The flipside: Young womens' understanding of the risks in skateboarding

Abstract

Through the examination of 12 young women skateboarders' narratives, I explore skateboarding as a gendered performance which challenges existing cultural norms about gender through the corporeal display of risk-taking and the ability to withstand pain and injury. Most of the participants construct themselves as 'alternative' women who engage in 'masculine' practices, rejecting dominant notions of femininities. Although skateboarding provides young women with a space to complicate and challenge dominate discourses of gender, skateboarding nevertheless also reinforces dominant constructions of gender. Indeed, young women struggled to establish 'alternative' identities as they are not immune to the ideological power of the dominant codes embedded in the social structures. Using a feminist poststructuralist framework (Lupton, 1999; Weedon, 1997), I explore how discursive power contributes to the construction of women's subjectivities as skateboarders and risk-takers by examining how female skateboarders come to conform to, resist and/or reconstruct dominant notions of 'femininities' and risk.