Work and Leisure

78 Judy Whitenot the preserve of a specialist group . . . [One of the differencesthat feminism made was to] insist on the common ownership andshared production of feminist ideas, seeing theorising as alwaysgrounded in a context, howsoever disembodied its male practitionersmight pronounce it.(Stanley and Wise 2000: 276)Now, there is a situation in which the place of theory in feminism has becomeconsiderably more like its place in the traditional disciplines (middle-rangetheories of different kinds are developed, with a ‘grand’ theory – sociological,anthropological or literary – standing over them). But superordinate over allis ‘social theory’, which is presumed to ‘travel’ across disciplinary distinctionsand to have general, even universal, applicability. In the ‘leisure studies andgender debate’ examined by Deem (1986, 1988) and explored earlier, thereseems to be a desire for leisure to be incorporated within traditional disciplinesfor issues of inclusion, safety and generalisability. But the distinctive roleof theory in feminism for women and leisure studies is not admitted and thedevelopment of grounded theory developed through researching the leisurepractices of women remains marginalised by feminist theorists in the academy.Such ‘Theorists’ have become part of the mainstream in the academyand have become adept at defending their positions. Echoing Stanley andWise, the question arises as to how leisure feminism theory, as earlier understoodand practised and examined in this chapter, and seen as ‘feminist theorising’,has become ‘feminist Theorising’ – the specialist activity of a few. Does‘feminist Theory’ belong to feminism in general or does it have primarilyacademic allegiance?In the third area, originally, feminism rejected scientistic claims that knowingthe category ‘women’ is best done from the outside; it situated thefeminist knower as fully within and as a part of the analysis.The feminist knower is a woman with a point of view located in a contextof time, place and personal specificities . . . The difference that feminismmade was to insist that knowledge is always partial, local, and grounded.Now there is a situation in which ‘feminist Theory’ has taken on many ofthe characteristics of ‘Theory’, including its implicit claims to producetransferable general knowledge. The attempts to ground productionof feminist theory in the location and situatedness of the knower arecriticised as an essentialist claim about ‘experience’.(Stanley and Wise 2000: 277)Again, there are trends in gender research in leisure which attempt to devaluethe legitimacy of the knower, and to devalue or ignore the possibility ofsustaining a multiple and varied group of ‘contenders’, each of whom has acontribution to make, but none of whom can represent the ‘whole’. Feminist