Deviant Leisure: Demand, Desire and the Harmful Marketplace

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

While the deviant leisure perspective frequently looks at the harms embedded within the most normalized and familiar forms of leisure, the libidinal desires that underpin consumer culture open up numerous opportunities for illicit criminal markets that have blurred and harmful relationships with legitimate forms of leisure. Taking demand and desire in late-capitalist consumer culture as its starting point, this panel of papers explores the numerous global, local and online criminal markets in violence, porn, counterfeit fashion and pharmaceutical drugs. These papers theoretically and empirically establish how these markets emerge from, cross over with and are fundamentally shaped by legitimate leisure markets and the underlying norms, values and psychoanalytic mechanisms of consumerism, which translate contemporary forms of lack into commodified modes of neophiliac desire. This panel therefore suggests that if we are to understand crime and its emerging global markets, we must begin to offer an appreciation of how these markets are fundamentally conformist to the norms, values and subjectivities cultivated by 21st century liberal capitalism.

Sub Unit

• Area III. Theoretical Explanations of Crime and Criminal Behavior / 2. Critical, Conflict and Feminist Perspectives

Individual Presentations

• From Fighting for Fitness to Brutal Bare Knuckle – A Deviant Leisure Perspective on the Phenomena of Unlicensed Boxing in England - James Treadwell, Birmingham City University, UK; Adam Lynes, Birmingham City University, UK

• The Violence of Authenticity: Feminist Pornography and the Fetishization of ‘Real’ Pleasure - Corina Medley, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

• Spot the Fashion Victim(s): The Global Demand for Consuming Counterfeit Fashion - Joanna Large, Teesside University

• Deviance, Leisure and Illicit Lifestyle Pharmaceuticals - Alexandra Hall, Teesside University

Chair

• Oliver Smith, Plymouth University, UK