Producing and Consuming the Snowboarding Body

Abstract

Within four short decades the snowboarding market has flourished, rapidly developing from a medley of backyard businesses to a global industry worth US$2.4 billion per annum (Morris, 2008). In this chapter I examine the snowboarding body as a malleable marker of commercial value subject to the fragmentation of this snowboarding market and the vagaries of fashion. Here I am particularly interested in the production and consumption of snowboarding bodies by company owners and employees, professional athletes, and various groups of cultural consumers. The following discussion consists of two main parts. The first examines snowboarding as a capitalist phenomenon through the works of political revolutionary and social theorist Karl Marx (1818–1883). Here I employ three of Marx’s basic principles of capitalism to explain how snowboarding propagates capitalist accumulation, competition, and exploitation in its modes of economic and political organization. I bring these theoretical concepts ‘to life’ using the case of Burton Snowboards. While this analysis reveals the inextricable links between snowboarding culture and the capitalist system, serious questions remain over the ability of Marx’s work to explain culture and cultural politics. Thus in the second part I draw upon a more recent post- Fordist perspective to further explain the relationship between the snowboarding economy and culture, illustrating this with the case of the female niche market.