Lisbeth A. Berbary

Poststructural Writerly Representation: Screenplay as Creative Analytic Practice

Based on the need to expand literature on sorority women and explore all women’s negotiations of gendered discourses, I conducted an ethnographic study of a southern sorority grounded in a priori notions of discourse, discipline, subjectivity, and performativity as theorized by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. The findings of this study were represented through a creative analytic screenplay that illuminated the ways sorority women learned gendered expectations, were disciplined towards compliance, and sometimes resisted or reinterpreted expectations of the dominant discourse of “ladylike.” This manuscript explores the use of the ethnographic screenplay as data representation, specifically focusing on the methods of creating composite characters, content, settings, scenes, and director’s comments. Exploring the use of this creative analytic practice helps to challenge notions of “traditional research” and makes space for “doing representation differently.”

“Don’t Be a Whore, That’s Not Ladylike”: Discursive Discipline and Sorority Women’s Gendered Subjectivity

While multiple and competing understandings of sororities exist in popular culture, academic research on sororities tends to homogenize the experience of sorority women, simplifying their existence to a quantitative understanding of specific behaviors such as those associated with binge drinking, eating disorders, and heterosexuality. Specifically, it ignores processes of discursive discipline that converge to disseminate social expectations, maintain dominant discourse, conceal processes of social control, and limit possibilities for gendered subjectivity. Therefore, in order to provide a more complex understanding of sorority women’s gendered subjectivity and to produce research cognizant of cultural discourse, this study explored sorority women’s experiences through an ethnographic lens informed by poststructural theory. Represented by creative analytic practice as an ethnographic screenplay, this research provides contextualized insight into societal relationships of power and gender as they produce and reproduce specific historical and cultural regimes. In particular, I contextualize the experiences of sorority women, explore the dissemination and discipline of femininity within the sorority, and show how such discipline relates to Foucauldian theorizations.

The American sorority girl recast: an ethnographic screenplay of leisure in context

Current research on women in sororities in the US offers only a myopic picture of the culture. The purpose of this post-structural feminist ethnography was to explore American sorority culture as one way to expose the complicated relationships between discourse and gendered performances of self. Using the representational strategy of an ethnographic screenplay, we illustrate how sorority women are constituted in relation to performances of femininity and expectations of appropriate “ladylike” behaviours. In doing so, we highlight the processes of gendered subjectivity and illustrate the ways that women are constituted within discourse within their lived leisure experience.

Eight Points for Reflection: Revisiting Scaffolding for Improvisational Humanist Qualitative Inquiry

Grounded in current shifts toward postqualitative conversations, we provide methodological scaffolding for qualitative scholars and students based on our use of improvisational inquiry. We have attempted to balance the fine line between postpositivist expectations for overdetermined structure and improvisational, postqualitative expectations for fluidity by creating a scaffolding sous rature, that is, a scaffolding that simultaneously provides support and possibility with the recognition that such structure is strategic, inadequate yet necessary, but also must continuously be opened up and reimagined (Derrida, 1974). We feel that our eight-point scaffolding for improvisational inquiry provides scholars and students with a strategic way to satisfy traditional expectations of methodological design, yet also push research toward the forefront of the current postqualitative conversations.

The dangerous deconstruction of gender: narrative inquiry of masculinities in a popular children's book

The leisure pastime of childrens reading transmits important cultural messages about gender and identity. The messages relayed through the guise of innocent characters, settings, and plots many times reinforce dominant discourses and expectations of cultural appropriateness. In order to highlight the ways that reading can become a mechanism for the dissemination of heteronormative notions of gender, we explored the popular childrens book The dangerous book for boys. Using the methodology of narrative inquiry, we analyzed the text to illuminate the leisurely ‘tellings’ and ‘not tellings’ of meta-narratives related to the dominant discourse of masculinities. Data and results are presented using creative analytic practice in a quiz format that might be found in a young adult magazine. This quiz shows that only three typical archetypes, The Beav, Bond, and Boone, are presented as appropriate masculinities in the book. We concluded that ‘a book for all boys’ should be more representative of the multiple masculinities found within socio-cultural discourse.

Dialogues for re-imagined praxis: using theory in practice to transform structural, ideological, and discursive “realities” with/in communities

ABSTRACT At the close of this special issue, Re-imagining Therapeutic Recreation: Transformative Practices and Innovative Approaches, our aim is to create an action-oriented document that points to a series of conversations we can continue at conferences, in classrooms, and in practice. In keeping with the call for reflexivity, we hope the document will be a way to ignite further critical reflections and dialogues about the taken-for-granted ways we relate with others and to our practices. As the path of change unfolds, we celebrate the multiple ways of getting there. To help us in this critical reflection and conversation we offer a vignette providing insight into the experiences of one individual and engage a plurality of philosophies and theories to create three critical, socially engaged conversations we see to be crucial to the endeavour of re-imaging and creating change in practices of therapeutic recreation. As much as these dialogues are difficult and challenging, they contain within them possibilities for inspired moments of insight and awareness ripe with possibilities for celebration, playfulness, and change towards social justice.

Too good at fitting in: methodological consequences and ethical adjustments

When embarking on ethnographic fieldwork, a researcher must carefully consider how to present oneself when entering the field. Presentations of self become particularly important when the culture under study maintains narrowly defined expectations for personal appearance and behavior. The more defined the expectations, the more important it is for the researcher to “read” those expectations and make deliberate choices concerning her appearance, body language, use of language, and overall style. Such choices can have tangible consequences concerning a researcher’s access to the field, in regard to both the physical access of the spaces and the social access of the lived experiences of participants within those spaces. In this article, I explore the use of my own self-presentation as a method of gaining physical and social access to ethnographic sorority spaces, and then consider those methodological consequences that may ensue when a researcher becomes “too good at fitting in.”

Questions for Postqualitative Inquiry: Conversations to Come

ABSTRACT The past 40 years of leisure sciences affirms not only the urgency of diversely informed investigations of leisure phenomena but also the fields commitment to forward contributions of social relevance, methodological innovation, and insightful critique. This legacy owes a considerable debt to qualitative researchers who reimagined the paradigmatic purview and methodological possibilities for leisure scholarship. At the threshold of the next 40 years, we leverage postqualitative inquiry to pry a modest space for continued intellectual and methodological diversity. Specifically, we revisit Berbary and Boless (2014) proposed scaffolding sous erasure (Derrida, 1974) for humanist, qualitative research to explore points of departure for postqualitative inquiry. We question the implications such a departure may hold for “data,” “theory,” “analysis,” and “representation” within non-humanist onto-epistemologies of post-qualitative research. Ultimately, we argue for postqualitative research as a promising, humane, and hopeful trajectory for our future, adding to our already rich legacy.

Thinking Through Post-structuralism in Leisure Studies: A Detour Around “Proper” Humanist Knowledges

Similar to any paradigm of thought, humanism has its limitations and should be met with suspicion (St. Pierre, Int J Qual Stud Educ 13(5):477–515, 2000). Scholars in our field have already taken up this call to question humanism by showing its limits and making space for more critical humanist theories (Parry et al., Leisure Sci 35(1):81–87, 2013). However, such critiques tend to remain with/in critical theory, feminism(s), and critical race theories, rather than stepping outside of humanism into post* theories such as post-structuralism, queer theory, and post-humanism. Recognizing the usefulness of engaging in a pluralism of theories to understand, critique, and deconstruct leisure phenomena, this chapter encourages scholars to consider stepping outside of humanism to show the strength of also employing post* theories in our theorizing and qualitative leisure research.

En/Activist Drag: Kings Reflect on Queerness, Queens, and Questionable Masculinities

ABSTRACT In recent years, media attention to drag performers has increased transforming the once-hidden leisure activity of gay men and lesbians into a publicly recognized phenomenon. Many of these representations of drag have fallen short in offering reflective illustrations of the connections among gender identity, performance, misogyny, patriarchy, and activism. In response, we find ourselves studying the gendered life experiences of drag kings to illuminate the variety of experiences that shape their gendered lives. We specifically look to our re-storied, visual, composite narratives of eight kings experiences to show how drag functions as a context where social-political-capitalist transformation can be enacted.