Playing in the Woods: Youth, Leisure and the Performance of Gender Relations in Rural Newfoundland

• Published in: Annals of Leisure Research
• Main Authors: Power, Nicole Gerarda, Norman, Moss E., Dupré, Kathryne
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis 2011
• Subjects: Canada; Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/8486/; https://research.library.mun.ca/8486/1/Norman_et_al_Playing_in_the_Woods.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2011.615713

Based on qualitative interviews and focus groups with youth (12-24 years) living in rural, coastal Newfoundland, Canada, we examine how leisure practices within this context served to reproduce and naturalise localised gender relations. More specifically, we argue that the participants drew upon dominant discursive constructions of rural leisure to reiteratively enact a binary distinction between the ‘town’ as a space of constraint, youth-adult tensions, and consumerism in contrast to the freedom and privacy of the ‘woods’. This dichotomy was mapped onto gender binaries, where the town was coded as feminine and the woods masculine. We argue that these constructions served to mark the boundaries of normative gender leisure practices in the production of embodied gender subjectivities.