Samantha Holland

'Bend it like Patel' - centring 'race', ethnicity and gender in feminist analysis of women's football in England.

This article focuses on the experiences of Black women and one Indian Hindu woman in football in England. The discussions draw on survey and interview research to theorize gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity. The research represents a questionnaire survey of women’s teams and 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews; seven with players and seven with ‘officials’. The survey provides data on players, coaches and managers at women’s football clubs registered with the Football Association (FA) in the North of England. The questionnaire data on ‘race’, ethnicity and gender demonstrate that football’s organizational structures in the region are White and gendered. The interview data highlights the gendered and racialized experiences of women as they begin to play and continue to play football at the club level. What emerges from the interviews is how ‘racial’ difference is constituted for some women footballers. The article analyses the processes that construct gender and ‘race’ as interlocking systems of relationships by using Glenn’s (1999) theoretical framework identifying three processes through which ‘race’ and gender are mutually constituted: representation, micro-interaction and social structure. We raise both theoretical and methodological issues that indicate the need for further rigorous theorizing in the sociology of sport of women’s interwoven experiences of gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity.

Grandfatherhood and Leisure

Abstract This paper explores the meanings and values attached to grandfatherhood for a range of older men who have recently retired from paid employment. It focuses on the spaces of grandfatherhood and the meanings they attach to time spent with grandchildren. The empirical study involved 12 semi‐structured interviews with grandfathers from diverse ethnic backgrounds. The data are examined from a theoretical position that recognises the significance of unequal gender relations within families in determining choice and autonomy and also the potential of leisure in the construction of identities that have the potential to challenge gender expectations and contribute to personal enrichment. This exploratory piece of work demonstrates the tensions, ambivalences and complexities of grandfatherhood for these men. The research suggests questions for future research that take into account differences across ethnicity whilst exploring shifting gender relations within families.

Preparation and determination: three vignettes of gendered leisure

This paper examines the leisure narratives of three individual women who attended pole dancing classes once a week in a city in the North of England. The research was based on participant observation of pole dancing classes and individual interviews with 15 women, nine of whom were students and six were teachers. This paper uses the pole exercise classes as a departure point for an examination of how the women negotiated the time and cost, and how they motivated themselves to continue attending despite various difficulties which they faced such as childcare, pressures of work, unsupportive partners, or just general lethargy. A key part of the overall experience was the sense of achievement that they managed to attend at all. What added to the enjoyment of the experience was the sense of triumph that, yet again, they had overcome the odds and managed to attend, illustrating that for the women who somehow endeavour to find a way to attend, ‘finding a way’ is itself part of the pleasure.

Who is the ‘girly’ girl? Tomboys, hyper-femininity and gender

This study is based on research which focused on tomboy girls and their shared leisure time with their mothers. The research was a small-scale exploratory study of 20 women in the UK; data were collected in Yorkshire in the north of England and London in the south-east. The focus of the research was on the topic of tomboy identities. In this study, we explore the nuances and ambiguities around what a tomboy is by using an indirect (and perhaps unexpected) but nonetheless illuminating route: asking what constitutes a ‘girly-girl’, the polar opposite of the tomboy. We are interested in how she compares with the tomboy, and how the tomboy participants talked about her. We conclude that the girly-girl is a powerful cultural figure, part of a narrative in which women are sexualised and objectified but she is also a form of polemic; she is contrived to be a marker of the worst excesses of hegemonic ‘femininity’. It is through this lens that we can view and understand the tomboy, and the anxieties about the tomboy experienced by those around her.

Three generations of women's leisure: Changes, challenges and continuities

This paper examines the leisure lives of twelve women, from four families, across three generations. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with ‘trios’ of three generations of women, I examine changes and shifts in womens leisure across the life-course and within families. At the outset of the research I was interested primarily in identifying changes, but soon the data revealed that the women transmitted both habits and understanding of leisure down the generations. An important question for gender studies is if women transmit leisure values and practices across generations does this mean that womens leisure lives remain unchanged since early feminist leisure theory? The challenges for the participants of this study were to achieve some autonomy and change in their leisure patterns, even though they demonstrated that many of those patterns remained extremely similar.

A Thing of Beauty

The next two chapters function much as does taking a big breath between exertions. Chapters 4 to 6 focused on the classes, so this chapter discusses the positive and negative experiences of and outcomes of pole classes, a sort of midway rounding-up if you like. Carol Rambo et al. (2006, p. 224) argue that there are other narrative possibilities for a positive, active identity, where women enjoy their bodies, enjoy the attention and are aware of (and possibly sympathetic to) feminism; in other words, ‘we own ourselves’. Conversely, Angela McRobbie (1997, p. 230) has noted the lack of ‘active role models’ which portray an active and energetic femininity. Arguably, pole classes provide those active role models. In previous chapters I have stated that, of course, pole classes are not going to achieve an organised, politicised movement which calls for improvements to women’s lives within a patriarchal system, and nor would they claim to do so (as, indeed, neither would any gym or dance school). However, they are an organised movement and they do call for improvements to women’s lives, however nominally: from the women who now have an improved, or hitherto absent, sense of positive body image; to those women who never thought they would enjoy exercise but now do; to those women who find the sociability of the lessons boosts their confidence and self-esteem; to those women who never thought they would end up running a business but now own a pole studio or school.

Introduction: Nostalgia, Stuff, Ghosts, and the Everyday

What is a vintage item, a dress, say, or a cup or a handbag? It is historical artefact and personal possession; it’s not in a museum behind glass, it is next to your skin, or held against your lips, or carried with you wherever you go. As a used item it holds something of its previous owners inside itself, which in turn imbues it with emotion and value. That ‘something’ may be a smell or a physical clue such as a hair or a stain; or it may be a name or story, or just a feeling. It is a ghost, but you can hold it in your hands.

Conclusion: “I Like Living with the Past”

Today, just before I started writing this chapter, I looked at a photograph of my grandmother and my uncle on holiday in the 1940s: she wearing a new holiday best frock, he in his schoolboy shorts and tweed jacket, both smiling. The outfit and hairstyle worn by my grandmother could easily (and willingly) be worn now by any one of the female participants. My uncle’s outfit would not now be worn by a modern little boy (unless he was going to a 1940s event maybe!). In the background the street is different, but recognisable. Perhaps as towns, places, clothes, language, technology, and social mores all become less recognisable, we look back more often to try to keep a connection, to stop the clocks, to keep the faith. If I was able to step into the world of the photograph there would feasibly be much I wouldn’t understand, such as slang of the time, how to speak or act, even body language. My position as an educated professional woman from a working-class background would be an unusual one – in fact, I would more likely be working in the same steelwork factory as my grandmother. However, there would be much that would be familiar, and things would probably seem quite difficult without the technology that we now take for granted. The ghosts in things become the only connection we can keep to a world which is becoming ever smaller, more and more like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I didn’t expect this book to turn out to be about hauntings, and freighted with emotion, as it is – and I return to hauntings, below. I thought it would be about leisure and gender, shopping and storage and it is. But I did know that research participants will always show the researcher things they hadn’t considered or expected, and take the research in unplanned directions.

‘Search for Hours in a Dark Room’: Finding Vintage

This chapter examines how the participants found their vintage items, which represents much more than a shopping trip: it is habit, chase, knowledge, taste, luck, and persistence. This chapter also seeks to contextualise their shopping habits within the history of second-hand markets, and how changes in the markets have impacted on how the participants shop. Tim Edensor (2008, p. 313) writes about his journey to work through a modern northern city, and how the

Studying Vintage (Or, What I Did)

The guiding principle of this book is to centralise the personal meanings, and the routinised embodiment and materiality, of people who choose to wear and collect vintage clothes and objects, to find ‘the ways in which a setting uniquely makes sense’ (Hine 2015, p. 31). The guiding principle of this book is necessarily and implicitly (inherently, in fact) about the process of the methodology and data collection, in order to conceptualise vintage lives. My belief in the importance of an account of the methodology is best justified by Beverley Skeggs (2002, p. 17) who asserts that it provides an underpinning for the rest of the [research] as methodology underpins all theory. To ignore questions of methodology is to assume that knowledge comes from nowhere allowing knowledge makers to abdicate responsibility for their productions and representations … Methodology is itself theory. [my emphasis]