ABSTRACT

Leisure studies have a long history of associating leisure practices and the meanings of leisure with notions of personal growth and self-development. This association is bound up with questions of personal identity and relies on the possibility that we have a stable personal self that we can develop. The prospect of a stable personal self is a distinguishing feature of modernity, and there is now substantial literature from a postmodern perspective suggesting that identities are instead fragmented and transitory. This raises a fundamental tension. If identities are transitory, how can we develop them? And what are the repercussions of this for personal growth through leisure practices? These questions have important implications for the meanings of leisure.