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!