Higher skilled working tourists and their leisure lifestyles: a qualitative study of guest language instructors in South Korea

Using interviews conducted with 24 higher skilled working tourists employed as guest language instructors in the Republic of Korea, this paper explores how working tourists could secure an optimal leisure lifestyle in their host countries. Three key findings emerged. First, the respondents were seeking casual, touristic, amateur, hobby and volunteer leisure with their colleagues and with their host community members. But, the rewards and episodic aspects of their leisure, including formal and informal language development, suggested that it incorporated variations in project-based leisure as a core characteristic. Second, these respondents were taking part in guest, host and leisure speech communities that were each offering leisure choices. However, their leisure lifestyle was best when leisure, second language development and acculturation coincided in a leisure speech community. Third, that in a leisure speech community, respondents’ acculturation and friendships improved more so than in either guest or host speech communities. Also, that these respondents’ formal and informal second language learning within their leisure speech communities was essential for an optimal leisure lifestyle. The paper determines that leisure speech communities, occurring along a continuum of monetary, educational and interpersonal resources, could affect the linguistic mobility of higher skilled working tourists. It recommends that future research could examine if a sociolinguistics of leisure could assist in exploring and mapping the leisure lifestyles appearing among mobile populations in a globalising world.     

Leisure,gender and family: the influence of social policy

A number of authors have recently called for reconsideration of the way in which gender and the family are investigated within leisure studies. This paper proposes that future analyses should include more explicit recognition of the ideological and practical influence of social policy on contemporary gender relations. The paper suggests that social policy has particular significance for debates within leisure studies, about the relationship between men and women's market and domestic labour, and their access to leisure. The paper investigates the influence of social policy on male and female adult life patterns through comparative analysis of social policy interventions and labour market outcomes in the economically advanced nations. It focusses on the policy stance in relation to paid work, especially maternal and paternal employment. It is shown that ‘family-related’ social policies universally support fathers' employment, but vary in the extent to which they encourage mothers' labour market activity. The implications of this for gender differentiation in leisure are explored through analysis of cross-national data for male and female sports participation in Europe. The analysis shows a strong correlation between gender discrimination in family-related social policy, and differentials in male-female sports participation rates. The paper next considers the implications of policy intervention for divergence within the female population. A detailed case study of the UK examines how family-related policy may differentially affect women in different socio-economic situations. The paper concludes that whether family-related policies encourage women to see themselves primarily as caregivers within the family unit, or as citizens with individualized rights, is likely to affect both their sense of entitlement to personal leisure and their ability to access it.     

Knowing your place and commanding space: de/constructions of gendered embodiment in mixed-sex karate

ABSTRACT

Feminists have long acknowledged that gendered divisions in access to spaces of leisure, and how women and men physically take up that space, reproduce gender inequality. This article will explore how karate practitioners participate in the space of mixed-sex karate practice and how such uses of space de/construct gendered embodiments and a gender hierarchy. Data presented are drawn from nine months of ethnographic emersion within three karate clubs and 15 photo-elicitation interviews with karate participants from the three clubs. The findings of this paper suggest that whilst women often occupied spaces of expertise within the karate hall, gendered distinctions in uses of space emerged in the more subtle ways in which women and men used their voice, responded to the tacit and smelt dilemmas of sweat, and moved their bodies across physical space. This research highlights both the potential of physical leisure practice to ‘undo’ conventional gendered embodiments that particularly restrict women’s intentionality in the world, and the power of spatially attuned research to illuminate the minute ways in which unequal gender relations are naturalised, legitimised and done.     

Intimations of masculinities among young male sports bettors

This study explored intimations of masculinities within narratives of young Australian men who bet regularly on sport. Qualitative data collected from white, heterosexual Australian men aged 18–34 revealed their sports betting as characterised by four interrelated intimations of masculinities. Sports betting was portrayed as masculine leisure with the young men’s sports betting interest often influenced by older males and male peers. A foundation and context for social interactions among male peers, sports betting provided a backdrop for formative masculine identity construction. An entrenched male peer group norm, sports betting success produced cultural capital and subsequent social status by virtue of analytic skill, risk-taking and boisterous, competitive social interactions. However, sports betting was widely perceived as stigmatised leisure capable of prejudicing the young men’s prospective or existing intimate relationships with women. The young men negotiated this dilemma by adopting softer projections of masculinity in which sports betting was concealed in the presence of their spouse or prospective female partners. We therefore theorise sports betting as an augmentation to sport as a bastion for the construction of heteronormative masculinity, whilst lending further support to conceptualisations of masculine identities as plural and fluid.     

‘Dutch don’t dance’ – leisure experiences and sense of belonging among Polish migrants in the Netherlands

The influx of migrants in Western Europe raises questions about the potential of leisure spaces and activities to support processes of social inclusion and to allow migrants to develop a sense of belonging. Discussions are ongoing about how this potential is realised or not. In this paper, I propose that the perspective of leisure activities as ritual may help to untangle how leisure spaces and practices build solidarity and a sense of belonging. The paper draws on interviews with Polish migrants to the Netherlands about leisure activities they undertake. Specifically, the paper will examine dance clubs as spaces and going out as activity in which migrants enter into contact with locals. It will show how these spaces and activities ultimately fail as potential sites for developing a sense of belonging.     

Use of Leisure Facilities and Wellbeing of Adult Caregivers

The current research examines leisure facility use as a moderator of the negative association of caregiving demands with wellbeing among informal caregivers. In accordance with the leisure constraints model, the study also explores the role of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural factors that may constrain or facilitate caregivers' use of leisure infrastructure. Data were collected as part of a survey conducted by the Canadian Index of Wellbeing in three communities. Results showed that greater use of leisure facilities buffered the association of greater hours of care with lower levels of mental and physical wellbeing for informal caregivers. Attitudes toward leisure, sense of community, and facility accessibility all positively predicted caregivers' use of leisure facilities. The results suggest that leisure infrastructure plays an important role in supporting wellbeing among caregivers and identify three types of constraints to consider when supporting caregivers' use of leisure facilities in their communities.     

‘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.     

From a Fall in the Mall to a Run in the Sun: One Journey to Ironman Triathlon

This autoethnographic account describes my personal leisure journey through an Ironman triathlon. The purpose of this paper is to highlight three themes that shed light on events like the Ironman as a leisure experience. The first theme reveals personal predispositions and the roles they play in deciding what constitutes leisure. The second theme discusses social or support networks within and around the Ironman experience. Third, the roles of key encounters are discussed as a way to make sense of what I was doing and how I was feeling. My Ironman experience represents an effort to escape the ordinary within defined, but extreme, limits. It is part of a larger search for complexity and, most of all, balance.     

Rec Needs a New Rhythm Cuz Rap Is Where We're Livin'

This research presents an autoethnographic strategy for self-reflection by sharing stories consistent with Indigenous methodologies and establishing a frame for re-mixing leisure theory. As an autoethnographic study, we reflect on how we have been engaged, changed, and challenged to rethink understandings of leisure and ourselves as leisure scholar-practitioners as a result of listening to rap music, especially composed by Aboriginal young people. We pause on questions related to how Aboriginal young people challenge leisure theory and its relevance to their lives through their rap and hip hop performances.     

Young people with intellectual disabilities and sport as a leisure activity: notions from the Finnish welfare society

Although disability sports have recently received positive attention, little concern has been directed towards them in youth research. In this article, we discuss the free-time sports in which youth with intellectual disabilities engage as a part of their leisure and their association with their peers. We maintain that every young person has a principal right to leisure and question what kinds of access youth with intellectual disabilities have to local sports communities in the Finnish context. Our empirical data consist of notes collected during sports training; interviews with young sports participants, their supervisors, and their parents; and online survey responses. Almost all sports are equally accessible to everyone; however, practical engagement in sports is not equally easy for everyone because long distances, lack of transportation, unsuitable sporting occasions and teams, or incapable coaches limit individuals’ participation possibilities. Furthermore, symbolic structures, such as neglectful attitudes, restrict the visibility of youth with intellectual disabilities in leisure sports. In many ways, supporting networks become significant when access to sport is under scrutiny. The most important enabling and restricting factors are families’ symbolic and material capital, as well as the unequal, poorly guided, and occasional leisure possibilities in different localities.     

Leisure studies in the United States: a British perspective

This paper attempts to decode the meaning of ‘education’ within the US higher education system. It is argued that this is necessary for a fuller understanding of the main body of the paper — an historical and contemporary analysis of leisure studies in the USA. The authors draw upon pertinent published sources to analyse leisure studies on the basis of the triad of academic responsibilities commonly found in the US; teaching, research and community service. A critical overview is presented in which the authors highlight apparent contradictions within the system, present a model demonstrating the potential directions of leisure studies, and identify several differences in the higher education systems of Britain and the USA, particularly those which influence the study of leisure.     

“The Night They Took Over”: Misogyny in a Country-Western Gay Bar

Abstract

Informed by feminism and theories of masculinity and space, this ethnography explores how gay men negotiate hegemonic masculinity in response to Lesbian Night, a regular Thursday night occurrence when women outnumber men at a country-western gay bar. Findings are examined to reveal the misogynistic assumptions inherent in gay men's reaction to Lesbian Night. Gay men's attempt to define the bar as a gay male space highlights their allegiance to a normative dialectic that pits men against women, and shows their unwillingness to forgo the authority and power inherent in their position as men. These findings highlight the complexities that lie at the intersection of gender and sexuality, and illustrate leisure spaces as complex and dynamic locations that foster inequity as well as community.     

Perceived Constraints and Social Support for Active Leisure Among Mothers With Young Children

Evidence suggests that women who are mothers of young children have lower levels of physical activity than women of similar age who do not have children (Brown, Lee, Mishra, & Bauman, 2000). The purposes of this study were to explore the factors that constrain mothers of young children from being more physically active, and the relationship between physical activity and levels of social support available to the women. The empirical basis for this examination was provided through a study of activity levels and barriers to physical activity experienced by a sample of 543 mothers of young children from differing socioeconomic backgrounds. The data indicate that: (a) more than two-thirds of the mothers were inadequately active in their leisure time for health benefit; (b) while the vast majority of mothers expressed a desire to be more active, they were inhibited in their ability to act out their leisure preferences by a combination of structural (e.g., lack of time, money, energy) and ideological influences (e.g., sense of commitment to others); (c) access to social support (from partners, family, and friends) was seen to place some women in a better position than others to negotiate constraints that inhibit leisure participation; and (d) within groups of varying socioeconomic status (SES) there was wide variation in the amount of time spent each week in active leisure.     

Identity,Politics, and the Beach: Environmental Activism in Surfers Against Sewage

Abstract

Academic accounts of leisure activities like surfing tend to emphasise their individualistic, hedonistic and commercialised qualities, seeing this as characteristic of leisure consumption in late capitalism; that culture is increasingly dominated by the market and attention is diverted from collective and political issues. Yet empirical research in such lifestyle sport cultures reveals a more complex and contradictory picture of leisure consumption. This paper examines the pressure group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), founded by surfers in Cornwall, England. It draws on subcultural media discourses about SAS and interviews with SAS members and personnel. Whilst acknowledging the limitations in the political significance and impact of SAS’s activism, the paper argues that through their sport consumption, participants from a range of minority water sports cultures have formed a politicised trans‐local collectivity based around a concern with their own localised environment, one which has become articulated into broader trans‐national political issues. It is argued further that SAS is part of a broader wave of new social movements and direct action protest groups that gathered momentum in Britain in the mid to late 1990s. In such groups the politics of identity take centre stage. The paper therefore challenges us to rethink the meaning of political activism, and the capacity of leisure and sport to contribute to the politics of identity.     

Becoming a belly dancer: gender,the life course and the beginnings of a serious leisure career

Serious leisure careers have a beginning, middle and end, yet few studies examine the beginning stage of leisure careers dominated by women. Drawing from interviews with male and female belly dancers in the USA, this study examines how people join serious leisure activities. Results show that both men and women were interested in dance, arts and history, had personal ties to belly dance, and wanted an enjoyable form of exercise to match their capabilities when they entered the world of belly dance. Unlike men, the women in this study also experienced major life transitions, such as diminishing familial responsibilities, job and school issues, moving and shifting relationships. These findings have implications for the gendered nature of serious 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.     

Leisure as a Coping Resource: Variations in Coping with Traumatic Injury and Illness

The influence of leisure in coping with negative life events likely derives from its powers to distract, to generate optimism about the future, and to preserve a sense of self in the face of trauma (Kleiber, Hutchinson, & Williams, 2002). While there is recent evidence of leisure's role in coping with daily hassles and normative life stressors (e.g., Iwasaki & Mannell, 2000), the nature and extent of leisure's utility in coping with a life-altering event, such as a traumatic injury, is not well understood. The purpose of this paper is to examine how individuals used leisure in coping with a traumatic injury or the onset of a chronic illness. Qualitative data from two studies involving people with either a spinal cord injury or chronic illness were used for this analysis. Findings support suggestions from earlier research: leisure served to buffer effects of immediate life circumstances and it sustained their coping efforts in various ways. The authors end by discussing the data in light of recent theoretical propositions about the role of positive affect and meaning in coping.     

Moving Beyond Conspicuous Leisure Consumption: Adolescent Women,Mobile Phones and Public Space

Abstract

In this paper we explore mobile phones as a form of fashion accessory for young women in contemporary culture and the possible value of such fashionable items as a source of identity and self‐worth. Despite reliance on the usual stultifying stereotypes produced by marketeers to promote mobile phones, we explore the possibility that increased access to public space generates for adolescent girls alternative choices of leisure experiences and possibilities of multiple enriching identities. The findings suggest that mobile phone use can impart a sense of self‐confidence, sexuality and autonomy which defies the male gaze in public spaces and may allow adolescent women to reject traditional images of femininity at a formative stage in the life course and take steps to a further array of leisure choices. It may only be a temporary image that assists a sense of self at a vulnerable time in life, or it may infiltrate other aspects of subjectivity and assist an ongoing sense of self‐confidence. However, this particular leisure activity can be seen as enabling, allowing entry to an arena, that of public space, that has hitherto been limited by the male gaze and other stereotypes of adolescent women. Through in‐depth interviews with teenage mobile phone users and a review of the literature we have examined the success that this form of technology has had with this social group.     

Postmodern Values and Leisure in Young Spanish University Students: An Exploratory Study

This article reports exploratory research about tendencies toward postmaterialism in university students. This paper used the theoretical framework proposed by Inglehart regarding three categories of leisure: postmaterialist, materialist and common. Students from a Spanish university (N = 1036) completed questionnaires that evaluated their materialist-postmaterialist values, how often they practiced the activities included in each category of leisure and the motivational factors involved in them. The results revealed that university students showed a tendency toward postmaterialism. Further, relationships were found between materialist-postmaterialist values and categories of leisure. This study results suggested that the tendency toward postmaterialist values may be a factor in structuring the leisure patterns of young Spanish university students.