Abstract
Drawing upon two years of ethnographic research into the spatially transgressive practice of parkour and freerunning, this chapter attempts to explain and untangle some of the contradictions that surround this popular lifestyle sport and its exclusion from our hyper-regulated cities. While the existing criminological wisdom suggests that these practices are a form of politicised resistance, this chapter positions parkour and freerunning as hyper-conformist to the underlying values of consumer capitalism and explains how late capitalism has created a contradiction for itself in which it must stoke desire for these lifestyle practices whilst also excluding their free practice from central urban spaces. Drawing on the emergent deviant leisure perspective’s interest in issues of infantilisation and adultification, this chapter explores the lifeworlds of young people who are attempting to navigate the challenges and anxieties of early adulthood. For the young people in this study, consumer capitalism’s commodification of rebellious iconography offered unique identities of ‘cool individualism’ and opportunities for flexibilised employment, while the post-industrial ‘creative city’ attempted to harness parkour’s practice, prohibitively if necessary, into approved spatial contexts under the buzzwords of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’. Therefore, this chapter engages in a critical criminological reappraisal of issues of transgression, deviance and resistance in urban space under consumer capitalism.
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Notes
- 1.
On 11 January 2017, parkour was formally recognised as a sport within the UK, making its governing body, ParkourUK, eligible for funding from Sport England and other funding bodies. Sport England’s most recent ‘Active Lives’ survey found that approximately 96,700 people regularly participate in parkour in England.
- 2.
Parkour Generations, Storror, Storm, Tempest Freerunning, 3Run, Take Flight, Airborn Academy, Apeuro, Verang, Lachette and Etre-Fort are just a few examples of the parkour teams and brands throughout the parkour community. Talented traceurs have featured in TV shows such as Ninja Warrior UK, along with other reality TV shows and feature films.
- 3.
The reader should note that at one stage of the research I was also living with some of the traceurs (see Ancrum 2012, on living in the field). While other ethnographic research into parkour appears to focus exclusively on the parkour jam and the embodied spatial practice of parkour itself, I wanted to contextualise the role that parkour played within the wider orbits of these young men’s lives as they attempted to make the difficult transition into adulthood under late capitalism and how this shaped their entrepreneurial efforts to move into the proliferating markets of commodified lifestyle sports. This involved being more deeply involved in the lives of my participants outside of the parkour jams, training sessions and exhibitions in order to understand the role and meaning parkour occupied within the wider struggles, challenges and anxieties of these youth transitions and how they shaped their underlying motivations and attraction to parkour and freerunning.
- 4.
It should be noted here that cultural criminological analyses have made significant theoretical advances in recent years, drawing upon cutting-edge criminological theory and continental philosophy to develop more sophisticated and materialist accounts of deviance within its cultural and political-economic context. While the criminological critique of ‘resistance’ as a concept was once the exclusive domain of ultra-realist criminological thinkers (Hall and Winlow 2007), cultural criminologists such as Keith Hayward (2015) have made calls for criminologists to be more circumspect in their use of the term resistance. Hayward has called for scholars to develop greater conceptual clarity around the term resistance and acknowledge that genuine political resistance occurs very rarely, or risk ‘being swept away if it continues to rely on tales of crypto-Marxist resistance, long-past-their-sell-by-date criminological concepts like moral panic theory, or tautological psycho-political aphorisms like “masculinity causes male crime”’ (Hayward 2015: 310).
- 5.
This chapter does not underestimate the centrality of embodied experience to the enjoyment of parkour. To reduce the traceurs’ motivations for practising parkour as a practice in external and aesthetic identity formation would be unfair and inaccurate, as the embodied and experiential practice of parkour informs this identity as well. Much like other transgressive urban and spatial practices, the corporeal sensations, affective experiences and intimately embodied connection with space and place is undeniably at the heart of traceurs’ motivations. This tension between internalised embodied sensations and the externalised and instrumental use of parkour as identity, spectacle and career can be conceived of as a tension running through parkour, reflective of the wider tension within the deviant leisure nexus it occupies.
- 6.
This is, I argue, a significant oversight of existing ethnographic research into parkour and other cultural lifestyle sports which have disproportionately focused on the parkour jam and its practice in the city. This is partially a product of the theoretical approach taken, with much ethnographic research exclusively focusing on the phenomenological, emotional and embodied experience of its practice (Brunner 2011; Fuggle 2008; Garrett 2013; Saville 2008), or upon the spatial dynamics of its practice (Atkinson 2009; Daskalaki et al. 2008; Lamb 2014). Consequently, research has paid disproportionate attention to the parkour jams instead of a more comprehensive exploration of parkour within the wider lived experience, anxieties, dreams and desires of these young people.
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Raymen, T. (2019). The Paradox of Parkour: Conformity, Resistance and Spatial Exclusion. In: Raymen, T., Smith, O. (eds) Deviant Leisure. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17736-2_16
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