Dismantling health and leisure boundaries: the interactive process of composing women’s lives

Abstract

In this paper we show how culture embodies taken-for-granted epistemologies about social life and how specific discourses may define and inhibit our lives in culturally expected ways. To discover how this constriction occurs within western cultural meanings of health and of leisure, we identify three distinct stages in western theory development: traditional, social and socio-cultural discourses and apply them to the notions of health and leisure. If we are to accept the findings of this enquiry – that women do not differentiate leisure from all of life’s experiences – we discover that these three discourses limit our understanding of life’s composition processes, and will continue to reinforce fragmentation within social life. Alternatively, if we challenge the boundaries in relation to health and leisure and seek to understand the composition of women’s lives as a whole, we can proceed with a quite different research agenda.