Too tired for exercise? The work and leisure of female cleaners in Denmark

The aim of this study was to explore the opportunities and challenges of female cleaners with regard to participation in leisure time physical activity (LTPA). We gained information about their everyday lives via semi-structured interviews with 25 women, most of them from rural Turkey. Drawing on the relevant literature on women’s work–life balance and (migrant) women’s participation in LTPA, we approached their work and leisure from an intersectionality perspective and explored if and how female cleaners engaged in LTPA and which constraints impeded their involvement. The interviewees’ narratives revealed that their everyday lives as unskilled migrant workers had a decisive influence on their opportunities of engaging in LTPA: most women struggled with the demands of a physically exhausting job and an extensive ‘second shift’ at home and therefore had great difficulty finding the time and energy to exercise. However, previous experience of LTPA seemed to have a decisive influence on their current LTPA practices.     

‘Freaky is just how I get down’: investigating the fluidity of minority ethnic feminine subjectivities in dance

This article addresses a lacuna of research into minority ethnic young women’s leisure participation by specifically focusing on the experiences and embodied subjectivities of two ethnic young women participating in dance. In the context of a qualitative research study based in an American inner‐city, post‐structural theory is used to signal the operation of intersecting racial, ethnic, gender, and class discourses and power relations. This analysis focuses on how the two young women engaged with dance cultures that were underpinned by particular dance forms; these dance forms arguably reproduced specific versions of ‘normalised’ femininity. The article then illustrates how the young women actively negotiated their dance cultures in order to construct multiple and shifting minority ethnic subjectivities. Commentary from one young woman, ‘Carrie’, indicates that she used her high school dance spaces as well as festival and club dance spaces to take up fluid white, black and ‘mixed’ subjectivities. I then investigate how a Salsa dance space provided the discursive resources through which another young woman, ‘Jenny’, constructed a proliferating diasporic identity. While Jenny identified as both black and Haitian, her hyperbolic dance performances re‐enacted various other subjectivities. These accounts demonstrate the possibility that young women can take up multiple versions of femininity in their leisure participation. These femininities reflect both alignment and resistance to dominant discourses which have ascendancy within young women’s leisure contexts.     

Health clubs and body politics: aesthetics and the quest for physical capital

At present, the western world wrestles with an obesity epidemic whilst, paradoxically, maintaining a fascination for the aesthetic ideal body. With the Scottish health and fitness industry providing the empirical backdrop, and drawing on the work of Bourdieu, this paper critically reflects upon processes of embodied production and consumption and the quest for physical capital and its referential symbolism. Using a range of qualitative methods across three case study facilities it is argued that as consumers seek to attain desired forms of physical capital, health and fitness clubs serve both to capitalize on and perpetuate cycles of embodied dissatisfaction. Although willingly subjecting their bodies to constant ocularcentric and objectifying processes, consumers are constantly reminded of their failure to attain the physical capital they desire. These processes not only mirror modern consumerism but also highlight a process of self‐imposed domination. With external medical and media discourses exerting persistent pressure on the embodied state, desire for physical capital produces a self‐legitimating and regulatory regime perpetrated upon the self within the internal environment of the health and fitness club. Therefore, as a venue for playing out aesthetic politics, health and fitness club spaces are anything but healthy as they oil the desire and dreamscape of physical capital, maintaining an aesthetic masochism and thus keeping the treadmills literally and economically turning.     

Determinants of Leisure Time Physical Activity Participation Among Latina Women

The goal of this study was to examine leisure time physical activity (LTPA) among Latina women and to determine factors influencing their LTPA participation. The ecological model was employed as a theoretical framework in order to examine attitudes, social support, and constraints affecting physical activity. Surveys and in-depth interviews were used to collect data. Results showed that although women's LTPA participation was low, they had positive attitudes toward LTPA, and they believed they had high levels of support for LTPA. The most often mentioned constraints included lack of child-care and lack of time. Attitudes toward LTPA, social support for LTPA, and certain constraints were significant predictors of LTPA participation. Results of the in-depth interviews complemented the survey data.     

Generational analysis of leisure time physical activity participation of women in Turkey

The purpose of this study was to analyse the adolescent-period leisure time physical activity (LTPA) experiences of three generations of women within the framework of the socio-ecological model and feminist cultural studies. For this purpose, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 144 women from three generations (48 girls, 48 mothers of the girls, and 48 grandmothers of the girls) and subjected the data to thematic analysis using a constant comparison method. Four themes were organized to assess similarities and differences across three generations drawing on the socio-ecological model: 1) Changing the meaning of sports, LTPA and being active; 2) Social resources for participating in LTPA: From authoritarian to supportive parenting; 3) Doorsteps, streets and the four-walls; and finally: 4) Changing educational policy. The findings revealed that, in parallel with the multifaceted historical changes in Turkey, the individual, social, physical environment and political factors of socio-ecological model determine the women’s LTPA participation differed throughout the generations. Results also showed that gendered relations continue to influence LTPA participation of women across the generations.     

Narrating the Multiplicity of ‘Derby Grrrl’: Exploring Intersectionality and the Dynamics of Affect in Roller Derby

Driven by an ethos of self-organization and empowerment women involved in the revived version of roller derby have created an embodied and virtual leisure practice that challenges gender norms and invites different identities. However, tensions exist in the way different women negotiate the space of roller derby and the meaning of playing, belonging, and becoming “derby grrrls.” This article presents findings from a qualitative study of roller derby in Australia to make connections between feminist theories of affect and the growing body of work on intersectionality. We explore how identity categories intersect to shape the meaning of roller derby for different women. Narratives recount the complex affective relations (passion, frustration, pride, shame) that women negotiate in forming leisure identities in relation to the social context of their lives. The article aims to contribute to the development of feminist thinking about leisure as a negotiated space of transformation, creativity, and difference.     

“I am so ashamed of my body”: Obese guests’ experiences in hotels

The hotel experience of obese people is examined in this exploratory study, addressing a segment of the population thus far ignored by hospitality scholars. The findings are based on 32 semi-structured interviews with American obese men and women living in the Virginia area. The results revealed that almost all participants’ hotel experience was affected by constraints arising from the physical environment, but more so, from other guests gazing at them. The thematic analysis of the experiences of obese hotel guests suggest that two relevant spaces in the hotel can be distinguished: the guest room and the public space accessible to all guests. These spaces differ in the difficulties experienced as well as the emotions that evoked among those guests. Overall, the findings indicate that people’s body and its image is crucial for the understanding of the hotel experience, as lookism is a critical barrier obese people face.     

Well-being and leisure-time physical activity psychosocial factors predict physical activity among university students

ABSTRACT

Drawing from literature supporting top-down (i.e., well-being impacting leisure) and bottom-up (i.e., leisure impacting well-being) models explaining the bi-directional relationship between leisure and well-being, this study examines the complex relationship of well-being, leisure constraints, and leisure negotiation factors in predicting leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) rates among university students. Six hundred sixty-one university students completed an online questionnaire assessing psychological well-being (PWB), LTPA constraints, LTPA negotiation strategies, and LTPA rates. A multiple regression analysis indicated bottom-up and top-down variables jointly predict LTPA. In regards to bottom-up psychological LTPA variables, LTPA was positively predicted by LTPA planning and prioritisation skills and negatively predicted by constraints to recreation facility spaces, lack of time, and utilising financial strategies. In regards to top-down well-being, influences on LTPA, LTPA rates were negatively predicted by personal growth and positively predicted by autonomy. We highlight how the study findings might inform intentional university health promotion policies and programming, leading to a culture of student well-being through LTPA.     

Learning to leisure: femininity and practices of the body

Within this paper, I conceptualise practices of the body that are learnt and deployed as part of feminised body work within the cultural context of girls’ leisure. These are practices of the body that are engaged by young women in ways that allow them to (re)construct their subjectivities as well as ‘negotiate a physical sense of themselves’. Therefore, this paper begins by mapping the theoretical foundations upon which the analysis of femininity is couched. Predicated upon debates that distinguish between the girl as a passive, duped recipient of culture’s pedagogical signs and the girl as an active, autonomous ‘freely choosing’, ‘freely consuming’ citizen, I draw out the ways in which young girls’ body practices can shed light on the complex relationship between ‘choice’, agency, consumption and subjectivity. Drawing on data collected from workshops and focus groups, I locate consumption, body management and beautification as constituents and simultaneously constitutors of leisure time. I thus offer insight into the ways in which a group of twenty 13-year-old girls who attended a private (fee paying) school in the West of England account for, maintain, develop, and in places resist, localised appearance cultures. Structured around certain leisure activities – reading magazines, shopping for clothes, eating, engaging in physical activity, applying beauty products, make-up and hair styling – this paper concludes by highlighting the ways in which wider cultural discourses are having embodied effects and are being consumed, not without consequence, as commonplace everyday preoccupations.