Parkour, Masculinity, and the City

Abstract

Parkour is a new, and increasingly popular, sport in which individuals athletically and artistically negotiate obstacles found in the urban environment. In this article, I position parkour as a performance of masculinity involving spatial appropriation. Through ethnographic data I show how young men involved in the sport use the city (both the built environment and the people within it) as a structural resource for the construction and maintenance of gender identities. The focus of my research highlights the performance of gender as a spatialized process.

Locus de género: Masculinidades y espacios urbanos en contextos de cambio

“…En esta línea se encuentran los estudios sobre la homosocialidad masculina alrededor del skate, como el trabajo de Carolyne Ali Khan (2009) por el cual el skate forma parte de toda una relación de la masculinidad con la materialidad del cuerpo, la representación de género, la virtuosidad técnica. También se encuentran aquí estudios sobre el Parkour como prácticas masculinizadas y profundamente ligadas a la performance de género masculina por la cual la resistencia, la virtuosidad corporal y la capacidad de apropiarse de los espacios a voluntad son claves fundamentales de un perfil de hombre joven-adulto que busca la reafirmación corporal y psicológica a partir del rendimiento físico (Kidder, 2013a;2013b).…”

Lifestyle Sports and Public Policy

“…There are a number of requirements to make out the defence; consent must be voluntary, informed, and only inherent risks are covered. This creates a lacuna for the parkourist -the norms of parkour mean that the boundaries of inherent and unacceptable risk are blurred, these are concepts that for the traceur are self navigated, problematizing the issue of consenting to risk (Kidder, 2013a(Kidder, , 2013b. This is further complicated by the potential difficulty of showing that young people fully understand risk and understand the legal consequences, and particularly this nexus between inherent and unacceptable risks (Hartley: 2009, 70).…”

Creating Our Own Lineup

“…In general, “lifestyle sports” are nontraditional sports such as surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding that focus on individual participation and a “style of life” built around the activity (Wheaton 2005). Because of their risk-taking nature, lifestyle sports are often sites where masculine identity is reified, where “teams” have been replaced with “fraternities,” and where women are excluded or pushed to the margins (Kidder 2013; Thorpe 2006, 2010). For example, in her study of snowboarding men, Thorpe (2010, 189) asserts that “like surfing, the fraternal structure of snowboarding devalues women as part of a process to help men define their masculinity.”…”