This paper draws on longitudinal ethnographic research conducted between 1981 and 1992 with white working class women (published as Formations of Class and Gender, Skeggs, 1997) and preliminary research begun in 1997 (with Les Moran and Carole Truman), later funded by the Economic and Social Research Council entitled Violence, Sexuality and Space, which compares the use of space by three different groups: gay men, lesbians and straight women in two different cities. Both these projects have Manchester's 'gay village' as a context, enabling exploration of the signi cance of homosexualized leisure space for understanding how identities become spatialized and how political claims are made and not made. The paper analyses the contrasts between a group of white working class women whose identity is based on dis-identi cation, dissimulation, mis-recognition and a desire for invisibility, and group of lesbians who form their identity through visibility, recognition and territorialization. The comparison between how different groups use leisure space begins an investigation into an empirical understanding of the relationship between leisure space, sexuality, identity and legitimation. The paper explores the consequences of these different processes for 'the politics of recognition'. It puts together a range of cross-disciplinary work, from feminist theory, political theory, cultural studies, cultural geography, sociology, leisure studies and queer theory.
FrameworkAn understanding of entry and restrictions on space is absolutely central to understanding how and why certain places can and cannot be used for leisure (see Mowl and Towner, 1994;Deem, 1996a;Scraton and Watson, 1998). The paper builds upon the foundational work on women and leisure (Deem, 1986;Green et al., 1990) aimed at understanding how sexuality intersects with gender in speci c spaces, asking what are the political consequences of this gender/sexuality matrix. As Scraton and Watson (1998, p. 123) argue:The challenge for leisure studies is to complement its already multidisciplinary base by drawing on work that opens up the complexities of space, not merely in the recognition of 'new' lifestyles and the conspicuous consumption of leisure but also, as a site for the maintenance and reproduction of complex power relations.It also speaks to debates in lesbian/gay theory and queer theory which have begun to map out the signi cance of certain spaces to the development and maintenance of visible communities: such as Mapping Desire (Bell and Leisure Studies 18 (1999) 213-232 0261-4367