“Grandma never knit like this”: reclaiming older women’s knitting practices from discourses of new craft in Britain

ABSTRACT

New discourses of craft construct knitting as young, hip, socially networked and politically conscious and the experiences of knitters who do not fit into this formulation are marginalised. 7.3 million people in Britain knit; the vast majority are women in their mid-thirties and older. Yet popular media accounts of ‘new knitting’ mobilise the derogatory figure of the ‘grandma’ to repudiate knitters who are seen not to properly instantiate contemporary femininity. Although this derision accrues particularly to older women, knitters of all ages can be similarly dismissed. Knitting is thus a site of struggle around new formations of gender in post-feminist culture in which some women fall short. This study uses original qualitative data from focus groups with 15 adult knitters in North-west England and North Wales to give voice to women who do not identify with ‘new knitting’ practices and primarily pursue their hobby in more conventional contexts. The article finds that traditional domestic craft practices continue to play a significant role, particularly in older women’s leisure, and that ‘new knitting’ is alienating for some practitioners. While the article concludes that twenty-first century discourses of craft have devalued established knitting practices, it also indicates that these are useful sources of critique of hipster capitalist post-feminist culture.     

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.     

Creativity,self-expression and leisure

The links between creativity, self-expression and leisure practices are underexplored within leisure literature. Despite research that documents the centrality of leisure as a worked-at process of self-actualisation and self-identity, the practice of leisure is still predominately viewed as one of consumption rather than production and of passivity rather than creativity. This paper, supported by empirical evidence through qualitative research into the lives of users of the leisure spaces of the ‘provincial bohemia’ of the Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle upon Tyne, argues that there is a strong component of creativity in this group’s leisure activity. This component, we argue, has, in recent years, become more important for ‘aesthetic-reflexive’ social actors in particular, as acts of self-authored and individual-expressive creativity have become more central to economic production, and to social identity. The rise in creative leisure is strongly linked to the valorisation of the romantic-artistic ethic of inalienable creative self-expression and the rejection of mass and putatively passive forms of leisure consumption common within previous Fordist modes of economic production and social ordering.     

Coastal blue space and wellbeing research: looking beyond western tides

ABSTRACT

In this paper we focus on coastal blue spaces and the ways in which they have been advocated as beneficial for health and wellbeing in the context of leisure practices. We offer a reassessment of some of the claims made in this growing body of literature, highlighting the diverse cultural practices at the coast across different geographical contexts, particularly for those communities that have experienced exclusion due to ethnicity, culture, and income. We then discuss conceptions of coastal blue space and wellbeing within the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, a bi-cultural nation in which indigenous knowledges connected to both wellbeing and leisure in the outdoor world are impacting dominant (white, colonial) discourses, policies and practices. We illustrate that a Māori world view embraces different practices and assumptions about what water means and how relationships with water are made including through leisure practices. Aotearoa New Zealand provides a revealing cultural context for re-assessing and indeed challenging Eurocentric assumptions about blue spaces as sites of wellbeing. More widely we suggest that it is timely to anchor blue space and wellbeing research to different ‘worlds’; that looking in to reach out and expanding research agendas is a useful and important enterprise.     

If it weren‘t for my hobby,I'd have a life: dog sports,serious leisure,and boundary negotiations

In the social sciences, work, family and religion - but not leisure - are commonly thought to shape the meanings people give their lives. But increasingly leisure research reports that under modernism, leisure practice and cultural consumption are at least as essential. What happens when leisure and ‘real world’ institutions pose different, even conflicting expectations? We focus on ‘serious leisure’ as elaborated through Tomlinson's ‘culture of commitment’. Our case study is people who participate in serious leisure involving dogs. The data comes from 61 interviews plus field notes based on our own involvement in dog sports. We ask how as an alternative world often perceived by self and others as marginal, this passionate avocation interfaces with the ‘real world’ of work, family, religion, and other social institutions. We find that dog sports indeed represent a ‘culture of commitment’. For hobbyists, involvement shapes such life realms as how time is used, how money is spent, how kin are defined, and how profit is viewed. Sometimes it generates strong behavioural expectations for participants, expectations that clash with those of the ‘real world’. Examples include gender identity and religious and work obligations. When these clashes occur, respondents neither simply succumb to nor resist either set of demands. Rather, they negotiate between the two, reproducing and reshaping each simultaneously. Meanwhile, they also deal with the intrinsic tensions that a serious leisure pursuit brings.     

Inaudible Noise: Belgrade’s Academy Club: Legacy,Old Locals and New Spaces

Abstract

This text deals with the transformation of spaces for ‘underground’ forms of leisure in Belgrade, Serbia. In these spaces, different styles of non‐mainstream music are enjoyed by disparate social groups, referred to here as ‘the underground scene’. The spatial and stylistic transformation of venues for ‘creative leisure’ in Belgrade is read in this article as an articulation of discourse. Fragmentation of music consumption is arguably a global trend acknowledged in many treatises. Discourses within the multifaceted Belgrade underground music scene seem to correspond to such fragmentation. In this case it was found that the development of such identity practices depends on the articulation of concrete social factors and constraints. This paper focuses on the Academy nightclub, its transformations and long‐term impact on the Belgrade scene, including the emergence of other venues that have superseded, but have not fully surpassed, this seminal space.     

Visitor (im)mobility,leisure consumption and mega-event impact: the territorialisation of Greenwich and small business exclusion at the London 2012 Olympics

Focusing on the London 2012 Olympics, we investigate the impact of mega-sport events’ spatial transformations on visitor mobility, local leisure consumption and resulting small business trade. Our case study draws on 43 in-depth interviews with local authorities, governmental and non-governmental project actors, and small-local leisure and visitor economy businesses (retail and hospitality) located at the heart of a ‘Host Event Zone’ in Greenwich, London. We supplement subjective accounts with a documentary analysis of policy reports, media, and archival material as the basis for our empirical analysis. Our findings reveal a major dichotomy between the ‘rhetoric’ of inclusion and local ‘realities’ of exclusion as security planning and spatial controls served to close off public spaces and local attractions: diverting visitor flows and leisure consumption towards official event sites, away from local businesses. We illustrate how such urban processes effectively render a vibrant business community invisible and visitors immobile to explore local community spaces during the live staging periods. We close with implications for event organisers, managers and policymakers focused on re-configuring the socio-spatial elements of Olympic organisation and re-direct and mobilise visitor economy flows towards more open civic and leisure spaces in the hope of better (re)distributing consumption into host communities.     

Participatory music-making and well-being within immigrant cultural practice: exploratory case studies in South East Queensland,Australia

ABSTRACT

Music participation is a way of life for many cultures and is an activity that is often passed on generationally. It can become especially important as a leisure activity for maintenance of self- and national identity for people who have migrated to countries of contrasting cultures, such as Australia. This article describes exploratory, qualitative research into the ways in which participatory music-making within communities from immigrant backgrounds in Brisbane, Australia may influence aspects of participants’ wellbeing. The sample for this research included three broadly-defined cultural groups living in the region: people of Baltic origin; people from Latin American and Caribbean backgrounds; and ‘newly arrived’ immigrants and refugees. Interviews with individuals have been analysed to explore the ways in which this involvement might affect mental, social, and emotional wellbeing. Our qualitative analyses demonstrated that beyond these aspects, factors of subjective wellbeing, both hedonic and eudaimonic, were apparent. This article aims to provoke discussions on the divergent ways in which immigrant communities utilise music-making practices to foster different types of wellbeing and the importance of maintaining diversity through cultural practices.     

Women,shopping and leisure

This paper examines the social antecedents, occupational experiences and problems currently challenging executive managers within the public leisure services in Britain. It describes those processes involved in an historic development which has seen leisure managers moving from the margin to occupy a more central role in local government, and explores the major dificulties currently challenging senior managers who have experienced this process of status transition, including: power conflicts with established professional groups, difficulties associated with one's role, mission, occupational identity and philosophy. All of these problems are addressed by different types of managers in different ways. The paper identifies four characteristic types of managerial executive in leisure: ‘The Traditionalist’, ‘The Sports Centred’. ‘The Generalist Graduate’ and ‘The Second Chance Careerist’, and relates each of these to different class, cultural, gender and occupational experiences. It suggests that, whereas in the past, work in leisure management was conventionally perceived to be a low status and marginal occupational largely colonized by the aspirant working class, this pattern is now rapidly changing. A new type of confident middle class generalist graduate who extols the virtues of ‘the amateur’ and ‘the good all-rounder’ is rapidly colonizing elite roles in leisure management. These people provide a new cohort of leadership which will face both the professional and social problems challenging the public leisure services in the 1990s.     

Come Downtown & Play

Abstract

The newly anointed American cities of the late capitalist moment appear preoccupied with the reconstitution of urban space. More accurately, select parcels of urban America have been reconfigured into multifaceted sport, leisure and tourism environments designed for the purpose of encouraging consumption‐oriented capital accumulation. Within this paper, the focus is a critical exploration of the ways in which tangible and intangible forms of heritage have been employed, utilized and exploited within these urban transformations. Through focus on a city emblematic of the processes that have molded downtown cores under US capitalism – Memphis – the paper points to the role of heritage in the reconfiguration of the Memphian ‘tourist bubble’. In particular, discussion centers on the often problematic selection of histories and historical elements, forms and practices within the interests of capital space and thus raises a host of localized questions about whose collective memory is being performed in the present, whose aesthetics really count and who benefits. Conclusions address how such urban space is imbued with power relations, that is, how increasingly leisure‐oriented spaces can be seen as important sites of social struggle in which dominant power relations can be constructed, contested and reproduced.     

Public and commercial leisure provision: active citizens and passive consumers?

Despite differing domain assumptions, the various perspectives in leisure studies have largely concentrated on providing a negative critique of ideologies of consumerism and the supposed ‘passivity’ of commercial leisure, often juxtaposed to the supposedly more ‘participatory’ and inclusive nature of public leisure provision. This concern with the mode of production and access has resulted in a failure to develop systematic sociological understandings of acts of consumption. It has also limited theoretical and empirical exploration of the extent to which new forms of consumerism may have served to re-define ‘leisure citizenship’ and the relationship between leisure and social exclusion. The article reviews the various perspectives and suggests that, despite differing domain assumptions there is a growing recognition within leisure studies of the need to move beyond a political defence of the ‘excluded’ to develop an empirically grounded sociological understanding of modern leisure forms.     

‘Race’, sport and leisure: lessons from critical race theory

This paper presents and explores critical race theory (CRT) as an ontological starting point for the study of sport and leisure. CRT is based on five precepts outlined by Solorzano and Yosso that centre ‘race’ and racism, social justice, plurivocality, transdisciplinarity and challenge orthodoxies. There have been a number of recent criticisms and debates amongst leisure and sports studies writers that challenge their general focus of study as narrow and myopic. The five precepts have been fundamental to radical shifts in critical legal studies over the past fifteen years and have significance for the development of critical sport and leisure theory. CRT and ‘race’ critical perspectives are drawn out, clarified and their mutual agendas focussed. It is argued here that researchers and writers need urgently to centralize ‘race’ and racism as core factors in the study of social relations in sport if Birrell's optimism in the development of sport (and leisure) theory is to be realised.     

Working leisure: entertaining guests in gated tourist resorts

In the contemporary tourism sector, entertainment is a particular type of service that is increasingly provided by specialised categories of tourist and leisure workers, such as (adventure) sport instructors, tour guides or reps, or ‘pub crawling’ cicerones. However, little attention has been paid so far to the complex intermingling between work and leisure that sustains the routine ‘working leisure’ practices of this ‘entertainment staff’. By building upon the Foucauldian concept of biopower and Hardt’s notion of affective labour, this article examines how entertainment is routinely generated as a service by tourist entertainers in an enclosed tourist resort in Italy. In particular, an in-depth qualitative analysis, combined with an account of a personal experience, was used to structurally frame tourist entertainers’ daily ‘playful working’ practices into three interrelated and functionally complementary dimensions: regimentation, hostessing and experiential rewards. The findings show that entertainment, and hence a successful tourist experience, is effectively (re)generated only when ‘working (through) leisure’ practices both constrain and gratify the workers. This result corroborates the ambivalence of entertainment as biopolitical affective labour that is a subjugating but also a liberating practice.     

Leisure corporations,beer brand culture,and the crisis of masculinity: the Speight’s ‘Southern Man’ advertising campaign

Leisure corporations and their brands are becoming increasingly signified to represent certain values and attitudes towards leisure and particular aspects of identity. One popular leisure product and practice is beer and its consumption, which also plays a role in constructing identity and, more specifically, masculinity. Within the context of contemporary promotional culture, beer advertising serves to reproduce the cultural links between masculinity, sport/leisure, and the consumption of beer, which form a theorised ‘holy trinity’. In this paper, we focus on Speight’s, one of New Zealand’s renowned breweries and beer brands, to explore the ways in which its promotional culture illuminates notions of a crisis of masculinity. Our multimethod, qualitative approach combines contextualisation with the critical textual analysis of two advertisements from the ‘Southern Man’ television campaign and interview data obtained from one key cultural intermediary, the campaign’s creator. From this, our analysis elucidates three key dimensions about the important role of the Speight’s ‘Southern Man’ advertising campaign as a site for understanding masculinities, in addition to how they are constructed and, ultimately, how they embody a crisis of masculinity. The first is the campaign’s exploitation of societal cleavages. The second is the campaign’s explicit use of nostalgia. And the third is the campaign’s omission of ‘other’ masculinities.     

Meanings of recreation and leisure among adolescents

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the validity of popular definitions of recreation and leisure. High school students volunteered to participate in the study. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of four possible stimulus word by response method groups. Subjects responded to either ‘recreation’ or ‘leisure’ using a production method or a sit and think method. Findings revealed that subjects defined ‘leisure’ as pleasure (and related terms) and specific passive activities. Like ‘leisure’, ‘recreation’ was defined by pleasure (and related terms), but the specific terms used to define ‘recreation’ were often active sports.     

Perfect pregnancy? Pregnant bodies,digital leisure and the presentation of self

Pregnant women are increasingly engaging with social media as a form of digital leisure. In doing so, they subject themselves to normalised images of pregnant bodies communicating unrealistic ideals. Instagram is a culturally communicative and visual platform and a pervasive context in which to explore body discipline and regulation. The current research utilised discourse analysis to explore dominant discourse surrounding pregnant women’s bodies through their self-presentation on Instagram, uncovering potential areas of challenge and resistance. Content was selected from 60 user-generated posts from 16 pregnant women’s personal accounts on Instagram. Results explore themes of ‘The “Perfect Pregnancy and Middle-class, Consumptive Ethic”’, ‘Doing Exclusive Heteronormative Pregnant Femininity’ and ‘Self-surveillance & Hyper-visibility of the Digital Fleshy Pregnant Body’. These themes identified how pregnant women embody dominant discourse regarding neo-liberalism, consumption, traditional medicine, heteronormativity, and hegemonic masculinity, and use this to engage in self-surveillance, policing, and monitoring of their pregnant bodies. A final theme Rejecting the ‘Perfect Pregnancy’, Reworking (and Reproducing) Dominant Ideals’ is uncovered, outlining alternative posts by the women that offer resistance to the dominant discourse, however examples are infrequent and lack evidence of conscious and overt politicisation. Future research should focus on pregnant women’s self-interpretation of social media engagement and the pregnant bodies excluded from this discourse.     

Negotiating work and family: lifestyle migration,potential selves and the role of second homes as potential spaces

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in the USA with migrants who use an act of relocation as a means of deliberately constructing identity as well as seeking greater ‘balance’ and ‘control’ in their lives. Specifically, it examines how ‘second’ homes can serve as a transitional or ‘potential space’ in the lives of these migrants not only between different geographic places but also what are taken to be distinct identities and ideals associated with these places and the lives lived in them. Such behaviour is not simply about coping and adapting to a new environment; rather, it is about using qualities of destination places to reconcile different visions of self and family purposefully set apart by relocation and a particular notion of ‘the good’ that underlies a ‘lifestyle commitment’ attached to the new place. The author highlights how research into the changing dynamics of work and family can help us understand, generally, effects of an emergent, economic order on working families and, specifically, how associated social and cultural changes shape this migration behaviour. Through analysis of lifestyle migration, this article contributes to discussion of the ways in which cultural values of work and family interrelate in migrancy as well as of challenges and opportunities facing migrants who purposefully attend to leisure activities and places associated with leisure as proper domains for essential identity work and to lifestyle as the means of realising what we may call the ‘potential self’.     

Domesticating Gambling: Gender,Caring and the UK National Lottery

Abstract

The issue of gambling as a form of leisure practice has, to date, received very little attention from sociologists. This is despite the enormous range of consideration recently invested in gambling by policy makers, politicians, journalists, psychologists and economists. In particular, the role that gambling plays as an important part of women’s leisure patterns has been virtually ignored. In this paper, the impact of UK National Lottery play on women’s everyday leisure experiences is examined. A questionnaire was administered to a diverse group of 150 women, and 15 women from this sample volunteered to take part in in‐depth interviews. The questionnaires sought to produce a database of the frequency of lottery play, the types of games played and the amounts of money gambled. The interviews focused on individual experiences, meanings and perceptions of lottery play as a form of leisure. The quantitative and qualitative findings of the research are discussed in terms of the material and ideological constraints shaping women’s everyday experiences of leisure, and also in terms of the ways in which gender and ‘caring’ are reproduced through women’s National Lottery play. It examines the ways in which the lottery addresses a lack of time and space for women’s pursuit of leisure.     

The offshore sailor: enskilment and identity

This paper employs the concept of enskilment – becoming skilful through active engagement – to investigate how a sense of identity, as an offshore sailor, is contingent upon being attuned to one’s environment. It draws on auto-ethnographic accounts to highlight the embodied practices that constitute ‘being’ an offshore sailor. In doing so, it draws on and extends investigations of leisure experiences concerned with offshore sailing, auto-ethnographic inquiry, the relationship between the body and the environment and developing a sense of identity. It highlights the process of enskilment that allowed the author to ‘(re)inhabit’ a particular leisure identity. The paper draws attention to the temporal and contingent identity of ‘being’ an offshore sailor that is grounded in the practice of offshore sailing. To understand the meaning of leisure experiences, it is helpful to foreground the embodied practices that constitute an activity, and consider how enskilment shapes participation and identity.     

Sensing the outdoors: a visual and haptic phenomenology of outdoor exercise embodiment

In recent years, there has been a burgeoning of academic interest in exercise embodiment issues, including a developing field of phenomenologically inspired analyses of the lived body experience of physical activity and exercise. Calls have been made for researchers to explore the sensory dimension of such embodiment, and a corpus of sensory ethnographic studies is now beginning to grow, focusing on the ways in which people engage in ‘making sense of the senses’ within a sociocultural framework. This article contributes to a developing body of phenomenological-sociological empirical work on the sensory dimension, by addressing the lived experience of organised physical activities in ‘natural’ outdoor leisure environments. We draw upon the findings from a two-year ethnographic study of a Welsh national physical activity programme, ‘Mentro Allan/Venture Out’, which aimed to increase physical activity levels amongst specific ‘target groups’. Based on fieldwork and on interviews (n?=?68) with Programme participants, here our analytic focus is upon the visual and the haptic dimensions of sensory engagement with organised outdoor leisure activities, including experiences of ‘intense embodiment’.