Abstract
Informed by extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter interrogates the normalised harms of illicit drug use and other forms of hedonistic consumption in the party spaces of Ibiza by amalgamating insights from three key theoretical approaches to the crime-consumerism nexus: cultural criminology, ultra-realism and deviant leisure. The chapter conceptualises Ibiza as a ‘Disneyized’ party space, using four key themes of ‘Disneyization’: (1) theming, (2) branding, (3) hybrid consumption and (4) performative labour. (1) Theming focuses upon how consumer capitalism is served by the merging of corporate-generated ‘staged authenticity’ and ‘bottom-up’ subterranean themes of no-holds-barred hedonism. (2) Branding explores how the island has created a hierarchy of party spaces in which individuals can conform to consumerism’s competitive individualism and distinguish themselves from consumers of supposedly “lower” taste. (3) Hybrid consumption looks at how the mainstream trend of merging multiple forms of consumption into one space has extended to the illicit aspects of the night-time economy (NTE), where the illicit drugs market and licit NTE converge to the extent that distinction between licit and illicit collapses in these bounded spaces. (4) Performative labour investigates the harms that stem from the affective and emotional qualities required by those employed in the low-pay service sectors of Ibiza’s party spaces, characteristics which are representative of employment in post-industrial capitalism more broadly.
You’ll never take it off. You’re on holiday in the trendiest hotel in Ibiza, and you want to look your best when you go out, whether you’re on the beach or clubbing. You don’t want to waste time on queues either. You just want to shop like a star and indulge your every whim. You’ll have all this and much more in a single bracelet. Well, it’s not just a bracelet, it’s the new Smart VIB and it comes full of advantages, not to mention social presence, so you can stay connected to your social networks all the time. Everyone will envy you. We’ve got a smart VIB with your name on it. New smart VIB. Be more VIP. (Ushuaia Beach Hotel, Ibiza, promotional material, 2014)
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Notes
- 1.
Dr Turner and Professor Hayward’s fieldwork visits to Ibiza were made possible by generous funding provided by The Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Coventry University, UK.
- 2.
Here we see yet another echo of the Disneyization thesis in that ‘consumers are provided with narratives that make consumption part of the experience itself, while they go to great lengths in order to ensure that the actual act of consumption is not explicitly acknowledged’ (Smith 2014: 78).
- 3.
On this point, see the work of Nelson Schwartz (2016) and specifically his observation that the so-called velvet rope experience is reversing the ‘great democratization of travel and leisure’.
- 4.
Tourists in Ibiza differentiated themselves on numerous other levels and in ever-decreasing circles, including clothing, spaces to be seen in on the island, type of alcohol consumed, behaviour related to alcohol consumption, and use and non-use of illicit drugs. With regards to the latter, and following Thornton’s (1995: 3) assertion that club cultures are ‘taste cultures… [and thus] riddled with cultural hierarchies’, it is interesting to note that drugs themselves were also subject to ‘faux luxury’ branding. Ecstasy tablets, for example, were embossed/stamped with names like ‘Gold Leaf’, ‘Louis Vuitton’ and ‘Rolex’ in a bid to symbolically distinguish them.
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Hayward, K., Turner, T. (2019). ‘Be More VIP’: Deviant Leisure and Hedonistic Excess in Ibiza’s ‘Disneyized’ Party Spaces. 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_6
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