This book develops a new theory of instrumental whiteness and leisure. Empirical research is drawn upon to highlight whiteness across a comprehensive and internationally-grounded range of leisure practices. The book explores sports participation, sports media and sports fandom, informal leisure, outdoor leisure, music, popular culture and tourism.

This book addresses how whiteness is represented in heavy metal scenes and practices, both as a site of academic inquiry and force of cultural significance. The author argues that whiteness, and more specifically white masculinity, has been given normative value which obscures the contributions of women and people of colour, and affirms the exclusory understandings of ‘belonging’ which have featured in the metal scenes of Norway, South Africa, and Australia. Utilizing critical discourse analysis and critical textual analysis of musical texts, promotional material, and participant-based observation ethnographies, it explores how the texts, discourses, and practices produced and articulated by metal scene members and scholars alike have presented heavy metal as a white, masculine pastime, yet also considers the vital work done by scene members to confront expressions of exclusory misogyny and racism when they emerge in metal scenes. The book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of metal music studies, leisure studies, sociology of culture and sociology of racism.

This book uses the work of Jurgen Habermas to interrogate leisure as a meaningful, theoretical concept. Drawing on examples from sport, culture and tourism, and going beyond concerns about the grand project of leisure, Spracklen argues that leisure is central to understanding wider debates about identity, postmodernity and globalization.

This book looks back at the meaning and purpose of leisure in the past. But this is not a simple social history of leisure. It is not enough to write a history of leisure on its own in fact, it is impossible without engaging in the debate about what counts as leisure (in the present and in the past). Writing a history of leisure, then, entails writing a philosophy of leisure: and any history needs to be a philosophical history as well. That is the purpose of this book. It provides an account of leisure through historical time, how leisure was constructed and understood by historical actors, how communicative reason and free will interacted with instrumentality at different times, how historians have reconstructed past leisure through historiography, and finally, how writers have perceived the meaning and purpose of leisure in alternative histories. Providing a sweeping overview of the field, Karl Spracklen charts how the concept of leisure was understood in Ancient history, through to modern times, and looks at leisure in different societies and cultures including Byzantium and Asian civilizations, as well as looking at leisure and Islam. Spracklen concludes with a chapter on future histories of leisure.

Race, Ethnicity, and Leisure: Perspectives on Research, Theory, and Practice provides an overview of the current theories and practices related to minority leisure and reviews numerous issues related to these diverse groups’ leisure, including needs and motivations, constraints, and discrimination. World-renowned researchers synthesize research on race and ethnicity, explain how demographics will affect leisure behavior in the 21st century, and explain the leisure behavior of minorities.

Even before the desegregation of the military and public education and before blacks had full legal access to voting, racial barriers had begun to fall in American sports. This collection of essays shows that for many African Americans it was the world of athletics that first opened an avenue to equality and democratic involvement. Race and Sport showcases African Americans as key figures making football, baseball, basketball, and boxing internationally popular, though inequalities still exist today. Among the early notables discussed is Fritz Pollard, an African American who played professional football before the National Football League established a controversial color barrier. Another, the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, exemplifies the black American athlete as an international celebrity. African American women also played an important role in bringing down the barriers, especially in the early development of women's basketball. In baseball, both African American and Hispanic players faced down obstacles and entered the sports mainstream after World War II. One essay discusses the international spread of American imperialism through sport. Another shows how mass media images of African American athletes continue to shape public perceptions. Although each of these six essays explores a different facet of sports in America, together they comprise an analytical examination of African American society's tumultuous struggle for full participation both on and off the athletic field.

Freewheeling sexuality and gender experimentation defined the social and moral landscape of 1890s San Francisco. Middle class whites crafting titillating narratives on topics such as high divorce rates, mannish women, and extramarital sex centered Chinese and Japanese immigrants in particular. Amy Sueyoshi draws on everything from newspapers to felony case files to oral histories in order to examine how whites' pursuit of gender and sexual fulfillment gave rise to racial caricatures. As she reveals, white reporters, writers, artists, and others conflated Chinese and Japanese, previously seen as two races, into one. There emerged the Oriental—a single pan-Asian American stereotype weighted with sexual and gender meaning. Sueyoshi bridges feminist, queer, and ethnic studies to show how the white quest to forge new frontiers in gender and sexual freedom reinforced—and spawned—racial inequality through the ever evolving Oriental. Informed and fascinating, Discriminating Sex reconsiders the origins and expression of racial stereotyping in an American city.