Leisure Experience and Identity: What Difference Does Difference Make?

Historian Joan Scott's quote provides us with insight for how we might think "differently" about leisure, identity and difference. For the past 30 years, leisure researchers have engaged in a process that gathers evidence in an attempt to identify "common" leisure experiences. Realizing that "common" leisure experiences are mediated by many different factors, researchers began to broaden their thinking to examine leisure across various markers of identity-race, disability, gender, sexual identity, age and class. These categories of identity are organizing principles of social life in our society and, as such, they contribute to the idea that "real" differences exist between people based on these markers of identity. By examining leisure experiences across these markers of identity, we have empirically verified that "differences" in leisure experiences among and between people do exist. Yet, ironically, when we use these markers uncritically in ways that suggest these social categories are "real," we may, in fact, reinforce these markers of difference. In the process of identifying and confirming that differences do exist, I think we have not attended to examining leisure's role in the construction of these social categories as markers of difference. The purpose of this essay is to examine where the field has been and to suggest where it can go relative to future research on leisure experience, identity and difference. Since the 1960s, the field of recreation and leisure has examined leisure experience, identity and difference in three distinct ways. First, leisure researchers shifted from quantifying what people did, to qualifying what people did and what it meant to them-they began to explore leisure behavior by uncovering the meaning of individual leisure "experiences. " Second, researchers sought to understand collective leisure experiences and behaviors relative to various markers of identity to understand leisure among and between different groups of people. Third, researchers have examined the intersection of leisure and identity in an attempt to understand leisure's role in the process of identity formation. These perspectives reflect a social psychological paradigm that focuses on understanding the individual and her/his experience of leisure. Such a paradigm puts the individual and her/his interpretation of leisure experiences unproblematically at the center of any discussion of leisure experience and identity. Yet as individuals, our identities and experiences are not, essentially, our own. Recognizing that our identities may not be our own, we need to consider two additional questions about leisure experience, identity and difference: What constitutes the "individual"? and What counts as the evidence of an individual's experience (Scott, 1993)? As women, men, people of color, people with disabilities, people who identify as lesbian and gay, we live and move in a world that is created by a priori categories of identity that reflect cultural ideologies and discourses about gender, race, sexual identity, etc. So, to ask individuals to reflect upon their experiences of leisure without understanding how various ideologies have contributed to the construction of their identities and, subsequently, their experiences, fails to recognize the discursive power of language to produce and reproduce differences in identity. As critical theorist Henry Giroux (1997) noted, "how we understand and come to know ourselves and others cannot be separated from how we are represented and imagine ourselves" (p. 14). Rarely do we ask one another in our journals to define the social categories that we use to describe our research subjects. We use these markers of identity with a hegemonic certainty because, of course, everyone "knows" what it means to be a woman, a man, a person who is gay, a person who has a disability because we do not question the social category itself It is precisely the "common sense" usage of these social categories-these markers of identity-that may, ironically, reinforce the construction of hegemonic identities within leisure contexts. …