A battle for control: exchanges of power in the subculture of snowboarding

Abstract

This article uses a Gramscian perspective to explore the subculture of snowboarding, suggesting that cultural power is both resisted and reproduced. It examines the impact of commercialization on a snowboarding subculture from a participant perspective, gained from semi-structured interviews with boarders and skiers at a resort in British Columbia, Canada. The paper discusses new ways that snowboarders differentiate themselves from wider sporting cultures, in addition to how they do not outrightly reject the ideologies of mainstream sport but instead attempt to involve themselves more in the snowboarding industry. Through linking themselves with traditionally non-snowboarding institutions and creating alternatives to them, snowboarders become actively involved in the organization of snowboarding.

Notes

¹ Ormrod and Wheaton, ‘On the Edge’.

² Tomlinson et al., ‘Lifestyle Sports and National Sports Policy’.

³ Humphreys, ‘Shredheads Go Mainstream?’.

⁴ Beal, ‘Disqualifying the Official’, 253.

⁵ Beal, ‘Disqualifying the Official’; Donnelly, ‘Sport as a Site of Popular Resistance’; Williams ‘Sport, Hegemony & Subcultural Reproduction’.

⁶ Atkinson and Wilson, ‘Bodies, Subcultures and Sport’; Atkinson and Young, Tribal Play; Crosset and Beal, ‘Use of “Subculture”’; Weinzierl and Muggleton, Post-subcultures Reader; Wheaton, ‘After Sports Culture’.

⁷ See Weinzierl and Muggleton, Post-subcultures Reader, for work done by Thornton, using Bourdieu's concept of ‘taste’,‘distinction’ and ‘cultural capital’ to examine club-cultures, Klein using Butler's work on performativity in understanding subcultural identities and St John for use of Maffesoli.

⁸ Weinzierl and Muggleton, Post-subcultures Reader, 10.

⁹ Atkinson and Young, Tribal Play; Wheaton, ‘After Sports Culture’.

¹⁰ Wheaton, ‘After Sports Culture’.

¹¹ Wheaton, ‘After Sports Culture’, 286.

¹² Marchunt, ‘Bridging the Micro-Macro Gap’, 94.

¹³ Hughson, ‘“They Think It's All Over”’.

¹⁴ Wheaton, Understanding Lifestyle Sports.

¹⁵ Beal, ‘Disqualifying the Official’, 265–66.

¹⁶ Beal, ‘Disqualifying the Official’.

¹⁷ Thorpe,‘Foucault, Technologies of Self’; Young and Dallaire, ‘Beware*#! Sk8’; Pringle, ‘Masculinities, Sport and Power’.

¹⁸ Thorpe, ‘Beyond Decorative Sociology’, 209.

¹⁹ Burton, ‘The Essence is Fun’; Humphreys, ‘Shredheads Go Mainstream?’; Heino, ‘What is So Punk’; Howe, ‘SICK’; Reed, ‘Way of the Snowboarder’. This is contested but most authors recognize Poppen as producing the first snowboard.

²⁰ Humphreys, ‘Selling Out Snowboarding?’.

²¹ Vaske, ‘Recreation Conflict among Skiers and Snowboarders’; Slack, ‘The Commercialisation of Sport’.

²² Rinehart, ‘ESPN's X Games’.

²³ Wheaton, Understanding Lifestyle Sports, 13.

²⁴ Slack, The Commercialisation of Sport.

²⁵ Maguire, Sports Worlds; Heino, ‘What is So Punk’.

²⁶ Howe, SICK.

²⁷ Burton, ‘The Essence is Fun’.

²⁸ The X Games is an annual event focussing on extreme sports that was created by ESPN (previously the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) it is a major television network in the USA.

²⁹ Beal, ‘Disqualifying the Official’; Donnelly, ‘Alternative and Mainstream’; Rinehart, ‘ESPN's X Games’.

³⁰ The Oakley Arctic Challenge, ‘TAC and Terje History’, http://www.thearcticchallenge.com/web/tac/judges.

³¹ SWATCH TTR World Snowboard Tour website, ‘About TTR: Questions and Answers’, http://www.ttrworldtour.com/about-ttr/faqs.html?tx_jppageteaser_pi1%5BbackId%5D = 830.

³² Wheaton and Beal, ‘Keeping it Real’; Wilson, ‘Believe the Hype?’.

³³ Donnelly, ‘Alternative and Mainstream’, 207.

³⁴ Clarke et al., ‘Subculture, Culture and Class’.

³⁵ Kidd, ‘Sport, Dependency and the Canadian state’; Howe, SICK.

³⁶ Donnelly, ‘Subcultures in Sport’.

³⁷ Rinehart, ‘ESPN's X Games’, 183.

³⁸ Humphreys, ‘Selling out Snowboarding’.

³⁹ Humphreys, ‘Selling out Snowboarding’

⁴⁰ Free and Hughson, ‘Common Culture, Commodity Fetishism’, 89.

⁴¹ Laurendeau and Sharara, ‘Women Could be Every’.

⁴² Dworkin and Messner, ‘Just Do … What?’.

⁴³ ‘Statutes of The World Snowboarding Federation’, World Snowboarding Federation website, http://www.worldsnowboardfederation.org/doc/WSF_Statutes_eng_ver_290305.pdf.

⁴⁴ Rowe, ‘Antonio Gramsci’.

⁴⁵ Donnelley, ‘Sport and Human Rights’, 389.

⁴⁶ Humphreys, ‘Selling out Snowboarding?’; Budd, ‘Capitalism, Sport and Resistance’.

⁴⁷ Humphreys, ‘Selling out Snowboarding?’.

⁴⁸ Beal and Wilson, ‘Chicks Dig Scars’.

⁴⁹ Coakley, Sports in Society.

⁵⁰ Rinehart, ‘ESPN's X Games’.

⁵¹ Rinehart, ‘ESPN's X Games’, 183.

⁵² Shaun White's snowboarding game is on the Playstation three and Nintendo Wii, he appears on the front cover of Rolling Stone on 9 March 2006.

⁵³ Rinehart, ‘Inside of the Outside’.

⁵⁴ Humphreys, ‘Selling out Snowboarding?’.

⁵⁵ ‘IOC bans Marijuana’, CBC News, 13 November 1998, http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/1998/04/27/IOC980427e.html. The IOC stripped Ross Rebagliati of his gold medal in the 1998 Winter Olympics, for alleged marijuana smoking. However the IOC and FIS had no clear rules on the prohibition of marijuana and as it is not a performance enhancing drug, snowboarders took it to the Court of Arbitration in Sport who overturned the ruling and Rebagliati's medal was re-instated. The IOC was attempting to discipline snowboarding and highlight Rebagliati's wrong-doing, which further served to emphasize (to snowboarders) the undemocratic ways of the IOC and FIS.

⁵⁶ Humphreys, ‘Sell Out Snowboarding?’.

⁵⁷ Kusz, ‘BMX, Extreme Sports’; Kusz, ‘Extreme America’.

⁵⁸ Robinson, ‘Taking Risks’.

⁵⁹ Palmer, ‘Death danger’; Robinson, ‘Taking Risks’.

⁶⁰ Stone and Horne, ‘Media Coverage of Snowsports’, 107.

⁶¹ Stranger, ‘Aesthetics of Risk’, 273.

⁶² Pike and Maguire, ‘Injury in Women's Sport’; Torjussen and Bahr, ‘Injuries Among Elite Snowboarders’.

⁶³ ‘Assumption of Risk and Realise of Reliability’, United States Ski and Snowboard Association website, ftp://ftp.ussa.org/Public/Athletics/Forms/2008-09/membership/waiver-release-ofLiability.pdf.

⁶⁴ Humphreys, ‘Selling Out Snowboarding?’. Free riding is all mountain snowboarding and so is about mastering all kinds of snowboarding; it is influenced by surfing and is enjoyed because it gives participants a connection to nature.

⁶⁵ Heywood, ‘Urgent dreams’; Humberstone, ‘Inside/Outside’; Palmer, ‘Death, Danger’; Rosen, ‘Somalis Don't Climb’; Watters, ‘The Wrong Side’.

⁶⁶ ‘26 Avalanche Deaths in 16 Days’, The Sunday Times, 20 January 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article3209113.ece; Chittenden, ‘Hi-Tech Skiers Lured to Death’.

⁶⁷ Beal and Weidman, ‘Authenticity in the Skateboarding World’; Wheaton, ‘Windsurfing, a Subculture’.

⁶⁸ Budd, ‘Capitalism, Sport and Resistance’; Tomlinson et al., Lifestyle Sports.

⁶⁹ Donnelly, ‘Alternative and Mainstream’.

⁷⁰ Anderson, ‘Snowboarding’; Heino,‘What is So Punk?’; Thorpe. ‘Embodied Boarders’.

⁷¹ Donnelly, ‘Local and the Global’.

⁷² Edensor and Richards, ‘Snowboarders vs Skiers’. Freestyle skiing is alpine skiing with acrobatic tricks.

⁷³ Thorpe, ‘Embodied Boarders’.

⁷⁴ Edensor and Richards, ‘Snowboarders vs Skiers’.

⁷⁵ Wheaton and Beal, ‘Keeping It Real’.

⁷⁶ Beal, ‘Disqualifying the Official’; Kay and Laberge, ‘Oh Say Can You Ski?’.

⁷⁷ Atkinson and Wilson, ‘Bodies’, 386.

⁷⁸ Stebbins, ‘Leisure Reflections’.

⁷⁹ Weinzierl and Muggleton, Post-subcultures Reader.

⁸⁰ Marchant, ‘Bridging the Micro-Macro Gap’; Wheaton, ‘From the Pavement’.

⁸¹ Marchant, ‘Bridging the Micro-Macro Gap’.