PART FIVE - Challenging gender norms in city-based recreational practices

hoop dance and queer performance 

By Cheshia Toka (Insta @electricchesh)

Final part - Technology and belonging: creation of home

So far, I have shown ways that my identity separates from performativity of womanhood and uses behaviours associated with masculinity and freedom. However, Butler stresses that what is important is that one must not, “conflate the universal with the masculine” (1988:530). To avoid continuous entrapment within the likening of behaviour to a binary of male and female, I suggest examining ways in which gender performativity can become obsolete when enacted by any gender. The concept of ‘home’ is an example that transcends this tedious dichotomy. Even though it has long been associated with women as sole providers of domestic maintenance and motherhood in the reproduction of heteronormative ideals (Ahmet, 2013:622), homemaking is a practice that establishes a sense of belonging and can be enacted by any gender. bell hooks makes the key assertion that home is instead a feeling rather than a space, one that is fragmented as, “home is no longer just one place” (1991:148). Akile Ahmet uses bell hooks’ ideas of home as unfixed, in spatial terms, to show how young men also engage in these practices as they extend and stretch their active sense of belonging away from the home and out onto the street. In Ahmet’s study, calling for the need to examine male domesticity, the young men enjoy the feeling of autonomy away from authoritative control seen inside the indoor space of the household (2013:631). Here, the creation of ‘home’ is a stretchable feeling that is not primarily associated with a singular, private dwelling. Moreover, the feeling of home can be made through practices that are not confined to one binary gender, as both men and women are understood to participate in processes of belonging, where “spaces take on different meanings for young men (and also young women)” (Ahmet, 2013:631). 

Similarly, to both women in the home or young men on the street, my way of creating a feeling of home when I am practicing street hooping comes about through the use of technology: that is through my rig (personal soundsystem) and by recording on my mobile phone. Personal music devices create the ability to restructure one’s experiences in public when listened to on headphones on the move as a sort of “mobile home” (Bull, 1999:205). Unplugging the headphones extends the site of home by enveloping others, and thus transforms the feeling of the space. When I play music in the street, I tap into online mixes of hip hop, funk, dub, and reggae beats, that have historical associations of civil unrest in post-war Britain harking back to Jamaican roots of early 1950s soundsystem culture (Hope, 2011). Soundsystems in Britain became a symbol of freedom and lawlessness: as a focal point of rebellion against the status quo on the streets, for example the Notting Hill Carnival with racial dimensions of unrest that British authorities struggled to stop (Peeren, 2007:70). Public relationships with sound technologies have historically indicated challenge to the dominant constructions imposed by authority over the cityscape. Two relevant features of carnival spirit on the streets are those of free communication and expression of previously disciplined identity (Peeren, 2007:73). Tapping into the sounds of these cultures that celebrate agency in conjunction with the sonic creates the feeling that I am at home in expressing my own identity with the freedom to resist normative bounds of gender performativity expected in city space. It is with this music that my body moves freely.

Filming my activity creates a sense of purpose and security: I set up my camera and, as I dance, I know a worldwide audience of hoopers could be watching the stream. Hampton, Goulet, and Albanessuis’ study found new technologies support women’s presence in public space as the feeling of being vulnerable by oneself outdoors is reduced (2015:1501). They explain that communication technologies enabled participants to linger for longer outdoors without feeling alone, and within the past 30 years there has been a “tendency for women to spend more time out of the home,” (2015:1501). Supporting their findings, my experience of belonging in being able to comfortably and freely embrace my own non-binary performativity in public space is certainly enhanced by my personal use of technology in these ways.

Here, I have shown that the feeling of home is one that can be made by both men and women and that this sort of analysis is necessary in creating more nuanced perspectives of gender performance in the city. Even though home-making practices can initially draw on women in private, domestic spheres, more literature is proposing that men also enact practices of home-making in public spheres, like the street (Ahmet, 2013). My own experience serves to ‘queer’ this advancement of spatially constituted acts of gender performance by enacting “mismatches” (Jagose, 1996:3), illustrating that, as biologically female, my practices of street hooping create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in public space and this is not exclusive to those who are biologically male. My sense of belonging comes from utilising an imaginary of resistance that comes from my music choice and connecting to a global audience on my phone in ways that are proving to advance women’s confidence in public space (Hampton, et al., 2015). Rather than listening to headphones, I contest potentially normative perceptions of the general public by playing music out loud while being active outdoors, which is how I define my sense of home and identity in the street. 


In this piece, I have contested normative modes of gender performativity in the city and provided an insight into the experience of queer hoop dance. As Butler put it, “For feminist theory, then, the personal becomes an expansive category, one which accommodates, if only implicitly, political structures usually viewed as public” (1988:523). In this way, an autoethnographic perspective offers new understandings of lived cultural experience. I explored the activity of street hooping to contest deeply rooted and historical understandings of women as lacking agency and confidence to be active in public space. I likened my own performativity, which borrows from masculine characteristics, to that of the graffiti scene to show that confidence in expressing art in public space is not exclusive to the male sex or to historical ideas of femininity. Examining the influence of commodified space on the gendered organisation of fitness of the city, I showed that by practicing street hooping in public, and as non-commodified activity, I remove myself from facilitating exchange of capital that is tied to the notions of womanhood. With a relationship to sound technology, I demonstrated a feature of performativity that can be understood to transcend the restrictive binary of sex and gender: that the practice of home-making for men is increasingly being studied, and calling for examination of women’s and non-binary people’s experiences of belonging in public space. My example of creating home on the street introduces segues for continuing to delve into more nuanced perspectives of the gendering and use of outdoor space in the city. Overall, street hooping is a practice enabling my non-binary identity to claim visibility in public space by contesting normative gendered city organisation.

Bibliography 
Ahmet, A. (2013) ‘Home sites: The location(s) of ‘home’ for young men’, Urban Studies, 50(3), pp. 621–634. 
Benjamin, W. (1969) ‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Perspecta, MIT Press, 12, pp. 163–172. 
Buck-Morss, S. (1986) ‘The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: the politics of loitering’, New German Critique, 39, pp. 99–140. 
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Butler, J. (1986) ‘Sex and Gender in Simone De Beauvoir's Second Sex’, Yale French Studies, 72, pp. 35–49. 
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Camp, J. (2013) Hoopdance Revolution: mindfulness in motion, Berkeley, California: Ark Light Books. 
Crossley, N. and Roberts, J. (2004) ‘Introduction’, After Habermas: new perspectives on the public sphere, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–27. 
Day, K., Stump, C. and Carreon, D. (2003) ‘Confrontation and Loss of Control: Masculinity and Men’s Fear in Public Space’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23(3), pp. 311–322. 
de Certeau, M. (2011/1988) ‘A very ordinary culture’, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, pp.1–42. 
Farinosi, M. and Fortunati, L. (2018) ‘Knitting Feminist Politics: Exploring a YarnBombing Performance in a Postdisaster City’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 42(2), pp. 138–165. 
Felski, R. (1999) ‘The Invention of Everyday Life’, Cool Moves: a journal of culture/theory/politics, 39, New Formations, Lawrence and Wishart: London, pp. 15– 31. 
Habermas, J. (1974/1964) ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article’, translated by Lennox S. and Lennox F., New German Critique, 3, pp. 49–55. 
hooks, b. (1991) Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston, MA: Southend Press. 
Hope, D. (2011) ‘Dancehall: Origins, History, Future’, Academia. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/7025734/Dancehall_Origins_History_Future  [Accessed: 6th May 2019]. 
Jagose, A (1996) Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York: New York University Press. 
Jasen, P. (2016) Low end theory: bass, bodies and the materiality of sonic experience, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 
Leclerq, E. (2018) ‘Privatisation of the Production of Public Space’, Architecture and the Built Environment, 5, pp. 1–384.  
Lefèbvre, H. (2000/1971) ‘The Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumption’, Everyday Life in the modern world: Second Revised Edition, Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 68–109. 
Leisure DB (2018) 2018 State of the UK fitness industry report – out now. Available at: http://www.leisuredb.com/blog/2018/5/16/2018-state-of-the-uk-fitness-industryreport-out-now [Accessed: 7th May 2019]. 
Leontidou, L. (2006) ‘Urban social movements: from the ‘right to the city’ to transnational spatialities and flaneur activists’, City, 10(3), pp. 259–268. 
McRobbie, A. and Garber, J. ‘Girls and subcultures’ in Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (2006) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd edition, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 175–188. 
Peeren, E. ‘Carnival Politics and the Territory of the Street’ in Dasgupta, S. and Peeren, E. (2007) Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique, pp. 69–82. ProQuest Ebook Central. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=556387. [Accessed: 9th May 2019]. 
Sarlo, B. and González, F. (2001) ‘Forgetting Benjamin’, Cultural Critique, University of Minnesota Press, 49, pp. 84–92. 
Sport England (2016) Record number of women get active, 8th Dec 2016. Available at: https://www.sportengland.org/news-and-features/news/2016/december/8/recordnumbers-of-women-getting-active/ [Accessed: 7th May 2019]. 
Tonkiss, F. (2005) ‘Embodied spaces: gender, sexuality and city’, Space, the city and social theory: social relations and urban forms, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 94–112. 

YogaWithAdriene (2014) Yoga For Beginners – 40 Minute Home Yoga Workout. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/user/yogawithadriene [Accessed: 7th May 2019].

PART FOUR - Challenging gender norms in city-based recreational practices

hoop dance and queer performance 

By Cheshia Toka (Insta @electricchesh)

Part four - Commodified space and urban fitness

In this section, I examine street hooping as an activity that complicates the present organisation of fitness in city space in regard to gender division and commodification. During a period of neoliberal urban regeneration in the UK from the 1990s onwards, city space has been increasingly privatised, giving way to more commodified forms of spatial organisation (Leclerq, 2018). City life revolves around shopping and spending with increasing rapidity, and, unless one is spending money, loitering is largely discouraged. During the rise of department stores in Paris in the 1800s, women would set out to invest in home furnishings and luxury items to add to the domestic sphere. Historically, the female counterpart to the flâneur – the flâneuse – was made use of “in order to sell goods” (Benjamin, 1969:170). Henri Lefèbvre argued that women are most integrated with the cycles of everyday routine that maintain norms in society, and that this grounds them in the home (in Felski, 1999:22). “Everyday life weighs heaviest on women” as they are, “both buyers and consumers of commodities and symbols for commodities” (Lefèbvre, 2000/1971:73). In this way, performativity of womanhood is closely linked to commodified experience and activity in private spheres. In the act of street hooping, I avoid reproducing the norms that most of my activity should take place in private, or, when outside of the home, be encouraging the exchange of capital.   Recently, the lottery-funded, UK-wide ‘This Girl Can’ 2015 programme run by Sport England, has encouraged women’s participation in sports classes, including competitive and team sports (Sport England, 2016). Kilgour’s study on social and cultural factors affecting how young women in UK universities perceive outdoor environments notes that, “It is apparent that women involved in sport and exercise are resisting deep-rooted societal beliefs about femininity, by challenging the notion that their bodies should be considered as fragile” (2011:226). Nonetheless, other deeply rooted notions of gender identity concerning use of space do not seem to come into question. Women engaging in fitness in the modern day seem to do sports mainly in indoor or private spaces: for example, at gyms or doing team sports in sporting facilities that have to be paid for. Leisure Database reports that the fitness industry’s market value in the UK is continuing to grow (Leisure DB, 2018). The Internet also provides opportunities to exercise without leaving the house, for example, ‘at-home yoga practices’ such as the YouTube channel Yoga With Adriene (2014) with a worldwide following and 4.9 million subscribers. Contemporary mainstream fitness does not seem to promote exercising the female body in public space, and the city is predominantly structured with fitness facilitated in private and commodified spheres.  In contrast to monthly gym subscriptions, my practicing hoop dance in the street is an individual activity that, after initially purchasing the hoop, requires no further exchange of capital. My regular practice enables me to renegotiate city space for the purpose of non-commodified fitness. I use street space by occupying the pavement, and sometimes even the road. In a space that one is most likely to pass through, my act of creative loitering reclaims an area of transition as a space of expression. The parkour scene bears similarity in that practitioners likewise occupy and redefine meanings of urban space (Gilchrist and Wheaton, 2011:113). Parkour, or freerunning, is understood as the imaginative transitioning of the body from one place to another through jumping, running, and climbing. Often practiced in the mundane setting of the inner-city concrete environment, one of its initial functions was to make the urban environment more accessible through a safe and creative practice of spatial-corporeal negotiation. In their study on parkour to inform new sporting policy initiatives, Gilchrist and Wheaton describe the activity as a lifestyle sport, that is, less competitive and less team-based than more traditional and institutionalised sports (2011:113) and fostering a cultural awareness and sense of belonging between its members (2011:114). Should hula hooping one day make the agenda, I propose that it be considered in this light as it also operates within this criterion.  
 It must be noted that, like the graffiti scene, outdoor parkour practitioners are also predominantly male. Again, from the perspective of Butler’s performativity, male parkour practitioners are enacting an historically masculine behaviour of residing in public space that, on the whole, tends to correlate with the sex of most participants in the scene. Why, then, should this performativity of fitness in public space not be accessible to any other sex, and not that of solely men? Kilgour rightly summarises how young women today are now more often, “using the street as a site of production and consumption, [however] they are more likely than their male counterparts to gain a ‘reputation’ for doing so and run the risk of compromising their respectability…” (2011:217). This study brings attention to the importance of female performativity in decision-making: when women’s participation in fitness was limited, it was because of the barrier of body-image, as “it seemed that most of these women tended to embody feminine ideas, tending to act ‘more sensibly’ when outdoors,” (Kilgour, 2011:228). Butler would understand this avoidance of space as avoidance of punishment for the incorrect enactment of womanhood (1988:528), which is upheld when the body is made to “conform to an historical idea of ‘woman’, […] to materialize oneself in obedience” (1988:522). In my reading of Kilgour’s study from the perspective of Butler’s performativity, enacting womanhood through selective behaviour appeared to rule out self-expression and fitness through use of public space, should one want to be considered a ‘respectable’ woman. Female choice in protecting this idealised notion of femininity preserves wider systems that divide space. Thus, commodified space becomes a more ‘appropriate’ option for females so that they can develop their identity within correct performativity of ‘womanhood’. Therefore, they are encouraged to continue to facilitate economic exchange, and further, to legitimise the use of public space for exclusively male activity.  In this way, women paying to use indoor space that serves their ideas of ‘sensible’ femininity works to both refine and gender fitness in the city, so that women continue contributing to profit production in some way. Both the parkour and street hooping scene challenge the organisation of the city that maintains commodified space associated with femininity. As a biological female, I am breaking these behavioural cycles associated with the performativity of being a woman that are frequently tied to commodification and this continues to construct my experience of queering space due to the “mismatch” of my biology and behaviour, as explained in queer theory by Jagose (1996:3). Therefore, street hooping becomes a practice of challenging normative modes of the city: as I access public space in ways an ideal performance of femininity will not permit, to fulfil needs in the same ways as my male counterparts who have more freedom to do so.

~COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR PART FIVE~
Note: part five is the final of this series!

PART THREE - Challenging gender norms in city-based recreational practices

hoop dance and queer performance 

By Cheshia Toka (Insta @electricchesh)

Part three - Street art and performativity

Street art is a predominantly masculine scene. It is a visual addition for filming hoop practice outdoors because it provides an interesting and colourful backdrop to use when creating videos to share online, and utilising this scene places me outside of the structures of femininity and enables me to queer the space. Street hooping has yet to enter mainstream popular culture; hoopers find it useful to connect to wider communities online as outdoor practitioners in the local area are few and far between. In my quest to find an interesting backdrop to fill my videos where I dance and execute tricks, I venture into Brighton and place myself within the scene of male street artists, often called “writers”. Street corners, electricity boxes, and shutters are frequently tagged with spray cans and pens as territorial references to indicate the owner of the tag was present in that location. Following Butler’s performativity, male street art can be understood as an enactment of historically masculine behaviour in public space, for example like that of the flâneur: larger graffiti pieces take up bigger sections of outdoor walls and are executed by local artists who take their time designing calligraphy, or “hand styles”. These pieces create a feeling the territory has been claimed by the artist. The hand styles of the pieces are designed to look sharp, bold, and intimidating for personal flare, thus creating a mood when one steps into the space. Some graffiti pieces in the city have been scrawled over with obscene language by other writers who dislike others’ styles or the artists themselves; a hostile environment where pieces of art are in conflict with one another. This behaviour constitutes an act that, “has been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Butler, 1988:526). The historical picture of men as confidently occupying public space is occurs here through this performativity.  

Immediately, I become part of the negotiation of masculine territory for art space. Choosing a graffiti piece to suit my taste based on colours and composition, I occupy the space in front of it physically by spreading my body to spin the hoop while I film, usually for about an hour at a time. The combination of my movement and the music I use fills the space creating a high-energy atmosphere where I aim to increase my visibility. This process comprises a literal performance and a gendered performance. In my video, I temporarily occupy the space between the camera and the wall to enact my performance art: spinning my hoop in motion against the static background, I impose my 3D self onto the male writers’ art and this is captured and processed into the 2D image on my phone screen. I claim my own space by becoming an ephemeral moving tag, inscribing my hoop on top of the graffiti. The motions that my hooping take up are mostly just associated with the music: hip-hop brings with it connotations of breakdance, and drum and bass associated with the paces of skanking, from ska music, where both of these practices of dance have stances that are typically low to the ground. I usually resume a stance that is low to the ground to execute tricks: should they fail, I am closer to the floor to pick up the hoop. I act in ways that the music encourages me to dance. Further, I switch between masculine and feminine traits, for example, some days I swamp my body in the fabrics of oversized t-shirts and hoodies, the typically masculine choice of clothing that hides my female bodily features. Other days I wear crop-tops and leggings as one might expect a young woman to dress in for fitness. This is the essence of performativity in my hoop dance. I intercept the status quo in graffiti art as a male activity of claiming territory by adding myself to the equation, as a non-binary female.  

Here, I bring in an example of female performativity in street art to create the comparison between the enactment of my queer self and the enactment of womanhood. Farinosi and Fortunati (2018) explore yarn-bombing as a worldwide movement that is comparable to street graffiti, except in the form of knitted fabrics rather than spray paint imposed on the urban environment. In this study, they examine yarn-bombing as a form of feminist craftism and citizen engagement in Italy: the knitted fabrics were created by groups of women in the city and installed into public space. Designed for a cause, the yarn bombing was, “community oriented and intended to draw public attention to relevant social and political problems, such as war” (2018:139). Their article describes knitting as an “old-fashioned technique” (2018:139) that adjusts its value to become an activist practice by being present in the city with the intention of change. These women used a “historically constituted” (Butler, 1988:530) enactment of femininity – knitting – perhaps usually done in private spaces such as the home and brought this to a public space to establish female agency and attention to politics in the outdoors. In comparison, I intend not to bring with me any “old-fashioned technique” that is associated with the enactment of femininity and subvert the normative behaviours enacted in public space by occupying it without these historically constituted acts. 

Hooping has historically been taken up by men and women across the globe, and although it can enable feminine and masculine performance, it can also be a mode of queer expression that exists between the two. For example, in Jan Camp’s book she tracks the story of a polyamorous Mexican hooper, Karis, who uses hoop dance to express both their male and female ‘sides’ through burlesque-style hoop shows (2013:158). From my observations of the widespread influences of hooping captured across the globe, the uniqueness of this practice stems from it being free from being reserved for any certain racial, ethnic, class, or gendered confines, as an activity that is open to interpretation by the individual and moulds to the shape of the culture in which it is conceived. Like the yarn-bombers, I take up space on the street by imposing my art, but I do this without totally abiding by the enactment of femininity as I seek to distance myself from the notion of being a woman. Butler puts forward that, “women cannot be said to exist” (2018:529), and since I am not enacting behaviour understood to be that fundamentally associated with characteristics of womanhood, I engage in a performative process that comprises part of my non-binary identity, as I separate from the category of “woman”. Similarly to Butler, my objective, “is not to re-describe the world from the point of view of women” (1988:529) as I cannot speak for all women, even if I am read as a woman. If I am read as female, my actions still serve to discursively undo the gendered expectations of being a woman in public space: I reject various notions of womanhood to form my non-binary identity by crossing into typically masculine behaviours in masculine territories, such as through dressing and being confident on my own in the public spaces of the graffiti scene. In this section, I have shown how I enable myself to associate with predominantly masculine graffiti art to “mismatch” (Jagose,1996:3) my biological sex with expected female performativity. 

~COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR PART FOUR~

PART TWO - Challenging gender norms in city-based recreational practices:

hoop dance and queer performance 

By Cheshia Toka (Insta @electricchesh)

Part two - background

Historically, literature on the use of public space has largely examined male activity, as a binary emerged between the public being a man’s space and the private being a woman’s space. Jurgen Habermas characterised the public with notions of discursive design, rationalisation, and discussion. His notion of the ‘public sphere’ (1974/1964) has been widely contested, since it produces a dichotomy between public and private space and a mechanism for the exclusion of women (for example, Crossley and Roberts, 2004:24). This dichotomy has frequently been compared to a binary understanding of sex, that is being male or female, and subsequently of gender: being a man or a woman, a boy or a girl. The notion of gender is widely understood as a construct of society (Butler, 1988) comprising replicated behaviours that guide how one is meant to act as a man or a woman, because of one’s deemed binary sex. Men are often expected to be brave, strong, and dominant: these characteristics are associated with the public sphere. This illustrates how the understanding of public and private dichotomy of space in the academic literature has been entangled with concepts of binary gender. Judith Butler’s work conceptualises gender as a social construct that is separate from biological sex. Using Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (de Beauvoir in Butler, 1986:35), Butler unpicks what it means to enact the behaviours associated with one’s binary sex, and calls this “gender performativity” (1988:527). Unlike a literal, overt performance, performativity happens in subtle behaviours that are learned and become an act of doing. She explains that, in this way, “one does one’s body” as the body receives signifiers from the environment as a guide through possibilities of existing corporeal styles: the body, then, “is never fully self-styled” (1988:521). 

Since the 1800s, the sight of women on the street has indicated their use for sex work and their presence outside the home indicated their assistance for men (Buck-Morss 1989:119). In comparison, Walter Benjamin, who wrote about early consumer culture in the rise of the department store, describes the iconic figure of the flâneur: the man free to explore and loiter in the city, who takes pleasure in looking and viewing (1969:170). The flâneur is continually referenced to this day, perhaps to the point of overuse (Sarlo and González, 2001), which denotes its persisting relevance. These are the “historically constitutive” acts that gender is built upon (Butler, 1988:530), repeated throughout history to form these social norms associated with men in public and women in private. These historic accounts of male and female behaviour situate gendered performativity in the city and trace the diminished power of women in public space. Fran Tonkiss discusses common knowledge to this day that women are more afraid to walk alone in the street than men (2005:102), even though statistics show men are more likely to experience assault (2005:104, also see Day et al. 2003:312) and that this perception of space extends patriarchal control. Women’s psychological fear that influences their lack of confidence in public, for fear of sexual harassment, is gender performativity in Butler’s terms, as it is an indicator of how one acts according to one’s sex. Ultimately, Butler’s core argument is that, “the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (1988:523), for example, avoiding being alone outdoors as a woman because of historically established fear and lack of agency due largely to male domination of public space. 

Butler’s work informs queer theory a discourse that began by examining lesbian and gay identity but expands its framework to examine any identity that falls outside heteronormative identity. Queer theory challenges the conception that sex correlates with gender and sexuality, seeking to understand the arrays of possible “mismatches” (Jagose, 1996:3) that destabilise heterosexual norms. Butler’s work on performativity is essential to queer theory as performance is the basis on which identity is constructed and maintained. As a queer person who does not always associates with the gendered acts that comprise ‘womanhood’, I mobilise this notion of performativity with reference to queer theory to show how my practice of street hooping challenges the expectations of how a ‘woman’ in public space has been seen to act through time.  

~COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR PART THREE~

PART ONE - Challenging gender norms in city-based recreational practices:

hoop dance and queer performance 

By Cheshia Toka (Insta @electricchesh)

~ Hey reader, thanks for being here! I am publishing a section of my final research piece I wrote for my Degree weekly in April 2020~

Part one - Intro

Sun beaming on a road adjacent to the busy shopping streets of Brighton. A freshly spray-painted wall beams its colours into the street and the chemical fumes battle with a breeze of dirty traffic air. It is here that I drop my bag upon the curb and set up the phone-mounted tripod. Plug in the rig. Grab the hoop. Waiting for a gap in the gentle stream of afternoon shoppers, I plant my feet wide on the pavement before the street art and seize the moment to spin my hoop to the blasting sounds of hip hop, funkstep, and drum and bass: it is time to execute a complex combination of my favourite tricks, and carve geometric patterns into the air with every twist and revolution of the plastic ring… 

In academic literature, the street has historically been analysed as a space of danger for women (Tonkiss, 2005:102). In this autoethnographic account, I discuss hula hooping in the street as a contemporary art form and mode of expression through which I – as a young, non-binary female – make attempts to reclaim city space by means of three interpretations of the normative modes in the city. First, I address the graffiti scene in which I ground myself to create hooping videos. Graffiti in Brighton is predominantly a masculine activity, altering how the space feels with colours and designs, and it is here I contest masculine control and normative performativity of womanhood in public space by projecting my own performance art as a female. Second, I use hooping as outdoor fitness to contest normative use of city space that has become increasingly private and commodified. Non-commodified, physical activity in public space is often a male initiative, for example the parkour scene (Gilchrist and Wheaton, 2011), enabling me to draw comparisons demonstrating how, as a biological female, street hooping challenges normative organisation of gendered fitness space. Third, I use notions of ‘home’ to extend my sense of belonging into the street through technology. As a young person who disassociates with binary gender, I further the suggestions that the sense of the home can be stretched (Ahmet, 2013) by arguing that, despite being most accessible to males, females can also enact practices that establish a sense of belonging in public space as well as the private. Unlike literature on large-scale urban social movements (Leontidou, 2006), I focus on street hooping as a day-to-day act of resistance to spatial organisation (de Certeau, 2011/1988:34). Street hooping has not yet made an entry into academic literature, so I take this opportunity to use feminist theory in an analysis of how outdoor hooping culture, enacted by females, subverts normative, gendered ideals of urban space.

~COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR PART TWO~