Gender and Serious Leisure Careers: A Case Study of Women Sea Cadets

Abstract

A central defining feature of serious leisure is the career afforded to its participants. This paper adds to emerging challenges to prevailing conceptualizations of the career as linear and progressive by exploring the lived experiences of women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps (SCC). By focusing on the plays of gender relations within and beyond the serious leisure social world, this paper demonstrates that women's relations to their career are shaped by the overall meaning they give to their participation; gendered divisions of labor within the SCC; and by their successful distancing from the demands of normative femininity in other social worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Serious leisure
• career
• women's leisure
• gender
• sea cadets