Masculinities, affect and the (re)place(ment) of stardom in Formula One fan leisure practices

Writing from an autoethnographic perspective, this article explores male leisure practices via the mediated relationships fans enter into with stars. More specifically, my own fandom for Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve is the locus of study, revealing how this affective investment shapes and furnishes my corresponding leisure practices. Notions of gendered 'performativity' come to the fore, with my own displays evoking, enacting and revealing oscillating performances of masculinity. Moreover, there are interesting gendered dynamics that such fan leisure practices flag in terms of the intersection of female/male relationships and the potential 'fantasy' and/or narcissistic readings that a male fan identifying with and performing as another male sport star afford. Finally, my research reveals paradoxes for contemporary masculinities, with fans reliant upon mediation and commodification to facilitate and sustain their performative roles. © 2011 Taylor & Francis

Walking with light and the discontinuous experience of urban change

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2020 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). This paper is concerned with the affective power of light, darkness, and illumination and their role in exposing and obscuring processes of rapid urban change. Little academic attention has focused on how lighting informs multiple, overlapping, and intersecting urban temporalities and mediates our experience of an ever-changing city. This paper foregrounds a walk through the illuminated city at night as an epistemic opportunity to develop an embodied account of material and temporal change in ways that disrupt the aesthetic organisation of the sensible world at night. By detailing the discontinuous experience of walking through differently lit spaces, the paper develops novel ways of conceptualising the experience of urban change that unsettle common understandings of subjectivity, temporality, and the city. The paper draws on a single night's walk from Canning Town to Canary Wharf in east London – an area that has recently undergone rapid change, including the erection of enclaves of high-rise development. By accentuating the shared experiences of walking with light, we reveal the affective capacities of light and dark to conceal and expose wider material, embodied, and temporal urban changes but also how we might challenge the organisation of the nocturnal field of the sensible