Playing in the Woods: Youth, Leisure and the Performance of Gender Relations in Rural Newfoundland

Power, Nicole Gerarda and Norman, Moss E. and Dupré, Kathryne (2011) Playing in the Woods: Youth, Leisure and the Performance of Gender Relations in Rural Newfoundland. Annals of Leisure Research, 14 (2-3). pp. 155-175. ISSN 2159-6816

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Abstract

Based on qualitative interviews and focus groups with youth (12-24 years) living in rural, coastal Newfoundland, Canada, we examine how leisure practices within this context served to reproduce and naturalise localised gender relations. More specifically, we argue that the participants drew upon dominant discursive constructions of rural leisure to reiteratively enact a binary distinction between the ‘town’ as a space of constraint, youth-adult tensions, and consumerism in contrast to the freedom and privacy of the ‘woods’. This dichotomy was mapped onto gender binaries, where the town was coded as feminine and the woods masculine. We argue that these constructions served to mark the boundaries of normative gender leisure practices in the production of embodied gender subjectivities.

Item Type: Article
URI: http://research.library.mun.ca/id/eprint/8486
Item ID: 8486
Keywords: gender relations, rural leisure, youth, masculinity, gender binaries
Department(s): Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of > Sociology
Date: 12 October 2011
Date Type: Publication
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