"We're a Disease to Someone": Embodying Safety and Freedom in a State Motorcyclists' Rights Organization.

Public health and safety experts have advocated mandatory helmet laws as an important means to increase motorcyclists' safety and public health for over 50 years. Despite these recommendations, some motorcyclists have successfully organized to challenge such laws. This is an ethnographic study of the largest state motorcyclists' rights organization (SMRO) in the United States and its institutionalized opposition to mandatory helmet laws. I argue that in addition to its focus on individual freedom, the motorcyclists' rights movement has characteristics of an embodied health movement in the sense that activists challenge expert understandings of health issues based on their personal experiences. Motorcyclists' rights activists oppose mandatory helmet laws advocated by experts because they interfere with their understanding of freedom but also do not work to increase safety as they understand it. Exploring the embodied health characteristics of the motorcyclists' rights movement helps us understand how the movement has been able to grow and maintain itself and the boundaries of embodied health movements. Other movements that combine a focus on both freedom and health and safety may exist and provide fruitful opportunities for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]