Work and Leisure

Gender, work and leisure 79knowledge cannot be produced in ways that are separated from values,feelings and points of view.Is feminist leisure research stuck in a ghetto or in‘theory wars’?In 1998 Rosemary Deem used her keynote speech to the Leisure StudiesAssociation International Conference on ‘Gender and the Ghetto’ to revisitthe state of research work on gender and leisure at the end of the twentiethcentury. Positively, she thought that:the small number of researchers studying gender and leisure in the westernworld have produced important new knowledge about women. They havealso informed both academic and policy communities about the ways inwhich leisure and sport are socially and culturally constructed by differentwomen in the same and different contexts, and hence thereby imbuedwith particular meanings in which gender identities, gender roles, andgender power relations are often significant. There are of course, theoreticaland political disagreements between those working in the genderand leisure ghetto, but it is a sign of intellectual maturity that suchdisagreements can be and are aired and interrogated.(Deem 1998: 4)However, she surmised that, for most leisure scholars, gender is still used aslittle more than a variable or a ‘grudging acceptance’ that gender is relevant,in some unspecified way, to many women, and sometimes to some men. Shemused that this is a result of some researchers just not wanting to examinegender as an issue or, equally, being fearful, from their own observation,that gender and leisure research is a ghetto in which they may be trapped,‘for ghetto studies rarely attract much status or funding’ (Deem 1998: 4). Ifthe ‘mainstream’ did ‘discover’ gender it would not necessarily be on thesame terms as feminists or proponents of masculinity theories and mayhave very different academic and political goals. If, she argued, leisure andgender researchers made more alliances with other researchers interested infeminisms and masculinity theories it could bring gender studies withinwider perspectives and research problematics. But she also wonderedwhetherwe have to completely abandon studies of women’s leisure: provided thatwe locate those studies within clear parameters and with a recognition ofthe many differences that there are between women, then in my view it isstill worthwhile to continue to conduct such research. Nor does it onlymean we can only do small scale research, valuable though this is. Thedevelopment of analysis of complex quantitative data sets about various