Sports Charity and Gendered Labour by Catherine Palmer

Author:Catherine Palmer [Palmer, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Gender Studies, Sociology
ISBN: 9781800434301
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2021-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Families and Sport

As noted in the previous chapter, sport and family interact in some important ways. As Fletcher (2019), Harrington (2006), LaRossa (2009), Jeanes and Magee (2011) and Elliott and Drummond (2017) have suggested, sport and leisure are often celebrated as ‘family time’ – a chance for families to play, connect and experience free time together. Indeed, families, for many people, provide the primary context for their leisure. As Fletcher notes:

…a great number of people are introduced to sport through the family. Sport is something that many families do and experience together; whether kicking, throwing, striking a ball in the garden or at the park, watching and supporting a loved one compete, watching it on the television, listening to it on the radio or talking about it in the car or around the meal table.

(2019, p. 4)

Clearly, the institutions of family and sport are intimately linked, yet this often reproduces limited conceptualisations of families. Scholars such as Finch (2007), Trussell, Jeanes, and Such (2017) and Wilding (2018) have noted the heteronormative privileging of definitions of ‘family’ as cis-man and cis-woman with biological children birthed by the mother. As I return to in the methodological details, several of the women interviewed for this chapter were in same-sex partnerships. This was not a deliberate sampling choice but a reflection of the ‘increasing diversity of family forms, structures and arrangements’ (Wilding, 2018, p. 21).

Although the chapter includes the experiences of people in diverse family arrangements, it remains (and should be read as) less an interrogation of family structures, and more an examination of how fitness philanthropy fits within family lives, and the forms of labour which make the often endurance-based events of fitness philanthropy possible. As such, it adopts the late David Morgan's (1996, 2011, 2013) concept of ‘family practices’ to anchor the empirical material presented. Morgan's framework has similarly been used to great effect by Tom Fletcher (2019) in his wide-ranging study of fatherhood and leisure. As Morgan argues (and Fletcher's work exemplifies), families are better defined by what they do; that is, it is by doing family things rather than by being a family that we come to know and understand the values and behaviours that make a family a family. While Morgan intends his approach as a way around some of the ‘… widely recognised dangers of writing about the family’ (Morgan, 2011, p. 1), the focus on family practices and doing things together has a particular resonance when, in this case, much of the ‘doing’ is dependent on the invisible labour that underpins the public, physical displays of endurance sport and fitness philanthropy.

To return to the diversity of family structures, much of the literature on families and sport has focussed on the inclusion of children in leisure activities as a marker of their identities as families; that is, sport is something which sets them apart from other ‘non-sporty’ families. The focus on families in this chapter, however, is less about children – it was the parents and spouses who

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