Deborah Chambers

No place like home.

There is a need for serious study of home-based leisure, and of the theoretical and methodological issues posed. Over half of leisure time is spent within the home environment, but there is little evidence concerning the choice of the home as a leisure centre or the social constraints which limit out-of-home leisure opportunities. An analysis of the structure and meaning of homebased leisure in relation to routine domestic tasks is required to challenge traditional concepts of ‘leisure’ developed in the context of outdoor recreation. The concepts of ‘home’, ‘family’ and ‘leisure’ need to be developed in terms of role, function, structure and meaning.

Begging for It: "New Femininities," Social Agency, and Moral Discourse in Contemporary Teenage and Men's Magazines

This article discusses the ways in which young women and young men are addressed through popular magazines in relation to their sexual subjectivity. It discusses the ways in which gendered attitudes towards sexuality and power are structured, and the ways in which moral agency and sexual practices are represented in UK magazines. The article is drawn from a study of ‘teenage sexual morality’, which explored the ways in which teenagers talk about sexual health and issues such as teenage pregnancy.

The constraints of work and domestic schedules on women's leisure

This article reports on the findings of a research project which examined the effects of hours of work on the leisure behaviour of men and women. By focusing on the women in the sample, the evidence shows that womens scheduling priorities are shaped by domestic rather than leisure concerns. Due to their higher leisure expectations, male shift workers have greater difficulty in adjusting to shift work than women. The relationship between womens domestic, leisure and work time is structured within a cultural framework that is distinct from, yet clearly influenced by that of men. The findings imply the need to revise approaches to the theoretical division between work and leisure time, by prioritizing the study of domestic and gender relationships. Proposals for the lifting of hours of work restrictions imposed on women must be studied in the light of such wider cultural analysis.

‘Wii play as a family’: the rise in family-centred video gaming

The idea that video gaming is for the ‘whole family’, to be played in the communal space of the living room, has gained momentum since the release of Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation and Nintendo Wii. This article addresses the growing popularity in family-centred video gaming in the British context by examining the design, promotion, instatement and use of this new media technology in the home. Research on the domestication of media technology is drawn on to examine the social impulses and conditions under which family-centred video gaming is introduced in the home as a domestic leisure activity. In response to parental anxieties about children’s disengagement from family life through new media use, industry-led claims that video gaming can foster family harmony are appealing. Representations of family gaming in the Wii commercials are analysed in relation to the findings of recent independent surveys on emerging patterns of gaming between parents and children. Policy issues emerge about the potential social and educational benefits of family-centred gaming and assumptions about them made in surveys and government-commissioned reports. Important questions are raised about the family dynamics of video gaming and children’s potential to benefit from this family-centred media entertainment in diverse family contexts.

Performing the Crisis

Abstract The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and The Full Monty (1997), produced outside Hollywood in Australia and Great Britain, respectively, were widely screened and enthusiastically received by a global audience. In this article, we argue that these two films were part of a panic over the perceived “crisis in masculinity” produced by the decline of traditional male manual work and increases in womens economic and sexual autonomy—a panic that has been widely discussed and debated (Segal, Burgess, Lupton and Barclay). The films mark an important discursive shift in the representation of male sexuality and identity in the late twentieth century. Drawing on Judith Butlers claim in Gender Trouble that gender is profoundly performative, we explore the ways in which performance becomes central in two narratives that take as their subject the literal staging of gender and sexuality in the form of a drag show and a striptease. We also consider the significance of the foregrounding of fatherhood in a remodeled masculinity offered by the two films and ask why paternity is represented as crucial to this process. We therefore consider the different ways in which these two texts may be said to be both responding to and helping to construct new discourses of fatherhood and a performative masculinity.

Networked intimacy: Algorithmic friendship and scalable sociality

This article asks whether a crisis of intimacy exists in the digital era to provoke an enquiry into the extent to which social media are transforming or transformed by personal relationships. I address the nature of late modern intimacy through the lens of ‘friendship’ and consider why Facebook embraces this affiliation. I then ask whether contemporary forms of public intimacy pre-date or are configured by social media. Software-centred approaches including algorithmically engineered friendship are considered to cast light on public intimacy, privacy and trust. The implications of cross-cultural ethnographic research by Miller et al. are then considered to highlight user agency. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp have the potential to liberate certain users by controlling group size and degree of privacy, as ‘scalable sociality’ in a polymedia environment. I conclude by arguing for a synthesis of political economic perspectives and cross-cultural studies to emphasise user agency in future research.

Representations of familialism in the British popular media

This article attempts to contribute to the re-centring of the family in cultural debates. It explores ways in which nation and race are appropriated to fix ideas about white familial identities today. A white, nuclear version of familialism continues to be naturalized and privileged within representations of the family in the British popular media. Three distinctive versions of the family are identified: an ‘ideal’ nuclear version, a ‘dysfunctional’ family, and a ‘hybrid’ transformative category. Familial meanings are used to condemn defective families and the perverse activities of its individual members. Yet they are also drawn on to describe alternative, trans-nuclear, transformative relationships. Despite tensions between individualism and familialism and important attempts to re-invent the family along democratic lines, the white nuclear family remains a powerful ideological device for naturalizing hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality and therefore has implications for ongoing debates about identity politics.

Comedies of Sexual Morality and Female Singlehood

A group of popular television situation comedies circulating among Anglophone nations since the 1990s show how situation comedy has been reshaped to feature the lives of single women. White, professional women are being identified as the source of shifting lifestyles and morals in comedies such as Sex and the City (HBO and Channel 4), Absolutely Fabulous (BBC TV), The Vicar of Dibley (BBC), and Ally McBeal (Fox and Channel 4). These are echoed in films such as Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequel which explores anxieties associated with finding a partner, sustaining intimate relationships and breaking down traditional forms of gender identity. Key themes of dating, being ‘unattached’, working in a masculine profession, non-marital sex, lone parenthood and cohabitation are delved into from the perspective of heterosexual urban women in their thirties and forties. Focusing on the independence and sexuality of the single woman, these comedies are morality plays structured by a comedic engagement with gendered identity.

Media Old and New

The vibrancy of women’s literary writing in the UK from the 1970s to the present is matched by the diversity of women’s journalistic writing over the same period. The unstable boundary between news and literary journalism, made fluid by rapid social, cultural, and technological change, makes the field difficult to define. Consequently, journalism is often treated as a devalued cultural form.1 Yet the importance of this area is indicated by the considerable number of successful novelists who began their careers as journalists — Angela Carter (1940–92), Helen Fielding, and Zoe Heller, for instance — and by literary authors who moved into journalism, such as Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, and Bidisha.2

THE MATERIAL FORM OF THE TELEVISION SET: A cultural history

This article offers a unique study of the material form of the television receiver between the 1930s and 1960s. Very little has been written to date on the history of the television set as an artefact. Yet its design and appearance played a major role in the acceptance of television in the home. The meanings of television sets are explored, from the design of wooden cabinets as family furniture to the shaping of portable sets as symbols of progress. A case study of British events is conducted, with reference made to American and other nations’ developments in so far as they relate to Britains television receiver history. The article confirms that the material form of the television receiver contributed to a narrative of domesticity and progress by reconfiguring the relationship between home and communication technology. The fusion of craft and futurist ideas in design reflected tensions about the receiver as an expression of traditional domestic values, of progress and modernity, and as an icon.