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The new politics of leisure and pleasure

In the introduction chapter, Bramham and Wagg claim that their edited book ‘... seeks to develop the contribution of critical cultural studies to the understanding of free time and leisure in the period of what some now term ‘postmodernity’ (p. 1). In this initial chapter, the authors cite the work of Clarke and Critcher (1985) as influential to their project. However, they also stress that their edited book should not be considered a sequel to The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain. Having made this point, Bramham and Wagg do continue in the tradition of The Devil Makes Work by highlighting the value of critical analyses of freedom, constraint, choice and regulation. Through such a socio-cultural approach, their book demonstrates the persistence of these concepts to the politics of leisure. The New Politics of Leisure and Pleasure provides engaging discussion on an impressive range of leisure settings (e.g. the countryside, tourism, sport, drinking, drug taking, gambling, comedy, reading, television, internet and sex). The book is divided into 14 chapters plus a very brief Afterward. The content is not split into themed sections; instead, the 14 chapters follow on from each other. Each chapter presents a different form of leisure and the topics covered are interesting and very relevant. Many of these individual chapters may be valuable to third year undergraduate students completing their dissertation on specific topics such as the relationships between leisure and the internet and the changing features of the gambling and music industries. Similarly, post-graduate students and academics may be drawn to specific individual chapters as well as the complete works. Excluding the Introduction and Afterward, each chapter begins with a useful summary of chapter content. Most, but not all, of these summaries have highlighted phrases so that readers are able to identify the main points of individual chapters. The title of the book suggests, to me, that the concepts leisure and pleasure feature equally in discussion. In fact, discussion of ‘pleasure’ in the Introduction and first chapter tends to be implicit rather than explicit. Explicit reference to pleasure emerges at the end of Chas Critcher’s chapter (Chapter 2) on ‘the moral regulation of alcohol consumption’. Critcher writes: “Panics about drink are integral to wider processes of moral regulation, centering on the question of what is and is not legitimate pleasure” (p. 43). The contributing authors to the collection appear to engage with the politics of ‘pleasure’ to differing degrees. It is not until Chapter 5, where Attwood discusses ‘erotic play and new leisure culture’, when pleasure is referenced in the chapter summary and a more overt engagement with pleasure and/as leisure is provided. Similarly, chapters tend to vary in the extent to which the contribution builds on and/or is influenced by The Devil Makes Work (Clarke & Critcher, 1985). Some Leisure Studies Vol. 31, No. 4, October 2012, 505–508