Deviant Leisure: A Critical Criminological Perspective for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This article argues that the time has arrived for leisure and consumerism to become key objects of study for a 21 st century critical criminology. As global capitalism struggles to sustain itself it is creating myriad crises in areas such as employment, personal debt, mental health issues and climate change. Using a zemiological lens, we argue that it is on the field of commodified leisure and consumerism that criminologists can see these meta-crises of liberal capitalism unfold. Therefore, this article positions the burgeoning deviant leisure perspective as a new and distinct form of 21 st century critical criminology that departs from traditional criminological approaches to leisure rooted in the sociology of deviance in favour of critical criminology's recent zemiological turn to social harm. In doing so, this article outlines how the deviant leisure perspective's emergence at the intersection of zemiology, green criminology and ultra-realist criminological theory enables it to address some of the realities of our times, and begin to explain the normalised harms that emanate from the relationship between commodified leisure and consumer capitalism.

From “Infant Hercules” to “Ghost Town”: Industrial Collapse and Social Harm in Teesside

“…Methodologically and theoretically, this article follows ultra-realism (Hall and Winlow 2015). Ultra-realists call for a network of ethnographic research that collectively identifies the reality of life in contemporary society (Briggs 2017;Kotzé 2019;Lloyd 2019;Raymen and Smith 2019;Wakeman 2016). As with all research, this project contains limitations; the sample size is relatively small and cannot offer universal generalizations or be representative of the whole population.…”

Plastic Waste and the Environmental Crisis Industry

“…Environmental crises, such as air and water pollution, biodiversity loss or climate change, ought to inspire in us such a level of crippling remorse that we disavow our attachment to harmful consumer goods and experiences. Instead, these emotions are brought into conflict with the contemporary re-orientated superego, which demands enjoyment and inflicts guilt for failing to take advantage of the various opportunities to enjoy ourselves within consumer capitalism (Raymen and Smith 2019a , b ). The ECI, however, allows both of these competing superegos to co-exist and even become mutually reinforcing!…”

“Souvenir Shopping is for Schmucks!”: Exploring Tourists’ Deviant Behavior Through the Items They Bring Back

“…Our investigation of tourist memento accumulation employs the theoretical lens of deviant leisure . Conceptualized by criminologists Raymen and Smith (2019, 2020), deviant leisure explores unethical leisure behaviors and aims to analyze critically the “myriad harms associated with the most legitimate, normalized and culturally embedded forms of commodified leisure” (Raymen 2017, 15). Raymen and Smith (2019, 18) explicitly contextualize such morality as being highly subjective and argue that unethical behavior should not be defined as a violation of some “non-existent social norms, values, and ethical standards.” Rather, they position social harm as the ultimate unethical practice and redefine deviance as a transgression of the “ethical duty to the other” (Smith and Raymen 2018).…”

“…Our aim is to generate insights into the mechanisms and motives behind tourist memento accumulation actions and misbehaviors. To achieve this, we employ a criminological perspective using the theoretical lens of deviant leisure (Raymen and Smith 2019, 2020), to explore unethical leisure behaviors. To date, despite having theoretical and intuitive appeal, the links between deviant leisure and tourism, have not been tested empirically.…”