Abstract
This chapter explores how structural feminist theories have informed leisure research over the last four decades. Structural feminist theories are broadly situated with a focus on liberal and radical feminist theories. We suggest how these foundational feminist theories have influenced key ideas about popular culture and leisure. These considerations of structural feminist theories are extended to the development of structural feminist critiques of leisure in six bodies of work by different scholars, within three central contexts: health, physical activity, and popular culture. Collectively, we hope to highlight the value, diversity, and complexity of structural feminist theories of leisure to critique and challenge the social structures and power relations that limit possibilities for all people.
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Notes
- 1.
We classify liberal feminist theory as a structural feminist theory following Aitchison’s (2013) inclusion of liberal feminist theory in her broad category of structural/social feminist approaches (in contrast to poststructural/cultural feminist approaches). We acknowledge, however, that other categorizations of feminist approaches do not consider liberal feminist theory a structural feminist theory and instead delineate it as an “individually focused” feminist theory (e.g., Given 2008, p. 332).
- 2.
The term “feminism” in its current meaning was not used until the twentieth century, however, as Pilcher and Whelehan (2004) note, “it has become common practice to refer to early writers and thinkers—for example the eighteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft—as ‘feminist’ in acknowledgement of the connections between their arguments and those of modern feminism” (p. 48). Specifically, Mary Wollstonecraft is widely recognized as a liberal feminist (Tong 2014).
- 3.
For our purposes, de Beauvoir is classified within radical feminism. At the time of writing The Second Sex, she did not define herself as a feminist (of any kind), but she later identified herself as a radical feminist and discussed a wide range of ways of being a radical feminist (Card 2003). De Beauvoir is also widely recognized as an existentialist feminist (Tong 2014).
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Valtchanov, B.L., Parry, D.C. (2017). Reclaiming the “F-word”: Structural Feminist Theories of Leisure. In: Spracklen, K., Lashua, B., Sharpe, E., Swain, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56479-5_32
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