Book review

Abstract

This article employs the methodology of contextual cultural studies to explore the protest strategies of ‘Lesbians for Liberty’, a group of fans who staged a ‘kiss‐in’ during every time‐out of a nationally televised game between the Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA) New York Liberty and Miami Sol. Designed as a way to challenge homophobia and lesbian invisibility sanctioned by the New York Liberty management, this article suggests the fans’ kissing activism promotes visibility and single‐issue identity politics as strategies for change. While the fans’ actions make lesbian bodies intelligible in a sporting and leisure space that too frequently imagines heteronormativity, a closer analysis reveals the rhetoric of Lesbians for Liberty and the WNBA’s marketing strategies are both complicit with ideologies and shifting processes characteristic of late capitalist profit‐enhancing practices. This article concludes by offering a discussion of queer and feminist writings that attempt to again theorise resistance in light of late capitalist marketing strategies, which have co‐opted the rhetoric of equality in the service of capital. The ultimate goal of this analysis is to join broader dialogues about the efficacy of identity‐based models of resistance by using the Lesbians for Liberty’s desire and actions as productive sites from which to rethink bodies, pleasures and resistance differently.     

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.     

#ILoveLondon: An exploration of the declaration of love towards a destination on Instagram

Travellers increasingly use a combination of photographs, texts and hashtags to expressing their attitude towards tourism destinations (TDs). Existing destination branding literature has not yet investigated how consumers express their love towards TDs on social media. This study addresses this knowledge gap and explores how destination brand love (DBL) is expressed on Instagram using a mixed-methods approach. Study one consists of a qualitative visual content analysis of 700 user-generated photographs; while study two adopts text analytics with a sample of 48,783 posts. The findings show Instagram users’ declaration of DBL is expressed through photographs of some destination attributes (natural & architectural, people, public transportation, food, weather), accompanied by specific positive emotions (amazement, attractiveness, pleasure, preference, enchantment, nostalgia, belongingness, intimacy). The findings also illustrate how Instagram users express their love by providing emotional support when the destination goes through a crisis and that different stakeholders co-create the emotional capital of TDs.     

All hype or the real deal? Investigating user engagement with virtual influencers in tourism

Virtual influencer (VI) marketing has become increasingly prevalent on social media with the evolving landscape of digitalisation. However, the use of VIs in tourism has received limited attention in the literature. This study examines salient source and content attributes that stimulate Instagram users’ engagement with VIs in a tourism context. An online discrete choice experiment was designed using key attributes (i.e. source realness, image composition and caption discourse) identified from online focus groups. Survey responses from 309 adult Instagram users in Australia were analysed through discrete choice modelling. The findings indicate that humanlike VIs are preferred over 3D animated VIs and the least preferred influencers are 2D animated VIs. Instagram posts from humanlike VIs that combine images of tourism settings with rational messages attract the most engagement from the audience. Theoretical and practical implications are provided with recommendations for how tourism practitioners can harness VI marketing effectively.     

Sense of belonging to a lesbian,gay, bisexual,and transgender event: the examination of affective bond and collective self-esteem

ABSTRACT

This study examined behavioral intentions of sexual minority attendees at an event from a sense-of-belonging perspective. Based on social identity theory, attendees’ social representations are examined via affective bond at the event level and collective self-esteem at the community level. A survey was conducted with 261 respondents from the sexual minority community at a large, annual lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) event. Findings revealed that affective bond positively impacts satisfaction and behavioral intentions. In addition, collective self-esteem also had a positive influence on behavioral intentions. Theoretical and managerial implications for event managers and destination managers are provided.     

Home of (or for?) Champions? The Politics of High-Performance/Elite and Community sport at New Zealand’s Home of Cycling

Abstract

Creating inclusiveness and user-friendly spaces is a challenge to any new sporting venue. This article explores the attempts by various ‘stakeholders’ involved in the production of the Avantidrome, New Zealand's ‘Home of Cycling’ to align the rhetorics with the realities for creating a new velodrome across its first 20 months of operation. More specifically, there exists a tension in the ‘selling’ of a sport-for-all model with the public construction of a high-performance, elite-use facility. In neoliberal times, such contradictions seemingly proliferate when public spending blends and blurs with corporate sponsorship and a results-driven framework for funding elite sport while being aligned with visions of community. Combining user interviews and sustained on-site ethnographic observations with Foucault's theories of power, we seek to understand how these multiple entities produced relational forms of power that resulted in efforts to accommodate both community-based and high performance models within the same cycling space.     

Cycling Assemblages,Self-Tracking Digital Technologies and Negotiating Gendered Subjectivities of Road Cyclists On-the-Move

Abstract

Self-tracking technologies are now a taken-for-granted part of the road cyclist’s kit. We are interested in the gendered dynamics of one particular self-tracking platform: Strava. This article offers the concept of the cycling assemblage to explore how gendered subjectivities are felt and gain legitimacy on-the-move through the ongoing negotiated relationship between cycling bodies and technology. Our account draws on a cycling ethnography conducted with 27 Australian participants. Four vignettes demonstrate how Strava’s incorporation within road cycling assemblages functions as a mechanism of gendered inclusion and exclusion. We point toward the tensions of Strava as site of excess, where the pleasures and pains of the “quantified cycling self” may reinforce or challenge bodily and spatial boundaries associated with sporting masculine subjectivities and alternative femininities. A focus on cycling assemblages enhances our understanding of the spatiality, fragility, vitality, and multiplicity of gender-on-the-move.     

Creating Distance from Body Issues: Exploring New Materialist Feminist Possibilities for Renegotiating Gendered Embodiment

Abstract

The body’s active role in the production of gendered embodiments is a key focus for feminist cultural studies and leisure studies. The article draws on new materialist feminist scholarship to explore how gender relations are produced and negotiated in physical culture through one case study example taken from a wider study of young people’s experiences of the body and self-image over time. The article explores how gendered embodiment is assembled through the socio-material circumstances of everyday life. For one particiapnt, 'Ann', “creating distance” from appearance concerns was an embodied process which involved new practices and encounters (e.g., walking for leisure, reading feminist literature) and relationships and engagements with others (e.g., a partner, friends, family). The potential for feminism to open possibilities to imagine the body otherwise is also discussed in relation to recent efforts to foster social justice imperatives in leisure sciences and feminist physical cultural studies.     

Towards an understanding of fathers’ involvement in children’s sporting activities as racial fathering practices

ABSTRACT

This research note puts forward a conceptual framework for leisure research seeking to bring sport, fathering, and race and ethnicity together. It draws on theoretical ideas of practices and racial projects to develop the notion of racial fathering practices. The potential of racial fathering practices as an analytic approach is indicated through three vignettes of fathers’ involvement in their children’s sporting activities drawn from in-depth interview studies of fathers’ understandings of bringing up their mixed-race children in Britain and Aotearoa New Zealand.     

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.     

The flag-bearers of change in a patriarchal Muslim society: Narratives of Iranian solo female travelers on Instagram

This paper examines the travel experiences of Iranian solo female travelers through an analysis of their Instagram posts. While there is a growing body of literature on solo female travelers, few studies involve women from Asian or Middle Eastern countries. In the case of the Iranian women who are the focus of this study, our analysis identified three main themes: meaning-making; power and empowerment; and facilitation of self-awareness and transformation. We argue that traveling solo is a form of active resistance against Iranian gender relations that creates opportunities for the women to overcome personal fears and logistical challenges. The act of writing up their experiences in their Instagram posts involves self-reflection and such critical analysis allows for greater levels of awareness of self that may then lead to self-transformation.     

Rethinking human rights: the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics,LGBT protections and the limits of cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Prior to the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, activists from several Western countries protested the implementation of draconian laws in Russia that targeted the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) community. This paper offers an alternative analysis of these protests, drawing attention to the effects of cosmopolitanism and contemporary human rights discourse within a current version of the ‘responsibility to protect’. The Western LGBT protest strategies are part of a broader historical shift from a classical notion of human rights as political demands with individuals seeking self-emancipation from their ‘Western’ nation states (rights of women, civil rights movement, etc.) to a current form of demands, which operate globally and serve existing neoliberal values related to capital and multicultural diversity. The problems with this type of intervention are multiple. In the case of the Sochi Olympic Games, advocates elevated visibility strategies instead of engaging Russian communities, histories and realities, to understand how local, Russian LBGT lives exist under an increasingly authoritarian regime. Such approaches not only privilege and assume ‘Western’ tactics of engagement embedded in a hegemonic discourse of human rights, but also elide important local Russian contexts and histories related to LGBT struggles.     

Social Capital,political empowerment and social difference: a mixed-methods study of an ecotourism project in the rural Volta region of Ghana

Abstract

Claims abound regarding the empowering possibilities of community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). Social capital is seen as a key element towards that end, yet there is a paucity of critical research testing these connections. This study examines two aspects of social capital (cognitive and structural) in a community-based ecotourism (CBE) project in Ghana as they relate to social difference (notably gender and ethnicity) and political empowerment (i.e., access to political involvement, and political efficacy). Quantitative results highlight specific gendered and ethnic differences in political empowerment and social capital that, when combined with qualitative analysis, reveal how those inequities in ecotourism may be rooted in socio/cultural norms. In addition, a novel contribution from this study is that political empowerment seems to be partly mediated by peoples’ access to social capital. This suggests that, regardless of one’s gender and ethnicity, social capital helps to empower individuals. We conclude by describing what an intervention could look like in the context of this CBE project when informed by qualitative feminist as well as quantitative social capital analysis. Doing so we illustrate how a mixed-methods approach to the study of social capital and empowerment may offer important insights towards more equitable CBE.Abbreviations: CBE: Community Based Ecotourism; CBNRM: Community Based Natural Resources Management; NCRC: Nature Conservation Research Centre; FPE: Feminist Political Ecology; PCA: Principal Component Analysis; ANOVA: Analysis of Variance     

Parents' Leisure,LGB Young People and “When We Were Coming Out”

ABSTRACT

This article examines parents' leisure experiences in relation to their child's coming out process and developing lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) identity. Thirteen heterosexual-identifying parents (seven mothers and six fathers) from Canada and the United States were interviewed about the social context and relational aspects of their leisure experiences (e.g., special events and holidays, friends, co-participants, co-workers). Analysis showed that leisure contexts could be altered in relation to their child's developing LGB identity and cultural norms related to heterosexism and homophobia. Three main themes that best reflected the mothers' and fathers' experiences emerged: (a) grieving heterosexist ideals and reframing familial expectations, (b) encountering homophobia and the loss of community, and (c) coming out of the family home and creating a supportive network.     

The antecedents of hashtag and geotag use in smart tourism: case study in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This study aims to determine what factors that motivate users to use the hashtag and geotag features on Instagram while traveling. It also seeks to determine the relationship between using Instagram features, traveling experience, expectation, confirmation, and satisfaction on traveling journeys. This study collected data from 606 Indonesian travelers. Then, the data analysed using covariance-based structural equation modelling. Results show that the use of hashtags and geotags during traveling improve their satisfaction. Additionally, information seeking, chronicling, and etiquette are found to be influencing hashtag use. Meanwhile, geotag use are influenced by geotag enjoyment and anticipated rewards.     

网红短视频传播对消费者旅游态度的影响——以丁真走红现象为例

短视频网红宣传对旅游地知名度的提升起到重要作用。文章综合信源吸引力模型、信源可靠性理论和心流理论,探究短视频传播的网红特质对受众观看短视频时的专注度、快乐度、身临其境感和心流体验的作用,以及对受众想要去短视频宣传地的旅游态度的影响。通过问卷调研,收集558份有效样本,并构建了网红个人魅力影响受众心流体验和旅游态度的结构方程模型,进行路径分析和中介效应检验。研究发现:网红包括吸引力、可信度和受欢迎度在内的个人特质显著影响受众观看短视频的快乐度、专注度和身临其境感,促使受众产生心流体验,继而影响受众对网红相关地区的旅游态度。该研究对于借力短视频、网红经济等数字媒介环境下的新兴传播形式开发旅游资源,提升旅游知名度具有一定实践参考价值。     

In the footsteps of Anne Frank,The Beatles and Vincent Van Gogh: a review and discussion of personal legacy trails

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a review and discussion of personal legacy trails. A detailed analysis and reconstruction of tourism in the footsteps of Anne Frank and the management of the involved sites form the main case study here. The short life of Anne Frank in perilous times has attracted the attention of millions of readers as well as visitors to the places closely associated with her life path: Frankfurt, her birth place in 1929, Aachen, Amsterdam (including her place in hiding 1942–1944), Transit Camp Westerbork, Concentration Camp Auschwitz and at last Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen, where she and her sister Margot died in March 1945. A general discussion of the importance of personal legacy trails follows in the last third of the paper. This section examines cases of the popularized legacy of well-known artists and musicians in local/regional settings, such as The Beatles in Liverpool, and tourism in the search of Van Gogh’s Provence. Finally, the commonalities in the personal legacy trails of ordinary US citizens is discussed and shown for the visitation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall and for the Wall of Honor on Ellis Island.     

Indigenous masculinity in sport: the power and pitfalls of rugby league for Australia’s Pacific Island diaspora

Pasifika men are significantly over-represented in Australia’s National Rugby League and their dramatic influx into the sport over the past 10–15 years has often been attributed to their ‘natural’ athleticism and other corporeal reasons invoking hyper-masculinity. Coupled with this discourse is the commonly accepted idea that these sporting opportunities are a good thing for Pasifika peoples. This paper considers both the damaging effects of the ‘hyper-masculine body’ and ‘sport-as-inherently good’ discourses, and addresses the positive potential rugby league has in transgressing various forms of oppression. Rather than arguing that sport is a positive force in society or outright challenging that assertion, I demonstrate how rugby league in Australia plays a paradoxical role in both reinforcing and challenging social values around race and masculinity. It can be a rare space for positive visibility and upward mobility for Pasifika and other Indigenous men, and a space of exploitation, degradation and racism; it can even save lives and destroy them. I argue that these complexities should be better understood before any moral claim is made about the positives or negatives of sport for marginalised peoples.     

Showcasing Scotland? A Case Study of the MTV Europe Music Awards Edinburgh03

Abstract

This paper critically reviews the public policy framework underpinning the MTV Europe Music Awards Edinburgh03. It argues that, because local organisers did not advocate local cultural participation as a key policy, preferring an economic rationale of marketing and tourism, such involvement was limited. The organisers’ global and economic rationale led to the official view that MTV’s status within global youth culture re‐imaged Edinburgh as a dynamic and cosmopolitan city in the international tourist market, while providing a turning point in Scotland’s ability to host world class events. To them, the £750k subsidy to MTV facilitated significant local economic benefits and enhanced the city’s profile in the creative industries. However, the narrow policy framework meant local inclusion took place within MTV’s overriding emphasis on promoting celebrities and producing a spectacular television show. The Awards therefore had a largely superficial engagement with local youngsters and the Scottish pop industry, with the main beneficiaries being MTV and its sponsors, Edinburgh tourism, global pop stars, and major hotels and retailers. Protests over this were encouraged by MTV’s tight control of information, the event’s politicisation by a local newspaper, and a local actor’s ‘anti‐MTV Awards’ campaign.     

Look at me—I am flying: The influence of social visibility of consumption on tourism decisions

This article focuses on the impact of social visibility of consumption on tourists’ purchase decision making. We focus on two important purchase decisions leading up to the time of departure: the choice of destination and the choice of an airline to get to the he results show that when individuals are concerned with how they are evaluated by others, they are more inclined to letting their image of the destination inform their willingness to visit a particular holiday destination. Further, the airline’s country-of-origin turns out to be a far more salient and useful information cue the more the holiday is perceived as being socially visible. Finally, the results regarding social visibility are more pronounced among travelers who are susceptible to normative influence than for travelers who are not susceptible.