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Sweden prides itself as a country where young women can enjoy gender equality. Yet many young women skateboarders still experience discomfort when skateboarding in public spaces. We argue that diverse strategies are required to intervene in the intransigent problem of gender inequality in the male-dominated sport of skateboarding. We discuss two intertwined strategies adopted in Swedish skateboarding contexts, strategic visibility and strategic entitlement. Strategic visibility is premised on making girls a special case, separated from the boys, and therefore highly visible. The other intervention goes beyond the limits of gender, aiming to achieve strategic entitlement, which takes-for-granted girls’ participation and competence. Drawing from ethnographic data, we explore the paradoxical spaces of these interventions, identifying the benefits and risks of each strategy. We conclude that both strategies are important, yet the latter breaks new ground. Strategic entitlement, which constructs skateboarding girls as ordinary and indistinguishable from boys, no longer constructs gender as a limiting factor. Interventions to promote gender equality should include strategies that seek to go beyond gender and strategies that acknowledge the significance of gender. We need to keep experimenting with and researching the unintended consequences of all strategies for challenging and changing male dominance in sport and leisure.

Sweden prides itself as a country where young women can enjoy gender equality. Yet many young women skateboarders experience harassment in public spaces. Drawing from a sensory ethnography, and inspired by the material turn in the social sciences, we analyse how women skateboarders experience the material environments of urban public space, while paying attention to the social and cultural context of Sweden. The urban environment with its smooth marble or rough asphalt surfaces, its alarming sounds and tingling smells, shapes the experience of skateboarding and the construction of femininity. The construction of femininity is also shaped by a social and cultural context that assumes ‘gender equality’ is secure. This paper contributes new empirical findings on what it means to skateboard in public spaces as a gendered minority, and adds to the debate on how a material feminist theory might be developed without overlooking the significance of social and cultural contexts.

The Town and Country Gay Community Survey is a cross-sectional survey of gay and homosexually active men recruited from Sydney and regional New South Wales. 1371 men were recruited for the Sydney Gay Community Periodic Survey in August 2009 and 469 men were recruited between August and November 2009 from regional New South Wales. This report compares these two groups of men (from the city and regional areas) on a range of indicators.

This is an examination of geography disciplinary identities and practices as they are (re)produced during seven residential geography fieldtrips. The thesis is structured around four key arguments. First, is an analysis of particular disciplinary practices of residential fieldtrips, namely geographers’ preoccupation with Difference within and between places, and with ‘seeing the real world’. It is argued that geographers’ fascination with Difference for its own sake, risks Difference as a new form of essentialism if the structure of Difference is not critically examined. Following this is a deconstruction and decentering of the taken-for-granted ways in which geography fieldtrip knowledge has been (re)produced via scopic regimes that depend on a self-evident ‘reality’. Second, I argue that the residential geography fieldtrip is one context in which students learn what it means to be a ‘geography student’/‘geographer’. Students and staff live/breathe/eat geography. I call this embodied fieldwork. The notion of embodied fieldwork is taken further into a consideration of the ‘re-creation’ (in both senses of the word) of the geography student/geographer. Fieldwork was constructed as fun and in a parallel fashion, I questioned whether so-called fun and jokes might be better understood as achieving a particular kind of work. I examine how individual bodies are disciplined in particular ways, and how this disciplining is accommodated and/or resisted. Third, is an analysis of the contradictions of an assumed community of geography students and geographers. Some fieldtrip participants felt the pressure to join this corporate body even though it did not represent a group they would (usually) choose to be part of. A corporate body of geography students and staff together depends on unspecified notions of sameness. These notions, on closer analysis, turn out to have quite specific hierarchical meanings in terms of ‘race’, gender, class, sexuality, physical ability and age. Fina