Gender and Leisure: Social and Cultural Perspectives. Cara Carmichael Aitchison

Abstract

Gender and Leisure: Social and Cultural Perspectives. Cara Carmichael Aitchison. London: Routledge Publishing, 2003.Gender and can no longer just be considered nouns used to describe a category of people and a segment of time. Instead, Cara Carmichael Aitchison tells readers that these words have shifted to verbs: Gender and leisure are practiced, achieved, and maintained. In Gender and Leisure: Social and Cultural Perspectives, Aitchison describes shifts in our understanding of gender and highlights the role of leisure as a significant site and process in the creation and contestation of gender relations.Gender and Leisure is presented in two parts: The first half of the book reviews key theoretical concepts related to gender study and provides a chronology of research relating gender and leisure. The second portion of the book uses a series of case studies to explore the role of policy, education, and management of leisure in shaping gender and leisure relationships. The final chapter synthesizes the previous seven chapters. Additionally, the final chapter highlights how the interaction of social and cultural forces has created and reinforced gender relations through leisure.The meat of the book, chapters two through eight, each contain adequate depth and could stand alone as literature reviews or journal articles. However, an important thread ties together each chapter and makes the book worth more than simply the sum of its parts. This thread is Aitchison's concept of a social-cultural nexus. The social-cultural nexus refers to the site or process in which social policies and management interact with the cultural norms and to shape the experience of gender. In each chapter the author revisits the idea of the social-cultural nexus to emphasize that it is the interrelationship between structures and cultures that often serve maintain gender inequity within leisure relations. Taken together, the chapters represent a comprehensive review of gender and leisure studies applied to women's lives, leisure studies curricula, management, and policy.Following an introductory chapter to orient the reader, Gender and Leisure begins by describing and evaluating the key social and cultural ideologies that have underpinned theoretical understandings of gender and leisure. This hefty second chapter provides a primer on the philosophy of science, outlines major paradigms (positivism, phenomenology, structuralism, and post-structuralism), describes and critiques different feminisms (liberal, socialist, Marxist, radical, post-structural, post-colonial, and Black feminism), and builds the foundation for the author's description of a social-cultural nexus. It is at this point that Aitchison identifies her own theoretical approach: post-structural theory. The author, however, makes the book palatable for structuralists by acknowledging the role patriarchy and capitalism in shaping gender relations:It has been argued that postmodernism may be a theory whose time has come, but only for men. As men have had their Enlightenment they are in a position of strength from which to deconstruct and de-center themselves. For women to take on such a position risks weakening what is not yet strong. . . . The challenge for this and other discussions of gender and leisure, then, is to provide a broad analysis of the cultural fragments and differences in the inter-relationships between gender and leisure while simultaneously attending to the broader structural relations of power, (p. 33)Chapters Three and Four turn the reader's attention from broad ways of knowing to a survey of gender and leisure research. Aitchison begins her third chapter by outlining the range of meanings given to leisure: as free time, activity, psychological state, and more recently, as a liminal moment or metaphysical space. Although it remains unwritten, Atchison implies that the latter conceptionalization of leisure is the only option for readers who are concerned with women's access to leisure. …