Leisure, activism, and the animation of the urban environment

This editorial sets the conceptual frame of reference for the special issue. It examines key themes at the intersection of activist leisure and critical event studies. Drawing on a wide range of social and leisure theory, we establish the critical lens of the Disrupt! project. Funded by Leeds Beckett University, Disrupt! used a variety of innovative methods to interrogate how activism could animate urban spaces

Mapping the underground: An ethnographic cartography of the Leeds extreme metal scene

This article centralizes changes within Leeds’ popular ‘musicscape’, i.e., the relations between popular music and urban landscape. Focusing on Leeds’ extreme heavy metal musicscape, we map sites of the Leeds metal scene (past and present) in order to understand the shifting social relationships, effects of city centre regeneration, and the ways in which heavy metal music scenes have the ability to adapt and respond to continual modifications within the urban city. To address these concerns, we draw upon scholarship from popular music and place, heavy metal and human geography. Heavy metal scenes are a significant, yet often invisible and under-acknowledged, part of the urban cultural landscape. Mapping the metal musicscape, then, becomes an important way to understand broader physical, social, political, and cultural changes that occur to, and within, the postmodern city

Somewhere under the rainbow: Drag at the Showbar

This chapter shares ethnographic research on leisure, gender, and sexualities in relation to drag and drag performance spaces. There is a rich history and increasing popular media attention to drag performers, whom Rupp and Taylor define as “people who create their own authentic genders” by blurring the lines between masculine and feminine, often in theatre, film, music, comedy, and television. The Showbar is a drag venue in a northern English city. It occupies a two-story building under a rainbow-painted railway bridge at the southern edge of the city centre known locally, yet unofficially, as the city’s Gay Quarter. Drag has deep roots in theatre. Romaya argues that drag, in distant Western history, originated in ancient Greece where young men would play women’s roles when performing theatrical tragedies. Drag is challenging to articulate because it encompasses a vast range of gendered and sexual performances and signifiers

Reimagining Nashville : The Changing Place of Country

For as long as there has been country music, Nashville has been its spiritual if not actual home. This city of recording studios, rehearsal spaces, music shops and venues is one of a small number of cities associated with a specific music genre and the creative cultures and attention this inevitably attracts. But just as heritage is never fixed and always becoming, Nashville - and the perception of Nashville - is changing, to the point where it may no longer have the primacy it once held. In a globalised music industry where not all country music is from Nashville, nor even the United States, new ‘Nashvilles’ emerge and grow, commensurate with actual or relative decline in the prominence of the original. This might be considered a heritage dilemma (heritage ‘at risk’, and a challenge to traditional views on authenticity), but equally the argument can be made for a new heritage replacing or augmenting the old. By considering the city’s ‘at risk’ status, and assessing the fictional representation of a reimagined Nashville in the Scottish city of Glasgow in the 2018 film Wild Rose, we explore this dilemma, and its challenge to heritage convention

Female, Mosher, Transgressor: A 'Moshography' of Transgressive Practices within the Leeds Extreme Metal Scene

This paper examines and reconceptualises transgression in the Leeds extreme metal music subculture through theories of performance, embodiment and spectacle. The spectacle, for Debord (1967), is a social relation that is alienating and mediated by images, visuals, and technology. At a live extreme metal concert fans subvert social norms, challenge gendered expectations, and disregard norms of etiquette and decency. Moshing is the most visible and sensuous example of transgression within the extreme metal scene. It is an aggressive, physically demanding performance which embodies resistance to the impersonal and disillusioning world of the spectacle (Halnon, 2004). The pit is a transgressive space that is itself transgressed by women who participate in this masculine, chaotic space, disrupting the homosocial bonds of male solidarity (Gruzelier, 2007). This paper offers an ethnographic account of a female metal fan participating in the transgressive practice of moshing within the Leeds metal music scene- a moshography

Khat-chewing, moral spacing and belonging: Sociological insights into the cultural space of the mafrish in the leisure lives of older and middle-aged British-Somali males

This paper explores the relationship between khat-chewing and feelings of collective sociality amongst older and middle-aged men living in Britain's Somali diaspora. The research's core investigates the feeling of moral connectivity, a sense of belonging with others based around a shared reading of Somali-British identity. Here, the paper explores how the leisure practice of khat-chewing in the space of the mafrish symbolises this sense of belonging through promoting conventional understandings of Somaliness, connected to traditional readings of masculinity and identity. While such leisure is understood to offer a site of collective belonging for the older and middle-aged men who chew khat, it is also explored how khat-chewing creates conflicts, particularly amongst those who question the 'imagined community' constructed in such spaces. The analyses highlight how this leisure practice fractures families and the broader community, instigating a feeling of cultural dissonance amongst women and some youth, problematising the cultural foundations of identity and community constructed in khat-chewing sessions

Leisure in the time of coronavirus: A rapid response special issue

As the world grapples with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, on almost every news website, across social media, and also in its (many) absences, leisure has taken on new significance in both managing and negotiating a global crisis. Amidst the disruption, inconvenience, illness, fear, uncertainty, tragedy and loss from this disease, there are also opportunities for leisure scholars to generate discussions and to learn, to engage with wider debates about the crucial role of leisure in people’s lives—during this pandemic, and beyond. This introduction lays out the foundations and scope of this special issue on leisure in the time of coronavirus