Parkour, Resistance, and the Precorporation of ‘Transgression’

• In Event: 'Serious' Leisure and Harm

Abstract

The urban lifestyle sport of parkour and freerunning is becoming rapidly established as a mainstream and professionalised leisure practice. Traditionally this has been approached through the cultural criminological notions of spatial ‘resistance’ to the late-capitalist city. Drawing upon a two-year ethnography among a parkour community in the North of England, this paper employs the deviant leisure perspective to problematize the shortcomings of this analytical approach. It explores how practitioners of parkour have embraced and solicited this drift into the mainstream through commercial and entrepreneurial efforts, viewed as an opportunity for a livelihood that preserves a culturally relevant identity in an infantilised era of late-capitalism that worships youth. Moreover, it will be argued that the practice of parkour and freerunning is not ‘co-opted’ away from its practitioners. Rather, the iconography of transgression within parkour is precorporated—pre-emptively shaped and imbued with the underlying values of consumer capitalism in which transgression has become a commodified norm that reproduces the consumerist project. Consequently, the deviant leisure perspective reconfigures cultural criminology’s understanding of transgression, resistance and conformity in late-capitalism, to consider its implications for our understandings of work, leisure and freedom in our current context.

Author

• Thomas Raymen, Plymouth University, UK