Abstract
This article argues that the time has arrived for leisure and consumerism to become key objects of study for a twenty-first century critical criminology. As global capitalism struggles to sustain itself, it is creating myriad crises in areas such as climate change, mental health, personal debt, and unemployment. Using a zemiological lens, we argue that it is on the field of commodified leisure and consumerism that criminologists can see these meta-crises of liberal capitalism unfold. Therefore, this article positions the burgeoning deviant leisure perspective as a new and distinct form of twenty-first critical criminology—one that departs from traditional criminological approaches to leisure rooted in the sociology of deviance in favor of critical criminology’s recent zemiological turn to social harm. In doing so, this article outlines how the deviant leisure perspective’s emergence at the intersection of zemiology, green criminology and ultra-realist criminological theory enables it to address some of the realities of our times, as well as how the deviant leisure perspective can help explain the normalized harms that emanate from the relationship between commodified leisure and consumer capitalism.
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Notes
Deviant leisure scholars have published works ranging from the night-time economy (Smith 2014) to gambling (Raymen and Smith 2017) to freerunning and urban exploration (Kindynis 2016; Raymen 2018) to volunteer tourism (Large 2019) to the cosmetics industry (Hall 2019) to the sports and gym culture (Van de Ven and Mulrooney 2019) to pornography (Medley 2019).
By “everyday harms of social media,” we are referring to the underlying competitive individualism of consumer culture and the display of cultural competence among users on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. This is distinguished from the more traditional criminological focus, which looks at trends of abuse and hate crimes on social media (Salter 2016). The everyday competitiveness of social media is designed to cultivate envy and a sense of lack in “friends” and “followers”—a reflection of what Hall and colleagues (2008) describe as amour-propre—a particular form of contemporary egoism in which the elevation of the self is contingent upon the denigration or cultivation of envy in others.
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Raymen, T., Smith, O. Deviant Leisure: A Critical Criminological Perspective for the Twenty-First Century. Crit Crim 27, 115–130 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-019-09435-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-019-09435-x