ABSTRACT
This chapter examines television representations of the beach as an embodied site of transgression framed by discourses of liminality and the carnivalesque. In the following pages we will suggest that the peculiar congurations of open and negotiable abstracted spaces of the contemporary resort beach are represented as offering a range of opportunities for display, performance and transgressive behaviour. The beach is a space of ‘natural heritage’ (Boyd and Butler 2000) and has been conceptualized as a liminal, in between place, neither land nor sea, where the normal social conventions need not apply. Much of the work underpinning this conceptualization of the beach is outside mainstream tourism studies and can be traced to sociology (Shields 1991), social history (see Walton 2000) and cultural geography (see Preston-Whyte 2004), scholarship which in turn builds on the work of van Gennep (1960) and Turner (1974). Central to the notion of liminality is its transitory, betwixt nature, whether manifested in terms of social life, space or time, so that ‘[i]n this gap between ordered worlds almost anything may happen’ (Turner 1974, 13). By extension, this conceptualization of the beach has similarly constructed the historic seaside resort as a ludic and unconventional site. Thus, Shields (1991, 75) has explored the liminal, carnivalesque and illicit pleasures associated with the British seaside resort of Brighton, particularly in the 1930s and 1950s, which became ‘the topos of a set of connected discourses on pleasure and pleasurable activities … without which our entire conception and sense of a beach would be without meaning’.
