Belinda Wheaton

After Sport Culture Rethinking Sport and Post-Subcultural Theory

The subcultural theory associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) has received numerous and wide-ranging critiques. Debate has been particularly prevalent within sociological work on youth, music, and style, a context in which some commentators have rejected the idea of subculture, favoring more fleeting, transient socialites. However, these debates have rarely been considered within the context of the study of sporting subcultures. In this article, the author reviews the post-CCCS oeuvre, exploring the implications for the study of sporting subcultures, questions of individuality, difference, and collective identity, and the possibility and nature of cultural or subcultural resistance. The author evaluates Atkinson and Wilsons proposition that bodily experiences or performances can resist constraints imposed by mainstream culture, illustrating this in the context of lifestyle sport culture. Thus, this article contributes to a revised agenda for the study of subcultures in sport.

Lifestyle sport, public policy and youth engagement: examining the emergence of parkour

In this article we consider the development of parkour in the South of England and its use in public policy debates and initiatives around youth, physical activity and risk. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with participants and those involved in the development of parkour in education, sport policy and community-based partnerships, we explore the potential of parkour to engage communities, particularly those traditionally excluded from mainstream sport and physical education provision. We discuss how the perceived success of parkour in these different contexts is related to the culture and ethos of the activity that is more inclusive, anticompetitive and less rule-bound than most traditional sports, and to its ability to provide managed risk-taking. More broadly, the article highlights the emergence of lifestyle sports as tools for policymakers and the potential role these nontraditional, non-institutionalized lifestyle sports can make in terms of encouraging youth engagement, physical health and well-being. Our article therefore contributes to ongoing debates about the (in)ability of traditional sports to meet government targets for sport and physical activity participation.

THE CHANGING GENDER ORDER IN SPORT? The Case of Windsurfing Subcultures

New sports such as windsurfing have been perceived as the product of a postmodern society and culture in which sporting and physical activity offer a basis for the generation of new and multiple identities. Drawing on ethnographic work within England and across global subcultural networks, this article documents the persisting gendered basis of the subculture of windsurfing. It identifies the core principles of windsurfings culture of commitment, the gender identities most prevalent within it, and the tension between dominant masculinity and the potentially empowering dimensions of the activity for women. The study also reiterates the importance of social class as a basis for the availability of life choices in sport and leisure, and of the centrality of ethnography and in-depth qualitative research in understanding how subcultures and their members live out gendered dynamics of power in the process of negotiating, renegotiating, and sometimes subverting the contemporary gender order.

Identity, Politics, and the Beach: Environmental Activism in Surfers Against Sewage

Abstract Academic accounts of leisure activities like surfing tend to emphasise their individualistic, hedonistic and commercialised qualities, seeing this as characteristic of leisure consumption in late capitalism; that culture is increasingly dominated by the market and attention is diverted from collective and political issues. Yet empirical research in such lifestyle sport cultures reveals a more complex and contradictory picture of leisure consumption. This paper examines the pressure group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), founded by surfers in Cornwall, England. It draws on subcultural media discourses about SAS and interviews with SAS members and personnel. Whilst acknowledging the limitations in the political significance and impact of SAS’s activism, the paper argues that through their sport consumption, participants from a range of minority water sports cultures have formed a politicised trans‐local collectivity based around a concern with their own localised environment, one which has become articulated into broader trans‐national political issues. It is argued further that SAS is part of a broader wave of new social movements and direct action protest groups that gathered momentum in Britain in the mid to late 1990s. In such groups the politics of identity take centre stage. The paper therefore challenges us to rethink the meaning of political activism, and the capacity of leisure and sport to contribute to the politics of identity.

“New Lads”? Masculinities and the “New Sport” Participant

Historically, sport has been so closely identified with men that sport has become one of the key signifiers of masculinity in many Western societies. Traditional institutionalized sports cultures in these societies have been a central site for the creation and reaffirmation of masculine identities and for the exclusion and/or control of women. Since the 1970s, women have permeated many sporting spheres; thus, exploring the role sport plays in the reproduction and/or transformation of contemporary relations between and within the sexes is a prime concern. This article explores how gender relations and identities in a less institutionalized, “new sport” culture are constructed. Ethnographic research focused on a windsurfing community in England and examined mens (and womens) sporting experiences within this community. The ethnographic data suggests that while competing masculinities are negotiated in the windsurfing culture, this individualized new sport broadens the recognized boundaries of sporting masculinities.

Introducing the consumption and representation of lifestyle sports

My own academic interest in what I have termed lifestyle sports began back in the mid 1990s when I embarked on a Ph.D. based on the culture of windsurfing. As one of only a handful of scholars worldwide who shared this interest, I remember vividly my excitement when, during the research, Becky Beal’s paper on skateboarding in Colorado was published. This was the first in-depth empirical study to emerge in English publications, and it was very exciting to learn that I wasn’t the only person who thought there was something interesting and potentially different about lifestyle sport that needed articulating. Since then, there has been an explosion in academic interest in what has been variously labelled alternative, new, extreme, adventure, panic, action, whiz and lifestyle sport. These labels encompass a wide range of participatory and made-for-television sporting activities including residual cultural forms, such as climbing, and emergent activities, such as kitesurfing. While commentators have differed in nomenclature, many are agreed in seeing such activities as having presented an alternative and potential challenge to traditional ways of ‘seeing’ ‘doing’ and understanding sport. This special issue is testament to the steady stream of exciting work that has emerged over the past three decades, research that has not only contributed to comprehending the significance of these sporting activities, their cultures and identities, but that has provided insights into understanding the relationship between sport and society more widely. Initially this body of work on alternative/extreme/lifestyle sport was dominated by scholars from North America and to a lesser extent Australasia. This is not surprising as North America is the home of the extreme sport phenomena – and as Bourdieu observed, the spiritual base of many lifestyle sports. However it is also where commercialization and institutionalization processes are most developed, and as a consequence, many activities have experienced fundamental shifts in their meanings. For example, as Beal’s work has illustrated, the emergence and success of ESPN’s X Games has had a profound impact on the growth and trajectory of North American skateboarding culture. More recently, empirical work has emerged from a wider and more international range of sites including Europe, New Zealand, Africa, China, Brazil (Dorfman Knijnik et al, this issue), illustrating both commonalities and diversity in participants’ experiences. Over these decades the academic interest in lifestyle sport has also broadened to encompass a broad range of different academic (inter) disciplines including cultural geography, architecture and urban planning, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy and psychology, which as evidenced in this issue, has lead to the emergence of new theoretical developments and to fruitful avenues of enquiry.

The cultural politics of lifestyle sports

Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Understanding lifestyle sport revisited Chapter 3. Mapping the lifestyle sportscape Chapter 4. Lifestyle Sport, identity and the politics of difference Chapter 5. Risk-taking and regulation: Examining the sportization of Parkour Chapter 6. Globalisation, identity and race: lifestyle sport in post- apartheid South Africa Chapter 7. The California beach, whiteness, and the exclusion of Black bodies Chapter 8. Surfing, identity and race: belonging and exclusion Chapter 9. Challenging exclusion: The Black Surfing Association Chapter 10. Coda

‘Generation X Games’, Action Sports and the Olympic Movement: Understanding the Cultural Politics of Incorporation

An important and mounting issue for the contemporary Olympic Movement is how to remain relevant to younger generations. Cognizant of the diminishing numbers of youth viewers, and the growing success of the X Games – the ‘Olympics’ of action sport – the International Olympic Committee (IOC) set about adding a selection of youth-oriented action sports into the Olympic programme. In this article we offer the first in-depth discussion of the cultural politics of action sports Olympic incorporation via case studies of windsurfing, snowboarding, and bicycle motocross (BMX). Adopting a post-subcultural theoretical approach, our analysis reveals that the incorporation process, and forms of (sub)cultural contestation, is in each case unique, based on a complex and shifting set of intra- and inter-politics between key agents, namely the IOC and associated sporting bodies, media conglomerates, and the action sport cultures and industries. In so doing, our article illustrates some of the complex power struggles involved in modernizing the Olympic Games in the 21st century.

Surfing through the life-course: silver surfers’ negotiation of ageing

ABSTRACT Images of surfing have tended to reflect consumer culture’s fascination with youthfulness, simultaneously perpetuating a myth that participants are reckless, male risk-seeking hedonists. This image, however, is being challenged with increasing numbers of older male and female surfers taking to the water. Drawing on empirical research conducted in the UK, I explore the meanings that recreational surfing plays in participants’ lives and identities as they grow older. The research involved interviews with male and female British recreational surfers from ‘middle-age’ through to what the media have dubbed ‘silver surfers’. I examine both life-long surfers and those who have taken to surfing in mid-life. While ageing is often conceptualized as a phase of cognitive and physical decline, recreational surfing is being used as an identity resource in the extension of ‘mid-life’ and in the process of negotiating anxieties about ageing [Tulle 2008. Ageing, the Body and Social Change: Running in Later Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan]. The paper highlights ways in which older surfers reproduce, and challenge dominant discourses about ageing, physical activity and embodiment, and how they envisage their sporting futures, negotiating ageing though surfing. Lastly, it draws out some of the implications for active ageing policy agendas.

Assessing the sociology of sport: On action sport and the politics of identity

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, Belinda Wheaton, a key figure in understanding emerging, high-risk, and lifestyle sports and their cultures, assesses developments in the sociology of sport that concern the politics of identity and action sport. In reflecting on the trajectory of inquiry, Wheaton notes the struggles of scholars to determine what constitutes sport and reflects on the ways in which action sport both challenges and reproduces dominant relations and meanings. Because many forms of action and informal sport continue to grow rapidly and outpace the expansion of many traditional sports in many Western nations, they represent an important lens for understanding sport in contemporary settings because they are characterized by boundary-crossing activities that traverse sport and art, play and games. Key challenges for the field include understanding the paradoxes that come with commercialization and professionalization as well as understanding how emergent sport subcultures may evolve in non-Western settings. Key on the agenda for the future will be a need for scholars to continue to expose the political formations and to link identity politics in emergent sport to broader structural forces to better understand power and inequality.