Standing Out while Fitting In: Serious Leisure Identities and Aligning Actions among Skydivers and Gun Collectors

Abstract

Serious leisure communities have proliferated over the past century, providing ever more opportunities for people to enact and embrace leisure-related identities. Serious leisure offers individuals resources to distinguish themselves by developing specialized knowledge, skills, and experiences. But members of serious leisure communities may also feel marginalized when they perceive themselves and their activities as misunderstood by the broader society. This article draws on data from field studies of recreational skydivers and gun collectors to examine key features of serious leisure identities created in these masculinized leisure communities. The authors then describe skydivers’ and gun collectors’ perceptions that they are stereotyped and misunderstood in the broader culture. The authors go on to examine several types of aligning actions through which members of these leisure communities endeavor, individually and collectively, to negotiate their identities, organizations, and activities within the broader society. In the process, the authors highlight interpretive strategies of significance to the study of serious leisure activities more generally.