Performing Leisure, Making Place: Wilderness Identity and Representation in Online Trip Reports

Abstract

Efforts to understand leisure as a spatial practice are surprisingly recent. It is only in the past decade or two that leisure studies has devoted much attention to the vital role of place and spatial practices for understanding how leisure is performed and experienced, how leisure related identities are constructed and affirmed, and ultimately how through these performances leisure places are made and remade (Crouch, 1999). A quick glance through the indexes of major theoretical works on leisure from the early 1990s (e.g., Rojek, 1993), show a remarkable absence of spatial terms. Prior to the mid-1990s what little work being conducted on leisure, identity and place was largely centered on identifying place attachment and place meanings associated with leisure settings. This work followed a cognitive-attitudinal approach in which place meanings and affinities were treated as already formed mental entities (Van Patten & Williams, 2008). Similarly, work examining leisure as an identity affirming practice has relied heavily on cognitive approaches to characterizing leisure as an arena for cultivating and expressing identity (Haggard & Williams, 1992).