Introducing the consumption and representation of lifestyle sports

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Notes

¹ Beal, ‘Disqualifying the Official’.

² See Booth and Thorpe, ‘Meaning of Extreme’; Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving Sport’; Rinehart and Sydnor, To the Extreme; Wheaton, ed., Understanding Lifestyle Sports; Midol, ‘Cultural Dissents and Technical Innovations’; Midol and Broyer, ‘Towards an Anthropological Analysis’.

³ I am referring here to Raymond William's categorization. Williams, Marxism and Literature.

⁴ Cf., Wheaton, ‘Introduction’.

⁵ The pioneering work of European scholars including Nancy Midol has been important too but, as not all of it has been translated into English, has tended to be overlooked.

⁶ Bourdieu, Distinction.

⁷ Beal and Wilson, ‘Chicks Dig Scars’.

⁸ E.g., Thompson, ‘Making Waves, Making Men’.

⁹ E.g., Chiu, ‘Street and Park Skateboarding’.

¹⁰ E.g., Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Jones and Graves, ‘Power Plays in Public Space’.

¹¹ E.g., Laviolette, ‘Editors Introduction’.

¹² E.g., Pomerantz, Currie and Kelley, ‘Sk8er Girls’; Robinson, Everyday Masculinities and Extreme Sport.

¹³ E.g., McNamee, Philosophy, Risk and Adventure Sports.

¹⁴ E.g., Lyng, ‘Risk-taking in Sport’; Thorpe, ‘Psychology of Extreme Sport’.

¹⁵ Rinehart and Sydnor, To the Extreme, 1.

¹⁶ Surfing, for example, has been used to market and promote regions as diverse as parts of Australia, the USA (California in particular) and cold-water venues like Cornwall.

¹⁷ Ormrod, ‘Introduction’, x.

¹⁸ Booth and Thorpe, ‘Meaning of Extreme’, 190.

¹⁹ Comer, ‘Wanting to be Lisa’; Jarvie, ‘Sport, Lifestyles and Alternative Culture’; Booth and Thorpe, Berkshire Encyclopedia of Extreme Sport; Rinehart and Sydnor, To the Extreme; Wheaton, ‘Introduction’.

²⁰ See Tomlinson et al., ‘Lifestyle Sport and National Sport Policy’. L'Aoustet and Griffet claim that in France any observable increase in sport participation can be attributed to non-institutionalized informal sport activities, with surveys showing that 45–60% of the French population now practise informal sports like skateboarding. L'Aoustet and Griffet, ‘Experience of Teenagers’.

²¹ E.g., Asthana, ‘Surf's Up for the Beach Girls’; Barkham, ‘A Bigger Splash’.

²² I would like to thank all those individuals who contributed to this time-consuming process to ensure that every paper had at least two full blind reviews.

²³ This term is from Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving Sport’, 507.

²⁴ Some, like surfing, with their roots in pre-industrial sports forms.

²⁵ For a fuller discussion of this term and others such as alternative, extreme, new, post-modern, etc., see Wheaton, Understanding Lifestyle Sports. See also Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving Sport’; Booth and Thorpe, ‘Meaning of Extreme’; Rinehart and Sydnor, To the Extreme.

²⁶ Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving Sport’.

²⁷ Booth and Thorpe, ‘Meaning of Extreme’, 183.

²⁸ Atkinson, this issue.

²⁹ Bourdieu calls these activities new sports and terms these entrepreneurs the “new” and “petite” bourgeoisie. Bourdieu, Distinction, 220.

³⁰ Bale, for example, suggests such activities present a challenge to the “western sport model”, and Maguire notes they challenge the “achievement sport” ideology. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport. See also Maguire, Global Sport.

³¹ Wheaton, ‘Selling Out?’.

³² Rinehart usefully adopts the term ‘expressive sport’. Rinehart, Players All. See also Laviolette, ‘Green and Extreme’.

³³ Stranger, ‘Aesthetics of Risk’, 269.

³⁴ Stranger, ‘Aesthetics of Risk’, 269.

³⁵ Ford and Brown, Surfing and Social Theory, 163.

³⁶ The idea of lifestyle sport as postmodern sport is discussed in Wheaton, Understanding Lifestyle Sports. However see also Allison, Amateurism in Sport, 43, 44; Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving Sport’.

³⁷ Kellner, ‘Popular Culture’, 141.

³⁸ Beck, The Risk Society, 87.

³⁹ Lupton and Tulloch, ‘Risk is Part of Your Life’, 318.

⁴⁰ Booth and Thorpe, ‘Meaning of Extreme’, 192.

⁴¹ Appleton cited in Booth and Thorpe, ‘Meaning of Extreme’, 192.

⁴² Le Breton, ‘Playing Symbolically with Death’.

⁴³ Fletcher, ‘Living on the Edge’.

⁴⁴ Lupton and Tulloch, ‘Risk is Part of Your Life’, 318.

⁴⁵ Lupton and Tulloch, ‘Risk is Part of Your Life’, 318.

⁴⁶ Booth and Thorpe, ‘Meaning of Extreme’; Dumas and Laforest, ‘Skateparks as a Health-resource’.

⁴⁷ Tombstoning is the term given to diving off cliffs or rocks into water.

⁴⁸ Kusz, ‘Extreme America’.

⁴⁹ Andrews and Cole, ‘On Issue’.

⁵⁰ Ostrowski, ‘Corporate America Cozies Up’, 24, cited in Wheaton, ‘Selling Out?’, 142.

⁵¹ Wheaton, ‘Selling Out?’.

⁵² Wheaton, ‘Selling Out?’, 156.

⁵³ Thornton, Club cultures, 116.

⁵⁴ Skelton and Valentine, ‘Cool places’.

⁵⁵ Wheaton outlines pertinent issues for examining the articulation and impact of global cultural forces on lifestyle-sport cultures in their ‘local’ and trans-local contexts. Wheaton, ‘Selling Out?’.

⁵⁶ Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving Sport’, p507.

⁵⁷ Ormrod, ‘Expressions of Nation and Place’.

⁵⁸ Robertson, Globalization.

⁵⁹ Robertson, Globalization

⁶⁰ Atencio, Beal and Wilson, ‘Distinction of Risk’.

⁶¹ Comer, ‘Wanting to be Lisa’; Jarvie, ‘Sport, Lifestyles and Alternative Culture’; Mike Bushell, ‘Women's Surfing Campaign’, BBC News, video, 1 August 2008.

⁶² Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City, 239.

⁶³ See for example, Chiu, ‘Street and Park Skateboarding’; Howell, ‘Creative Class’; Howell, ‘Skateparks as Neoliberal Playground’; Jones and Graves, ‘Power Plays in Public Space’; Stratford, ‘On the Edge’; Wooley and Johns, ‘Skateboarding’.

⁶⁴ Howell, ‘Skateparks as Neoliberal Playground’, 478.

⁶⁵ Howell, ‘Creative Class’.

⁶⁶ Silk and Andrews, ‘Fittest City in America’, 323.

⁶⁷ E.g., Dumas and Laforest, ‘Skateparks as a Health-resource’; Jones and Graves, ‘Power Plays in Public Space’; Wooley and Johns, ‘Skateboarding’; Howell, ‘Skateparks as Neoliberal Playground’.

⁶⁸ For example, in Great Britain, as set out in ‘Framework for sport in England’. See Tomlinson et al., ‘Lifestyle Sport and National Sport Policy’; Kay, ‘Extreme Sports’. On the problems and contradictions on evidence in such policy documents more widely, see Piggin, Jackson and Lewis, ‘Knowledge, Power and Politics’.

⁶⁹ E.g., Atkinson, ‘Parkour, Anarcho-environmentalism, and Poiesis’; Daskalaki, Stara and Miguel, ‘Parkour Organisation’;, Geyh, ‘Urban Free Flow’; Thompson, ‘Jump City’; Wheaton, Gilchrist and Binney, ‘Taking a Running Jump’.

⁷⁰ McLean, Houshian and Pike, ‘Paediatric Fractures’, 795.

⁷¹ Geyh, ‘Urban Free Flow’, 1.

⁷² Daskalaki, Stara and Miguel, ‘Parkour Organisation’.

⁷³ Daskalaki, Stara and Miguel, ‘Parkour Organisation’, 61.

⁷⁴ Atkinson, ‘Parkour, Anarcho-environmentalism, and Poiesis’; Atkinson and Young, Deviance and Social Control in Sport.

⁷⁵ Atkinson, ‘Parkour, Anarcho-Environmentalism, and Poiesis’, 170.

⁷⁶ Thrift, Non-Representational Theory. See Thorpe and Rinehart, this issue.

⁷⁷ Saville, ‘Playing with Fear’, 892.

⁷⁸ Saville, ‘Playing with Fear’, 893.

⁷⁹ Atkinson, ‘Parkour, Anarcho-Environmentalism, and Poiesis’, 182.

⁸⁰ Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 280.

⁸¹ Wheaton, ‘After Sport Culture’.

⁸² Grossberg, ‘Replacing Popular Culture’, 236.

⁸³ See Andrews and Ritzer, ‘Grobal in the Sporting Glocal’.

⁸⁴ Andrews, ‘Coming to Terms with Cultural Studies’, 116, cited in Giardina and McCarthy, ‘Popular Racial Order’, 148.

⁸⁵ E.g., Banks, ‘Instrumental Leisure’; Heywood, ‘Producing Girls and the Neoliberal Body’; Heywood, ‘Third Wave Feminism’; Howell, ‘Creative Class’; Howell, ‘Skateparks as Neoliberal Playground’; Kusz, ‘Extreme America’.

⁸⁶ Giroux, Terror of Neoliberalism.

⁸⁷ See Kay and Laberge, ‘“New” Corporate Habitus’; Kusz, ‘Extreme America’.

⁸⁸ Banks, ‘Instrumental Leisure’, 8. Silk and Andrews discuss the “interpellation of this ‘desirable new urban populace’” in their analyses of Baltimore, but while they discuss the role of sport and leisure, they don't discuss lifestyle sports specifically. Silk and Andrews, ‘Fittest City in America’.

⁸⁹ Howell, ‘Creative Class’.

⁹⁰ Howell, ‘Skateparks as Neoliberal Playground’.

⁹¹ Howell, ‘Skateparks as Neoliberal Playground’

⁹² Howell, ‘Skateparks as Neoliberal Playground’, 477.

⁹³ Howell, ‘Skateparks as Neoliberal Playground’, 477.

⁹⁴ Heywood, ‘Third Wave Feminism’.

⁹⁵ Heywood uses Empire here in the context of the seminal work on Empire by Hardt and Negri. Hardt and Negri, Empire.

⁹⁶ Heywood, ‘Producing Girls and the Neoliberal Body’, 104.

⁹⁷ Heywood, ‘Producing Girls and the Neoliberal Body’, 117.

⁹⁸ Heywood, ‘Third Wave Feminism’, 63.

⁹⁹ Also as illustrated in the emerging work on environmental consciousness and activism in some lifestyle-sport cultures See, for example, Wheaton, ‘From the Pavement to the Beach’; Heywood and Montgomery, ‘Ambassadors of the Last Wilderness?’.

¹⁰⁰ Also examining contemporary girlhood in the globalization of contemporary surf culture, but discussing its gender politics and aspects of “colonial desire”, Comer, ‘Wanting to be Lisa’, 259.

¹⁰¹ Humphreys, ‘Selling Out Snowboarding’.

¹⁰² Ritzer, ‘Rethinking Globalization’.

¹⁰³ Ritzer and Stillman, ‘Postmodern Ballpark’.

¹⁰⁴ On online communities, see Wilson and Atkinson, ‘Rave and Straightedge’. On the ways in which participants can gain control over the production process, see Thorpe, ‘Foucault, Technologies of Self’.

¹⁰⁵ See for example Thorpe, ‘Foucault, Technologies of Self’.

¹⁰⁶ While third-wave feminism is a contested and in-process political “project” aptly described by Pender as “more about desire than an already existing thing”, it has been adopted to examine the shifting and expanding opportunities for many young white western women, how these women and especially girls engage with global popular culture, and with their different ways of “doing” activism and feminism. Pender, ‘Kicking Ass is Comfort Food’, 225. In the context of sport, see Heywood, ‘Third Wave Feminism’, and Comer, ‘Wanting to be Lisa’.

¹⁰⁷ Atencio, Beal and Wilson, ‘Distinction of Risk’: Pomerantz, Currie and Kelley, ‘Sk8er Girls’. See also Young and Dallaire, ‘Beware *#!’.

¹⁰⁸ e.g., Booth, Australian Beach Cultures; Comer, ‘Wanting to be Lisa’; Henderson, ‘A Shifting Line Up’; Heywood, ‘Third Wave Feminism’; Wheaton, ‘Surf Film and Female Spectatorship’.

¹⁰⁹ See Carrol, ‘Brazil's Surf Sensation’ discussing the rise of female Brazilian surfers in the British media.

¹¹⁰ E.g., Anderson, ‘Snowboarding’; Wheaton, ‘New Lads’; Robinson, ‘Taking Risks’.

¹¹¹ Henderson, ‘A Shifting Line Up’.

¹¹² Ford and Brown, Surfing and Social Theory; Scheibel, ‘“Making Waves” with Burke’; Booth, Australian Beach Cultures.

¹¹³ Csikszentmihalyi, Flow. Lyng's concept of Edgework, see for example: Laurendeau and Sharara, ‘Women Could Be’; Lyng, ‘Risk-taking in Sport’.

¹¹⁴ Pronger, ‘Post-sport’.

¹¹⁵ See also Atkinson and Young, Deviance and Social Control in Sport.

¹¹⁶ Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’.

¹¹⁷ Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’.

¹¹⁸ Massumi, Parables for the Virtual.

¹¹⁹ Their approach reaffirms similar assertions made by other commentators such as Victorian Robertson on climbing, Booth, Evers and Ford and Brown on the affective aspects of surfing, and Saville on ‘playing with fear’ in parkour. Booth, ‘(Re)reading the Surfers' Bible’; Evers, ‘How to Surf’; Ford and Brown, Surfing and Social Theory; Saville, ‘Playing with Fear’. Saville considers how fear is a “distinctly mobile engagement” with the environment.

¹²⁰ See also discussion in Wheaton, ‘After Sport Culture’ and Wheaton, ‘Introduction’.

¹²¹ In focusing here on these selected aspects of research my intention is not to marginalize the significance of other fertile areas, but to map some of the possibilities.

¹²² Donnelly, ‘Studying Extreme Sport’; Tomlinson et al., ‘Lifestyle Sport and National Sport Policy’.

¹²³ There are some exceptions, such as explorations of the various female non-core identities. Wheaton and Tomlinson explore the girlies and windsurfing widows in windsurfing, and Robinson belay-bunnies in climbing. See Robinson, Everyday Masculinities and Extreme Sport; Wheaton and Tomlinson, ‘Changing Gender Order in Sport?’.

¹²⁴ For a more in-depth discussion of these issues see Wheaton, ‘Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sport’.

¹²⁵ Cf. King, Leonard and Kusz, ‘White Power and Sport’.

¹²⁶ Kusz, ‘BMX’; Kusz, ‘Extreme America’.

¹²⁷ E.g., Beattie, ‘Sick, Filthy, and Delirious’; Frohlick, ‘That Playfulness of White Masculinity’; Ormrod, ‘Endless Summer’; Kusz, ‘Dogtown and Z-Boys’.

¹²⁸ Frohlick, ‘That Playfulness of White Masculinity’, 179. See also Farley, ‘By Endurance We Conquer’.

¹²⁹ Ahmed, ‘Declarations of Whiteness’; Byrne, White Lives.

¹³⁰ Jarvie, ‘Sport, Lifestyles and Alternative Culture’, 277.

¹³¹ Hemson, ‘Ukubekezela or Ukuzithemba’; Leitch, ‘Alfred Lomax’.

¹³² Surfing, of course, has not always been associated with whiteness, indeed its roots are as a Polynesian cultural activity, and despite being appropriated by ‘white’ American youth in the twentieth century, in Hawaii it remains an important part of Polynesian culture and identity.

¹³³ Jarvie, ‘Sport, Lifestyles and Alternative Culture’.

¹³⁴ Wheaton, ‘Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sport’; Wheaton, ‘Re-(en)visioning Action Sport’.

¹³⁵ Of course, as Pelak outlines in the context of sport specifically, racial identities and categories in post-apartheid South Africa continue to be contentious, context specific and shifting. Commentators often use the political term ‘black’ to refer to South Africans of African, Asian and Coloured identities. Pelak, ‘Negotiating Gender/Race/Class Constraints’.

¹³⁶ On kwaito, see for example Swartz, ‘Is Kwaito South African Hip Hop?’.

¹³⁷ Wheaton, ‘Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sport’.

¹³⁸ Wheaton discusses how advertising in publications targeting retired consumers, like Saga magazine, draws on the imagery of lifestyle sporting activities to promote healthy and fulfilled lifestyles.

¹³⁹ The British Surfing Association (BSA) recently claimed (2008) older surfers have increased significantly over the past five years, now constituting 10% of beginners. There are a number of possible explanations for this increase, including the revival of long board surfing. The BSA is cited in McWaters, ‘Rise of the Silver Surfer’. See also Ormrod, ‘Expressions of Nation and Place’.

¹⁴⁰ E.g., Laing, ‘Silver Surfers’; McWaters, ‘Rise of the Silver Surfer’.

¹⁴¹ Featherstone and Hepworth, ‘The Mask of Ageing’.

¹⁴² Tulle, ‘Ageing Body’.

¹⁴³ Cf., Giardina and McCarthy, ‘Popular Racial Order’.