ABSTRACT

This book uses the emerging and cutting-edge area of leisure research to highlight the importance of sexuality and sexual activity and its relevance to leisure studies. It brings to the fore some complex issues associated with this topic using a range of substantive, epistemological, theoretical and methodological approaches.

Drawing on international scholarship, the book examines sexuality from multiple, and at times, competing directions, exploring the continuum of sex from work through to carnal pleasure, and across specific sexual practices including BDSM, pornography, stripping, and sex work. Drawing on critical, feminist, queer, and post theoretical perspectives, the book charts a new direction for leisure studies and sex research, including diverse understandings of leisure practice, sex positivity, fringe and deviant sex practices. Critically, the book moves beyond merely establishing sex as a leisure pursuit to focusing on the compelling and complex intersections between sexuality and leisure.

This is fascinating reading for any student or researcher with an interest in leisure, sexuality, gender, cultural studies or sociology.

chapter |16 pages

Let’s talk about sex

Promiscuous perspectives on sex and leisure

chapter 2|17 pages

Playing with danger

Encouraging research on BDSM as a form of leisure via reflection and confession

chapter 3|18 pages

Some memoirs of a male stripper 1

An autoethnography of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity

chapter 4|18 pages

Sex, power, and controlling bodies

Incels and pickup artists

chapter 5|18 pages

“Making myself more desirable”

Digital self-(re)presentation on geo-social networking apps for men seeking men

chapter 6|18 pages

A porn of one’s own

Feminist complexities with women’s consumption of online sexually explicit materials

chapter 7|17 pages

Kinky people need kinky events

Kinkster events and kink/BDSM products in hospitality and tourism

chapter 8|19 pages

Somewhere under the rainbow

Drag at the Showbar

chapter 9|19 pages

Sex-on-wheels

The leisure sexscape of scooter-ladies

chapter |13 pages

In bed with a stranger

Doing research toward a risky, reflexive, and promiscuous leisure studies