Review of “Righteous Sisterhood: The Politics and Power of an All-women’s Motorcycle Club”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sarah Hoiland’s remarkable book Righteous Sisterhood takes readers on an ethnographic ride through the complexities, contradictions, and politics of an all-women, three-piece patch motorcycle club, for which Hoiland uses the pseudonym Righteous Sisterhood Motorcycle Club (RSMC). Hoiland connects with a group of women bikers who are predominantly straight, middle-aged, White women from various socioeconomic backgrounds. These women resisted the misogyny and secondary status imposed on women in men’s motorcycle clubs and sought out the RSMC as a space where they earn righteousness and find sisterhood. This all-women space rebukes feminist labels but approves of a “girl power” sisterhood that values membership, service, and healing from past trauma, albeit within a hierarchical structure. Drawing on political theory of Hannah Arendt, Hoiland argues that the RSMC is a polis—“a realm of action” that defines meaning and purpose for those within (p. 73). “Sandy,” the president and founder, refers to the RSMC as a “nation.” Citizenship occurs when the RSMC patches a member during a closed, candlelit, and emotional ceremony; citizenship is documented and preserved in The Book of Sisters. The first patch symbolizes citizenship within the nation, and the second and third patches establish longevity, status, and respect. Members must follow rules, earn their keep, provide service and resources to the club, maintain regular communication with leadership, and attend nationals at club headquarters. Sisters who die when they are in good standing are immortalized during the club’s spirit rides in full pack formation. Political death occurs through exile when the leader strips members of their patches and declares a no contact rule; the ex-sister loses her citizenship and returns to the civilian world. Hoiland’s development of this political argument throughout the chapters is provocative and convincing with this empirical case, and she exemplifies how this political framework could be relevant to other closed identity-based groups.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".