Ongoing Methodological Problematics: Masculinities and Male Rock Climbers

Abstract

My qualitative research study of sporting masculinities (Robinson, 2008) investigated how the sport of rock climbing in the United Kingdom was experienced and practised at the everyday level by male (and female) climbers. The world of male rock climbers, which was explored in this study, was a ‘largely taken for granted world that remains clandestine, yet constitutes what Lefebvre calls the “common ground” or “connective tissue” of all conceivable human thoughts and activities’ (Gardiner, 2000, p. 2). It was a clandestine world because UK rock climbing as a sporting site had not been systematically studied before. I was also concerned to investigate the ‘common ground’ and ‘connective tissue’ of the climbing world in as much as a central focus of the research was how a sporting site connects to everyday life more generally. I was specifically interested in identifying any potential contradictions in men’s embodied experiences so that the possibility of shifting male identities could be explored in detail. Inherent to this aim was a concern with a critical consideration of the ‘extreme’ (also characterized as the extraordinary) represented by the activity of climbing, which is often defined as an ‘extreme sport’ due to the attendant risks and potential danger, in terms of what it reveals about both static and changing masculinities.