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Gendered divisions and representations can be especially problematic issues underpinning participation in water-based lifestyle and sporting activities. Sailing has particularly been found to be dominated by male participants who tend to dictate everyday codes of practice and symbolic representation. Female sailors are therefore regularly portrayed as inauthentic members of this activity and their participation also typically reflects much lower rates than males. In this paper, we develop these critical ideas about gendered sailing in the context of an 18 months comparative qualitative study involving 24 interviews and 113 hours of ethnographic field observations with five coaches, three physical education teachers, and 16 sailors. This study examined school sailing programmes in Western France and California in terms of the gendered practices and relationships that developed amongst young sailors and supporting adults. Bourdieu's theory of embodied power reproduction and masculine domination is used to analyse how school sport sailing programmes often benefited male participants. Within both Western French and Californian sailing contexts, young men were viewed as being more legitimate participants and regularly took up the lead role of skipper – young women were considered secondary participants and were typically positioned as crew members. Notions of embodied agency are subsequently developed to illustrate how young women sometimes contested the male-dominated gender order found within Franco-American school-based sailing programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes Colette as a case study to explore the role of the press in the literary world of the belle époque. Like Colette, many literary authors worked in journalism, a commercial career that often clashed with ideals of creative autonomy and genius. Yet the close connection between the literary world and the press was more complex and productive than has previously been acknowledged by either cultural historians and historians of the press. This analysis offers new perspectives, not only by examining Colette’s overlooked journalistic career, but also by looking at the role of money, publicity and how the press shaped the politics and poetics of writers. This paper argues that the press played a crucial and under-examined role in French literary life of the belle époque and that the study of the press contributes to a better understanding of the institutional context of cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]