Learning to leisure

Femininity and practices of the body

Dados Bibliográficos

ID11435751
AutoresJessica Francombe-Webb (0000-0002-5058-2681, University of Bath, autor correspondente), J Francombe
Ano2014
Volume33
Fascículo6
Páginas580-597
Data de publicação2014-11-02
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLeisure Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0261-4367 • E-ISSN: 1466-4496
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02614367.2013.833970
OpenAlexW1980874325
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas11
Referências citadas50

Within this paper, I conceptualise practices of the body that are learnt and deployed as part of feminised body work within the cultural context of girls’ leisure. These are practices of the body that are engaged by young women in ways that allow them to (re)construct their subjectivities as well as ‘negotiate a physical sense of themselves’. Therefore, this paper begins by mapping the theoretical foundations upon which the analysis of femininity is couched. Predicated upon debates that distinguish between the girl as a passive, duped recipient of culture’s pedagogical signs and the girl as an active, autonomous ‘freely choosing’, ‘freely consuming’ citizen, I draw out the ways in which young girls’ body practices can shed light on the complex relationship between ‘choice’, agency, consumption and subjectivity. Drawing on data collected from workshops and focus groups, I locate consumption, body management and beautification as constituents and simultaneously constitutors of leisure time. I thus offer insight into the ways in which a group of twenty 13-year-old girls who attended a private (fee paying) school in the West of England account for, maintain, develop, and in places resist, localised appearance cultures. Structured around certain leisure activities – reading magazines, shopping for clothes, eating, engaging in physical activity, applying beauty products, make-up and hair styling – this paper concludes by highlighting the ways in which wider cultural discourses are having embodied effects and are being consumed, not without consequence, as commonplace everyday preoccupations

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Beauty · Clothing · Consumption (sociology · Context (archaeology · Developmental psychology · Embodied cognition · Femininity · Girl · Masculinity · Negotiation · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Psychology · Sports, Gender, and Society