Gendered Bodies And Leisure

With its roots in Middle Eastern and North African dance, belly dance is a popular leisure activity in the West with women (and some men) of all ages and body types pursing the activity for diverse reasons. Drawing on empirical research, fieldwork, and interviews with participants, this book investigates the social world and small group cultures of American belly dance, examining the various ways in which people use leisure to construct the self and social relationships. With attention to gender expectations, body image, sexuality, community, spiritual experiences, and the process of identifying with a leisure activity, this book shows how people engage in the same pursuit in a variety of ways. It sheds light on the manner in which dancers strive to deal with the challenges presented by internal power struggles and legitimacy bids, public beliefs, narrow cultural ideals of beauty and often sexualized assumptions about their art. A fascinating study of identity work and the reproduction and challenging of gender norms through a gendered leisure activity, Gendered Bodies and Leisure: The Practice and Performance of American Belly Dance will be of interest to students and scholars researching gender and sexuality, the sociology of leisure, the sociology of the body and interactionist thought.

Wide-ranging and challenging, this book offers a host of new insights into how leisure theory has handled the question of gender difference and inequality. Providing a critical introduction to the leading positions in leisure theory, Betsy Wearing guides the reader through their strengths and weaknesses from a feminist perspective. This book draws attention to the various leisure experiences that women encounter and construct in their everyday lives and the meanings that these experiences have for them. Her perspective takes into account such poststructuralist ideas as multiple subjectivities of women and multiple femininities; the possibilities of resistance to male dominance in leisure; the potential through leisure of rewriting masculine and feminine scripts; and leisure as a site of struggle to challenge hegemonic masculinity.

Interest in sociological study of the body, theoretically and empirically, has increased dramatically in the 1990s. This book builds on this work by bringing together exciting and stimulating research which examines the social and cultural processes involved in the construction of gendered bodies and sexual practices. Contributors explore these issues in a variety of settings ranging from the workplace and leisure industry to social arenas of moral and medical regulation.

In this unique approach to the field of body studies, author, scholar, and educator Victoria Kannen explores what it means to exist in a body that is constantly on display and subjected to public scrutiny. Kannen examines the interplay of many ways our bodies express identity, such as gender, race, body size, sexuality, disability, body modification, and age, and how public scrutiny of those expressions can impact our public and private selves. Intertwining personal narratives of self-identified “odd and awed” women with theoretical chapters that help to elucidate the role of social power, this volume tackles the stares, comments, and questions that are directed towards bodies in public space through original research, personal narratives, and artistic expression. As readers encounter the narratives and images throughout the book, they will be supported by scholarly chapters on embodiment, identity, resistance, and power to help analyze, reflect on, and critically engage with the content. Through stories, theory, and art, this timely new resource will engage students and scholars of women’s and gender studies, sociology, critical disability studies, and body studies. FEATURES: - Offers a unique understanding of interpretation and what it means to have a body that causes curiosity, discrimination, and lifelong interactions - Accessible and engaging for students and scholars, as well as those outside of academia - Provides creative and non-traditional opportunities for critical engagement with various embodiments

Feminisms in Leisure Studies acknowledges and advances the contribution of feminist theories to leisure knowledge and research. Building upon the strong history of feminist leisure scholarship, the book reviews key feminist theories and offers an overview of a fourth wave of feminism and its relevance to leisure. Written by a team of leading international feminist scholars, each chapter addresses a particular theoretical perspective, using examples from each author’s research to unpack methodological and substantive issues essential to leisure studies. Critically, this book moves beyond women, the emphasis of much gender scholarship to date, to focus on issues of feminism as connected to leisure scholarship more broadly. This book is an important and engaging read for students and scholars of diversity, women’s studies, multiculturalism, social justice, gender studies, leisure studies, LGBTQQ studies, and feminist research.

Includes articles that examine the intersection of gender with other characteristics in a variety of settings including factory floors and corporate offices, welfare offices, state legislatures, the armed forces, universities, social clubs and playing fields.

For centuries the biological sciences have dissected, measured, and probed the human body as a product of nature. But from a feminist perspective, the human body is a social production. Human bodies are shaped and controlled by the norms and expectations of gendered social orders, intersected by racial, class, religious, and age norms and expectations. The result is a gendered body produced for a gendered social world. In this concise text with readings, designed for undergraduate students, Lorber and Moore present feminist contributions to social and cultural studies of the human body, showing the construction of gendered bodies in different contexts. The authors argue that the ideology of the perfect body is a powerful means of social control for girls and boys as well as women and men. The authors show how children's bodies are gendered through games and sports - and shaped and modified throughout adulthood to meet social expectations. Each chapter includes a list of key concepts, three readings, recommended books and articles, and Internet sources. For the instructor, the book includes class exercises and a list of films with somatic themes.

Leisure, Women, and Gender is part of an ongoing examination that explores and elaborates issues of leisure for girls and women. The book is both an update of A Leisure of One's Own: A Feminist Perspective on Women's Leisure (1989) and Both Gains and Gaps: Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Leisure (1996) and a departure from these earlier works, in its process and structure. Specifically, in this volume, rather than writing about the research that others are doing, we invited some of those researchers to talk about how they came to study leisure, women, and gender; what they have learned from their research; and to reflect on directions for future research. Hence, organizationally and structurally it falls in the “middle ground” between a co-authored and an edited book: it mixes writing by the book’s editors with the voices of invited scholars, who contribute central and additional perspectives regarding the topics.