirical material re ects the views of Volvo sta and
unexpected stakeholders generated through these workshops.52
Imagining Connected Futures
While the Vienna Convention on Road Tra c of 1968 states that the driver is
responsible for controlling the vehicle, this convention was amended in 2016
to allow self-driving cars on public roads.53 e hindrances for realization of
this future system are not only legal and technical but also sociocultural: in
order for this technology to be successful, consumers will have to like it and
be willing to use it.54 Or as Carl Johan Almqvist, the tra c and product safety
director for Volvo Trucks, says: “It will take them some time to understand
how fantastic this is.”55
Despite the fact that the media report about ordinary Swedes’ mixed emo-
tions about self-driving vehicles, media representations of autonomous car
technology use words like “revolution,” “fantastic,” and “excitement.”56 e ex-
citement in this case is associated not with the actual driving but rather with
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Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
the technology and the changes it is imagined to bring for future societies:
“Autonomous driving will turn the car into a commodity, a simple, smart,
human-replacing means to an end, and our society is going to be feeling the
impact for decades. Exciting times.”57 Excitement over change is here asso-
ciated with how this technology may rationalize the car from being in the
hands of fallible humans to becoming nothing more than a commodity and a
means for transport. Anders Eugensson, director of Governmental A airs at
the Volvo Car Corporation, has considered self-driving cars “the most excit-
ing thing I have ever been part of,” and in his keynote speech at Scandinavia’s
largest transport conference, he said:
What if you can make that time useful? What if you can say to the car, take over,
and I can do other things? If you envision yourself leaving the o ce six o’clock
at night, on your smartphone you request the car coming up to you pick you
up, and this drive is going to take you thirty minutes in the tra c, because all
the cars are being connected. … Your drive will take only half an hour instead
of one hour and a half in the normal tra c before you had these self-driving
cars. e car will come up to you pick you up, it will check the driving con-
ditions, it will say, “Well, you will be home in half an hour,” it will go for the
self-driving lane, and by the time you are home you been able to connect with
your business partners in Singapore, whatever, you check a couple of e-mails,
and you order our car to pick you up in the morning. You come home to your
family relaxed and able to focus on being with your family. … e main driver
for o ering this in the future, we think people [will] want to buy cars and spend
some extra on the possibility to use the time in the vehicle and be connected.58
is quote not only summarizes some of the imagined a ordances ascribed
to autonomous vehicles but also interpellates a user who is nancially able
to make use of, and thereby control, their time in this future system. As the
vehicle extends o ce space into public space, the user is envisioned not only
to perform a traditional form of connected business masculinity but, in this
example, also to become a more dedicated parent and family member. is
autonomous vehicle makes mobile time less un-useful; people may stay con-
nected, not only to business partners but also to family members.
Even though images and other representations of autonomous vehicles
often depict typical white business masculinities using exclusive high-tech
technology, the cultural imaginary of autonomous vehicles is not exclusion-
ary in terms of imagined users.59 is is a technology that is imagined to bring
“unprecedented freedom” to the “disabled, old and blind.”60 Connectedness
is not only associated with business masculinities; the providers of this tech-
nology also envision how those who may be less connected in the present
transport system may bene t:
I have got a personal stake in this: my mother-in-law, she is pushing eighty.
And she realizes she can’t be driving much longer, and how is she going to get
to play bridge on Tuesdays with her lady friends? She said, “Anders, you have to
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x this!” And I can’t say no to my mother-in-law, so I am on a really important
mission here. We think this is going to be important for the future as part of
o ering this for more people who can’t have mobility today.61
Autonomous vehicles are imagined to empower and bring mobility to those
who in the current transport system may be facing various forms of transport
injustice and exclusion.62 is quote also exempli es how autonomous auto-
mobility may allow men to imagine themselves as helpers and problem solv-
ers for elderly women.
Even though their usefulness may be argued for in many di erent ways,
autonomous cars are also resisted and critiqued, not least from professional
drivers’ point of view. As Dant notes in a recent interview, to “go by car” will
be easier, “but much more important will be the economic and social impact
of the loss of skilled jobs—taxi drivers, bus drivers and lorry drivers for exam-
ple—as business realizes that a driverless vehicle can be operated at all hours
with less risk and less cost.”63 So, in addition to being a technology for those
able to embody traditional business masculinities, or promising bringing mo-
bility to the not-so-mobile, this technology is predicted to have consequences
for working-class masculinities within the transport sector.64 In the next sec-
tion, we focus especially on how designers and engineers in the Swedish truck
industry imagine their future users and mobility future.
Emancipatory Challenges
As spelled out earlier, trucking is typically portrayed as embedded in a mascu-
line culture and belonging to a hard-core form of masculinity. While truckers
in the past might have been imagined as road cowboys living a free life on
the open road, the current economic realities of freight transport place harsh
constraints on truck drivers. Nonetheless, the image of the road cowboy is
still a prevalent theme in popular culture.65 One goal of the Volvo project was
to think about ways to develop “trucks for all”: trucks that may be used by a
broader range of users than today. While the workshops tended not to focus
on such economic constraints of future freight transport noted by Dant, they
exemplify how autonomous vehicles can be used to rethink aspects related to
the interdependencies between the automation of driving and gender. And
by doing so, invisible and unconscious norms likely to guide design processes
and thereby privilege certain perspectives, genders, and bodies over others
are addressed.66 e focus of the workshops was on going beyond the present
model male driver to imagine how, and by whom, future autonomous trucks
could be used.
Future trucks were envisaged as connected and linked into truck trains
using a multiple-driver function, thereby freeing drivers to do other things.
When the workshop participants were asked to imagine what drivers would
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Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
do with their time while trucks were in self-driving mode, the discussions that
followed revolved around truckers exercising, cooking food, reading a book,
watching a movie, or meeting other drivers/riders.67 One particular outcome
of the workshops was a discussion about new ways of thinking about the
cabin as a social space, a space for part of the driver’s social life with friends,
pets, even family members, to a greater extent than today.
Along similar lines, future trucks were envisioned as a more hybrid tech-
nology, as autonomous trucks will be able to challenge boundaries between a
vehicle for transport, a caravan truck, and/or an auto camper. e participants
generated ideas that challenged and displaced dominant notions regarding
work and family relations, as future truck drivers would live di erently in their
trucks than they do now. With new technology, the participants suggested,
a long-haul driver will not necessarily have to be a man—and not even one
person. In fact, such a driver could also be composed of several people liv-
ing together in the truck. e idea that cabins should be designed for a single
driver was questioned. From this point of view, the autonomous truck was
imagined to facilitate working environments and work assignments that are
more exible compared to contemporary trucks.68
Furthermore, one of the workshops particularly addressed the possibility
of designing autonomous trucks facilitating disabled bodies at work in the
context of postwar Syria. In this case, the assumption was made that the cur-
rent civil war is over, and reconstruction is ongoing. e scenario was used
as a tool for expanding the focus from gender and sexual identity to include
other intersections more urgently, for example, dis/ability issues. e ques-
tion was if Volvo could build a cab that allows a person with war disabilities
to work e ectively as a driver. Here the discussions revolved more directly
around ways of thinking beyond the model able-bodied male driver, as the
task was to discuss what a truck designed for a postwar Syria scenario would
possibly look like. is exercise facilitated discussions around access to the
truck as one key aspect of inclusive design, as current truck designs make it
rather hard to get to the seat with their high steps. e cabin could also be
designed so that it can facilitate the speci c needs of the driver. e back of
the cabin, for example, could be tted with a toilet rather than the bed that is
common in contemporary trucks. e idea behind this suggestion was that it
might be hard to access public toilets for disabled drivers, making access to a
toilet in the cabin more important than a bed or a kitchenette.69 ese ideas
are in line with some researchers’ beliefs that vehicles will become larger as
they turn more autonomous. Abdul Pinjari and colleagues suggest that when
people no longer have to remain seated, they will want to engage in other ac-
tivities that require more space, for example, more gadgets, restroom facili-
ties, and bedding.70
As noted earlier, only some attention was given to hard economic aspects
and constraints associated with contemporary freight transport. e case
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study simply assumed there would be a driver present, even though discus-
sions on truck drivers losing their jobs did take place during the workshops.
However, contrary to the example discussed in the previous section, where
the imagined user was traveling in solitude, future truckers (if they exist at
all) were rather imagined to use trucks as social spaces, inhabited by (em-
ployed?) people who do not necessarily have to comply with contemporary
ideas about the male “model driver.”
By using the autonomous vehicle as a tool to think with, ideas about gen-
der, space, place, bodies, and mobile communities could to some extent be
rethought. e workshop participants used an autonomous truck as a tool to
think with, and managed to temporarily displace not only dominant gender
norms but also norms regarding work, social relations, home, and not least
what a driver is. Drawing on Sarah Redshaw’s discussion in this issue on how
Volvo truck’s advertising o ers alternatives to “combustion masculinity”
based on bursting and threatening power, these workshops also point to the
possibilities of a di erent form of masculinity from that commonly associated
with truck drivers.
Discussion
In this concluding discussion, we return to the questions of if and how auton-
omous vehicles can be part of a regendering and degendering of car/truck
cultures, something we believe is a necessary move for a more sustainable
transport system. Or are we possibly witnessing a gendered resegregation
where certain forms of masculinity closely connected to automobility are
gaining ground at the expense of others?
With autonomous vehicles, the driver’s responsibility to control the vehi-
cle is beginning to be transferred from the driver to digital control systems
and intelligent roads.71 We argue that the gendered implications mean that
cars, trucks, and other motor vehicles as traditional means for men to ex-
press masculine identities, status, and pleasures, not least performed through
ownership, care, or (aggressive and competitive) driving, are gradually being
undermined. Furthermore, the increasing capacity of vehicles to drive them-
selves may also reduce typically gendered problems (for instance, road rage
and aggressive driving), often caused by male drivers and tightly related to
how masculinity is performed through motor vehicles and risk taking.72 If
masculinity and masculinization are constituted in interpellative risk taking,
a fully autonomous system of transportation would make it impossible to per-
form masculinity and risk with motor vehicles.
While we address in this article the pleasures associated with driving
motorized vehicles, the advent of autonomous cars and trucks also seems
to indicate that it is time to pay more attention to the pleasures of being a
56 • Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018
Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
passenger. Perhaps pleasures related to automated vehicles may be less as-
sociated with driving per se and more with dwelling in the car/truck. As dis-
cussed earlier, the convoy system imagined for future truck users turns truck
drivers into passengers, thereby enabling them to do other things currently
associated with typical passenger pleasures, such as “reading, daydreaming
or looking out of the window at the scenery.”73 Being a passenger is possibly
opening another symbolic realm where the “passive” and typically feminized
subject position can be valorized di erently. e symbolic power balance
between being in control of the steering wheel and being out of control in
the passenger seat is potentially altered. Being the passenger will be the nor-
mative position.
Automation potentially makes traveling time more “useful”—as Volvo’s
representative noted, or more social, as in the case of Volvo trucks—while re-
lieving the driver from the responsibility of driving.74 e self-driving vehicle
also potentially changes the traditional patriarchal seating grid of men in the
“driver’s seat” and children and women as passengers. e seating arrange-
ments of autonomous cars may reorganize the placement of bodies, thereby
making it possible for passengers to face not the road ahead but each other
instead, and doing so may level out power relations between users. Not hav-
ing to drive can mean having more time for using the vehicle as a social space,
as a space of trust and intimacy.75 For example, Laurier and colleagues outline
the uniqueness of the car space as the e ects of being in motion and the dis-
tractions of engagements, including the pause- lled re ective conversations
this enables.76
In addition to driving, masculinity is also strongly formed around car own-
ership in societies all over the world. With the autonomous car, drivers will
no longer have to own and care for their cars. Some writers even predict that
individual car ownership will “wither and die,” as vehicles may be shared and
used only when needed.77 Laurier and Dant argue that driving a car will be-
come less about expressing an identity and more about “inhabiting a space.”78
While this would indicate a process of deanthropomorphization, other stud-
ies point to the fact that people assign personalities and acknowledge auton-
omous vehicles’ humanlike intelligence. As mentioned earlier, Waytz and
colleagues argue that their test drivers were more likely to trust and enjoy a
vehicle that was anthropomorphized (i.e., given a name, gender, and voice).79
Waytz concludes that their research demonstrates how easy it is for people
to shift between “seeing human” in nonhuman objects, “an ability that has
become all the more necessary as technology has become more humanlike.”80
One conclusion to be drawn is that the autonomous vehicle might still be an-
thropomorphized, as are today’s cars, since these cars cannot be reduced to
“merely mindless tools.”81 To become interpellated by “driving” and car use,
by way of anthropomorphization, can consequently happen outside speci c
Masculinity and Autonomous Vehicles
Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018 • 57
regimes of power and pleasure, outside speci c interpellative regimes based
on masculinity, speed, risk taking, and calculation, which in itself rather
points to processes of gendered resegregation.
So, rather than thinking in terms of a process of degendering, it seems
more appropriate to anticipate a development of resegregation where certain
forms of masculine gendered economies of pleasure will lose ground and
others will become more dominant. We might think of this as the dominant
form of masculinity of working-class men in the transport system giving way
to the professional, calculating rationality of technical specialists associated
with the “ruling-class men” within large-scale engineering organizations and
social institutions.82 One predicted social impact may be the loss of skilled
jobs in the transport sector, likely a ecting working-class men.83 Another im-
pact may be the impossibility for many of these men to “live out” emotions for
what constitutes a meaningful masculinity. inking about how driving skills
confer social status on the (professional) driver, Dant may be right when he
argues that “as the socio-technical culture changes in western societies with
less ‘freedom’ to drive due to road congestion, speed restrictions, and the in-
creasing capacity of the car to drive itself, we will have to look to other social
and material arrangements to acquire status and pleasure.”84
Having said this, the workshops discussed earlier also made apparent
technology’s complex role in (re)shaping gender, and vice versa. e project
expanded these perspectives to include critiques of dominant ideas about
dis/abilities, gender norms, and work-life balances that may also circumvent
the contemporary model male driver. While trucks are systematically asso-
ciated with masculinity, the workshops also questioned other intersections
such as class, age, and able-bodiedness, as well as what a truck is, by expand-
ing not only the possibilities, but also the inclusiveness, of future autonomous
trucks.85
As an opening to the larger questions of future challenges with regard to
masculinity, gender politics, car cultures, and sustainable transport systems,
it seems clear that autonomous vehicles expand possibilities beyond the gen-
der paradigms marked by industrial modernity. e idea that the future of au-
tomobility will be more sustainable through a degendering via autonomous
vehicles, which is the common thread throughout our material, is indeed
promising, although the material we rest our claims on is, of course, limited.
Nonetheless, we believe that what we have described in this article can be
regarded as indicative of a wider “movement” of degendering or at least re-
segregating the old masculine love a air with automobile technology, an af-
fair that has been based on the gendered economy of speed, pleasure, and
embodiment, and that has been constitutive for certain forms of masculinity
in the age of industrialism.
58 • Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018
Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
Dag Balkmar is a researcher at the Centre for Feminist Social Studies at Öre-
bro University, Sweden. He has published within the areas of masculinity
studies, gender and technology, gender and mobility, and risk and violence.
He is project leader of “Trucks for All: Developing Norm-Critical Innovation
at Volvo,” funded by VINNOVA (Swedish Governmental Agency for Innova-
tion Systems).
E-mail: dag.balkmar@oru.se
Ulf Mellström is Professor of Gender Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden.
He has published extensively within the areas of masculinity studies, gen-
der and technology, gender and risk, engineering studies, globalization, and
higher education. He is editor in chief of NORMA: International Journal for
Masculinity Studies.
E-mail: ulf.mellstrom@kau.se
Notes
We would like to express our gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers of this article.
eir comments have been invaluable to the improvement of this text. Balkmar’s con-
tribution to this article has been made possible through VINNOVA (Swedish Govern-
mental Agency for Innovation Systems) and their support of the interactive research
project “Trucks for All: Developing Norm-Critical Innovation at Volvo” (2016–2018).
1. Brian Ladd, AUTOPHOBIA: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2008), 2; Enda Du y, e Speed Handbook: Velocity,
Pleasure, Modernism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 53, 56; Dag
Balkmar, On Men and Cars: An Ethnographic Study of Gendered, Risky and Dan-
gerous Relations (Linköping: Linköping University, 2012), 92, 152; Ulf Mellström,
Masculinity, Power and Technology: A Malaysian Ethnography (Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2003), 58.
2. Du y, e Speed Handbook, 56.
3. Catharina Landström, “A Gendered Economy of Pleasure: Representations of
Cars and Humans in Motoring Magazines,” Science Studies 19, no. 2 (2006): 31–53,
esp. 40; Mimi Sheller, “Automotive Emotions,” eory, Culture and Society 21, nos.
4–5, (2004): 221–242, esp. 225; Olle Hagman, “Driving Pleasure: A Key Concept in
Swedish Car Culture,” Mobilities 5, no. 1 (2010): 25–39, esp. 28. Richard Benson,
Iain MacRury, and Peter Marsh, “ e Secret Life of Cars and What ey Reveal
about Us,” a report by BMW (London: Not Actual Size, 2007), 1–89.
4. Jae-Gil Lee, Ki Joon Kim, Sangwon Lee, and Dong-Hee Shin, “Can Autonomous
Vehicles Be Safe and Trustworthy? E ects of Appearance and Autonomy of Un-
manned Driving Systems,” International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction
31, no. 10 (2015): 682–691.
5. Adam Waytz, Joy Heafner, and Nicholas Epley, “ e Mind in the Machine: An-
thropomorphism Increases Trust in an Autonomous Vehicle,” Journal of Exper-
imental Social Psychology 52 (2014): 113–117, esp. 116; Adam Waytz, “Seeing
Masculinity and Autonomous Vehicles
Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018 • 59
Human,” Slate, 13 May 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_
tense/2014/05/anthropomorphizing_driverless_cars_psychology_research_
into_autonomous_vehicles.html.
6. Li Lin, Yanhegn Liu, Jian Wang, Weiwen Deng, and Heekuck Oh, “Human Dy-
namics Based on Driver Model for Autonomous Car,” IET Intelligent Transport
Systems 10, no. 8 (2015): 545–554.
7. Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak, A Survey of Public Opinion about Auton-
omous and Self-Driving Vehicles in the US, the UK, and Australia (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2014), 1–35; William Payre, Julien Cestac, and Pa-
tricia Delhomme, “Intention to Use a Fully Automated Car: Attitudes and a pri-
ori Acceptability,” Transport Research Part B: Tra c Psychology and Behavior 27
(2014): 252–263; Christina Rödel, Susanne Stadler, Alexander Meschtscherjakov,
and Manfred Tscheligi, “Towards Autonomous Cars: e E ect of Autonomy Lev-
els on Acceptance and User Experience,” in AutomotiveUI ’14: Proceedings of the
6th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Ve-
hicular Applications (Seattle: ACM Digital Library, 2014): 1–8; see also Amy Dan-
ise, “Women Say No anks to Driverless Cars, Survey Finds; Men Say Tell Me
More,” NerdWallet, 9 June 2015, https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/
survey-consumer-fears-self-driving-cars.
8. Christoph Hohenberger, Matthias Spörrle, and Isabell M. Welpe, “How and Why
Do Men and Women Di er in eir Willingness to Use Automated Cars?,” Trans-
portation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 94 (2016): 374–385.
9. Eric Laurier and Tim Dant, “What Else We Do While Driving: Towards the Driv-
erless Car,” in Mobilities: New Perspectives on Transport and Society, ed. Margaret
Grieco and John Urry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 223–244; Robert Moor, “What
Happens to American Myth When Your Take the Driver Out of It? e Self-Driving
Car and the Future of the Self,” New York, 17 October 2016, http://nymag.com/
selectall/2016/10/is-the-self-driving-car-un-american.html.
10. Anna-Lena Berscheid, “Masculinity in Danger? e Autonomous Car as Game
Changer,” paper presented at the Cars In/Of Culture: Mobility, Materiality,
Representation Conference, Oxford, 13–15 September 2016, http://www.inter-
disciplinary.net/critical-issues/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/AnnaLenaBer
scheid-dpaper-cars1.pdf; Anna-Lena Berscheid, “Masculinity in Danger? Au-
tonomous Cars as Cultural Challenge,” 2025ad.com, 15 April 2016, www.2025ad
.com/in-the-news/blog/automated-driving-and-masculinity.
11. Berscheid, “Masculinity in Danger?,” 7.
12. Ibid., 1.
13. Laurier and Dant, “What Else We Do While Driving,” 239, 240 (this and the previ-
ous quotation).
14. Kingsley Dennis and John Urry, After the Car (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 2.
15. Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman, Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead.
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), vii.
16. Transportbusiness.net, “Autonomous Truck Convoys: e Question Is When,
Not If,” http://www.transportbusiness.net/features/autonomous-truck-convoys-
question-when-not-if (accessed 16 January 2016); Waytz, “Seeing Human”; Janne
Andersson, “Forskare: Riskfylld väg till självkörande bilar,” Ny Teknik, 8 December
2015, http://www.nyteknik.se/asikter/debatt/article3951060.ece.
60 • Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018
Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
17. Rory Buckeridge, “Autonomous Cars and Man’s Future: e Road Ahead,” Factor,
29 June 2015, http://factor-tech.com/feature/autonomous-cars-and-mans-fut
ure-the-road-ahead; Felicia Bohm and Klara Häger, “Introduction of Autono-
mous Vehicles in the Swedish Tra c System: E ects and Changes Due to the New
Self-Driving Car Technology” (MA thesis, Uppsala University, 2015), 5; KPMG,
Self-Driving Cars: e Next Revolution (Amstelveen: KPMG LLP, 2012), https://
assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2015/10/self-driving-cars-next-revo
lution_new.pdf; Laurier and Dant, “What Else We Do While Driving,” 239; Gun-
nar Lind, Per Strömgren, and Fredrik Davidsson, E ekter av självstyrande bilar:
Litteraturstudie och probleminventering (Stockholm: Movea Tra kkonsult AB,
2014), http://trafa.se/globalassets/rapporter/underlagsrapporter/movea_e ekt
er-av-sjalvstyrande-bilar--litteraturstudie-och-probleminventering.pdf; Abdul R.
Pinjari, Bertho Augustin, and Nikhil Menon, Highway Capacity Impacts of Au-
tonomous Vehicles: An Assessment (Tampa: Center for Urban Transportation Re-
search, University of South Florida, 2013), http://www.tampa-xway.com/Portals/
0/documents/Projects/AV/TAVI_8-CapacityPinjari.pdf.
18. Laurier and Dant, “What Else We Do While Driving,” 240.
19. e pilot study was conducted together with project leader Nina Lykke. We would
like to thank Nina Lykke for inspiring discussions on autonomous vehicles and
future lives on the road.
20. Balkmar, On Men and Cars, 92, 152; Mellström, Masculinity, Power and Technol-
ogy, 98, 123.
21. Sheller, “Automotive Emotions,” 223–225; see also Virginia Schar , Taking the
Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1992), 21; Sara Ahmed, e Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 5.
22. Ladd, AUTOPHOBIA, 54–55.
23. Sheller, “Automotive Emotions,” 226; Sarah Redshaw, In the Company of Cars:
Driving as a Social and Cultural Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate Pub, 2008), 82, 103.
24. Schar , Taking the Wheel, 225; Sara Jain, “Violent Submission: Gendered Auto-
mobility,” Cultural Critique 61, no. 1 (2005): 187–214.
25. Ladd, AUTOPHOBIA, 24, 25.
26. Sasha Disko,Men, Motorcycles and Modernity: Motorization During the Weimar
Republic (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Georgine Clarsen, “ e
‘Dainty Female Toe’ and the ‘Brawny Male Arm’: Conceptions of Bodies and
Power in Automobile Technology,” Australian Feminist Studies 15, no. 32 (2000):
153–163; Landström, “A Gendered Economy of Pleasure,” 40; Mellström, Mascu-
linity, Power and Technology, 97.
27. John Law, “Machinic Pleasures and Interpellations,” in Machines, Agency and De-
sire, ed. Brita Brenna, John Law, and Ingunn Moser (Oslo: Oslo University, Center
for teknologi och mennesklige verdier, 1998), 25; Annica Bragd, Knowing Man-
agement: An Ethnographic Study of Tinkering with a New Car (Gothenburg: Uni-
versity of Gothenburg, 2002), 38; Ulf Mellström, Engineering Lives: Technology,
Time and Space in a Male-Centred World (Linköping: Linköping University, 1995),
45; Mellström, Masculinity, Power and Technology, 78.
28. Louis Althusser, On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008). Our use of interpellation is
less concerned with the structural, ideological, and political dimensions of be-
Masculinity and Autonomous Vehicles
Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018 • 61
coming a subject but rather how we as subjects are conditioned by a ective re-
gimes in personal encounters with humans and nonhumans. is is of course
deeply political as well, but we would like to stress that interpellation is a meta-
phor that also is productive in relation to technology and machines.
29. Law, “Machinic Pleasures and Interpellations,” 25.
30. Balkmar, On Men and Cars, 216–221; Dag Balkmar and Tanja Joelsson, “Den bi-
oniske mannen på autoerotiska äventyr: Mäns risktagande i tra krummet” [ e
bionic man on autoerotic adventures: Men’s risk taking in tra c space], NORMA
5, no. 1 (2010): 28–44, esp. 34; Mellström, Engineering Lives, 45; Ulf Mellström,
“Technology and Masculinity: Men and eir Machines,” in Moulding Masculini-
ties, ed. Søren Ervø and omas Johansson (Oxon: Ashgate, 1999), 118–135, here
127; Mellström, Masculinity, Power and Technology, 78.
31. Paul Macnaughton and John Urry, Contested Natures (London: Sage, 1998), 18,
162.
32. Du y, e Speed Handbook, 53, 56.
33. Balkmar and Joelsson, “Den bioniske mannen på autoerotiska äventyr,” 34; Mell-
ström, Engineering Lives, 45; Mellström, “Technology and Masculinity,” 27; Mell-
ström, Masculinity, Power and Technology, 78; Ulf Mellström, “Machines and
Masculine Subjectivity: Technology as an Integral Part of Men’s Life Experiences,”
in “Masculinities and Technologies,” ed. Maria Lohan and Wendy Faulkner, spe-
cial issue, Men and Masculinities 6, no. 4 (2004): 368–382, esp. 380.
34. Landström, “A Gendered Economy of Pleasure,” 35; Law, “Machinic Pleasures
and Interpellations,” 25.
35. Laurier and Dant, “What Else We Do While Driving,” 240; Berscheid, “Masculini-
ties in Danger?,” 5.
36. Michael Agar, Independents Declared: e Dilemmas of Independent Trucking
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 7; Eddy Nehls, Vägval:
Lastbilsförare i fjärrtra k—perspektiv på yrkeskultur och genus (Umeå: Umeå Uni-
versity, 2003), 92.
37. Ulf Mellström, “From a Hegemonic Politics of Masculinity to an Ontological Pol-
itics of Intimacy and Vulnerability? Ways of Imagining through Karen Barad’s
Work,” in “Quantum Possibilities: e Work of Karen Barad,” ed. Karin Sellberg
and Peta Hinton, special issue, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowl-
edge, no. 30 (2016): 810–816, esp. 812.
38. Balkmar, On Men and Cars, 27; Balkmar and Joelsson, “Den bioniske mannen på
autoerotiska äventyr,” 19; Mellström, Engineering Lives, 45; Mellström, “Technol-
ogy and Masculinity,” 27; Mellström, Masculinity, Power and Technology, 78.
39. Mellström, Masculinity, Power and Technology, 123.
40. Oskar Juhlin,Prometheus at the Wheel: Representations of Road Transport Infor-
matics (Linköping: Linköping University, 1997), 37, 48.
41. Bragd, Knowing Management, 38.
42. Redshaw, In the Company of Cars, 82; Pablo Schyfter, “ e Bootstrapped Arte-
fact: A Collectivist Account of Technology Ontology, Functions, and Normativity,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A 40, no. 1 (2009): 102–111, esp.
109; Balkmar, On Men and Cars, 216; Tanja Joelsson, Space and Sensibility: Young
Men’s Risk-Taking with Motor Vehicles (Linköping: Department of ematic Stud-
ies, Linköping University, 2013), 182.
62 • Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018
Dag Balkmar and Ulf Mellström
43. Magdalena Petersson McIntyre, Bara den inte blir rosa: Genus, design och kon-
sumtion i ett svenskt industriprojekt (Gothenburg: Mara, 2010), 27.
44. Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Tech-
nology, Animals and the Sacred (London: Zed, 2000), 8.
45. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of
Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 1.
46. Berscheid, “Masculinities in Danger?,” 2.
47. Bohm and Häger, “Introduction of Autonomous Vehicles,” 5.
48. Manderscheid, this issue; Lipson and Kurman, Driverless, 10; Berscheid, “Mascu-
linity in Danger?,” 1–9.
49. Dag Balkmar and Nina Lykke, Developing Disruptive Normcritical Innovation at
Volvo: Final Report (Linköping: Tema Genus, Linköping University, 2015).
50. “Trucks for All: Developing Norm-Critical Innovation at Volvo,” nanced by VIN-
NOVA (Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems), 2016–2018.
51. Balkmar and Lykke, Developing Disruptive Normcritical Innovation.
52. Ibid., 8–10.
53. “UN Amends Vienna Convention on Road Tra c to Allow Driverless Cars,” Safe
Car News, 21 May 2014, http://safecarnews.com/un-amends-vienna-convent
ion-on-road-tra c-to-allow-driverless-cars.
54. Kirsten Korosec, “Meet the Future Buyers of Self-Driving Cars,” Fortune, 22 April
2016, http://fortune.com/2016/04/22/self-driving-cars-poll.
55. Mark Piesing, “Autonomous Vehicles: How Safe Are Trucks without Human Driv-
ers?,” Independent, 9 January 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/
gadgets-and-tech/features/autonomous-vehicles-how-safe-are-trucks-without-
human-drivers-9047546.html.
56. “Mixade känslor för självkörande bilar,” Aftonbladet, 24 January 2016, http://www
.aftonbladet.se/senastenytt/ttnyheter/inrikes/article22140974.ab; Ny Teknik, “En
av tre positiv till självkörande bilar,” Ny Teknik, 25 January 2016, http://www.ny
teknik.se/nyheter/fordon_motor/bilar/article3957803.ece; Buckeridge, “Autono-
mous Cars and Man’s Future”; KPMG, Self-Driving Cars; Piesing, “Autonomous
Vehicles.” All translations in this article are our own unless otherwise indicated.
57. Buckeridge, “Autonomous Cars and Man’s Future.”
58. Anders Eugensson, “Transportforum 2015, Inledningen del 2: Autonom körn-
ing/autonomous driving,” video, 1:19:38, 21 January 2015, https://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=UdTBcpOE1F8.
59. Manderscheid, this issue.
60. Buckeridge, “Autonomous Cars and Man’s Future.”
61. Eugensson, “Transportforum 2015, Inledningen del 2.”
62. Adriano Alessandrini, Andrea Campagna, Paolo Delle Site, Franscesco Filippi,
and Luca Percia, “Automated Vehicles and the Rethinking of Mobility and Cities,”
Transportation Research Procedia 5 (2015): 145–160; Berscheid, “Masculinity in
Danger?,” 2.
63. Buckeridge, “Autonomous Cars and Man’s Future.”
64. Lipson and Kurman, Driverless, viii.
65. Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: e Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 189; Agar, Independents De-
clared, 7; Nehls, Vägval: lastbilsförare i fjärrtra k, 92.
Masculinity and Autonomous Vehicles
Transfers • Volume 8, Issue 1 • Spring 2018 • 63
66. Petersson McIntyre, Bara den inte blir rosa, 16, 27.
67. Balkmar and Lykke, Developing Disruptive Normcritical Innovation, 21.
68. Ibid., 20–22.
69. Ibid.
70. Pinjari et al., Highway Capacity Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles, 6–7.
71. Tim Dant, “ e Driver and the Passenger,” in Mobilities Handbook, ed. Peter Adey,
David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman, and Mimi Sheller (London: Rout-
ledge, 2014), 367–375, esp. 368.
72. Bjurström, “Baby You Can Drive My Car,” 237; Berscheid, “Masculinity in Dan-
ger?,” 3; Redshaw, In the Company of Cars, 82, 103.
73. Dant, “ e Driver and the Passenger,” 370.
74. Laurier and Dant, “What Else We Do While Driving,” 239.
75. Harry Ferguson, “Driven to Care: e Car, Automobility and Social Work,” Mobil-
ities 4, no. 2 (2009): 275–293, esp. 277.
76. Eric Laurier, Hayden Lorimer, Barry Brown, Owain Jones, Oskar Juhlin, Allyson
Noble, Mark Perry, et al., “Driving and ‘Passengering’: Notes on the Ordinary Or-
ganization of Car Travel,” Mobilities 3, no. 1 (2008): 1–23, esp. 7.
77. Buckeridge, “Autonomous Cars and Man’s Future.”
78. Laurier and Dant, “What Else We Do While Driving,” 223.
79. Waytz et al., “ e Mind in the Machine,” 116.
80. Waytz, “Seeing Human.”
81. Waytz et al., “ e Mind in the Machine,” 116.
82. Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (Cambridge: Polity, 1991),
141–142.
83. Lipson and Kurman, Driverless, viii; Vivek Wadhwa, e Driver in the Driverless
Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future (Oakland, CA: Berrett-
Koehler, 2017), x.
84. Dant, “ e Driver and the Passenger,” 374.
85. Balkmar and Lykke, Developing Disruptive Normcritical Innovation, 24–25.
