Governing bodies or managing freedom? Subcultural struggles, national sport systems and the glocalised institutionalisation of parkour

Whilst being the world’s fastest growing informal sport, parkour is also undergoing a gradual institutionalisation which is shaped differently by each national context’s specific sport system. We investigate this glocalised process by examining the subcultural tensions and power struggles it generates within the Italian parkour community. Whilst in other countries parkour practitioners (the so-called traceurs/traceuses) have managed to gain public recognition by forming a specific and independent national governing body, in Italy they are gradually affiliating with different Sport Promotion Bodies (Enti di Promozione Sportiva), the distinctive umbrella organisations which compete for the provision of sport-for-all within the country. Through a qualitative mixed-method approach based on focus groups, individual interviews and the analysis of ethnographic and documentary material, we explore the institutionalisation of Italian parkour by focusing on the controversies surrounding the introduction of teaching standards and qualifications, which is becoming a battlefield between competing authenticity claims based on different visions and interpretations of parkour. Our analysis shows how sport policymakers become influential agents in this authentication process by (often unwittingly) favouring certain forms and meanings of the practice and thereby contributing to legitimising certain practitioners over others, distributing subcultural reputations and shaping hierarchies in the field. Moreover, by highlighting how the specific characteristics of the Italian sport system contribute to increasing tensions amongst traceurs but also stimulate discussion and pluralism, this study calls for future comparative analysis of the role of policymakers in the local re-contextualisation of highly globalised practices

“A Cathartic Moment in a Man’s Life”: Homosociality and Gendered Fun on the Puttan Tour

Rarely addressed in academic scholarship, the puttan tour is a well-known form of entertainment in Italy where young men drive around in small groups with the aim of spotting street sex workers. On some occasions, the participants will approach the sex workers to strike up a conversation. On others, they will shout out insults from their car then drive away. This article aims to advance a detailed analysis of this underexplored cultural practice drawing on a diverse body of scholarship exploring the intersection of masculinity, leisure, and homosociality. By analyzing stories of puttan tours gathered mostly online, including written accounts and YouTube videos, our aim is to explore the appeal of the puttan tour through an analysis of how homosociality, humor, and laughter operate in this example of gendered fun. To this end, we look at the multiple and often equivocal meanings of this homosocial male-bonding ritual, its emotional and affective dynamics, and the ways in which it reproduces structures of inequality while normalizing violence against sex workers

Managing alternative sports: new organisational spaces for the diffusion of Italian parkour

The article explores the encounter between parkour as an unstructured and culturally innovative practice, challenging both physical as well as organisational spaces, and UISP (Unione Italiana Sport per Tutti / Sport for All Italian Union) as a sport promotion body open to organisational and cultural experimentation. Drawing on a multi-method qualitative approach (analysis of documentary material, interviews and focus groups), we look at the role of UISP in the diffusion and legitimation of parkour within the Italian context, investigating the interplay between the cultural and organisational logics of both this new practice itself on the one hand, and the organisations that are trying to accommodate it on the other. The incorporation in a sport-for-all organisation like UISP provides traceurs with a safe and legitimised space, which is however ‘loose’ enough to maintain the fluidity of the practice. Nonetheless, by enabling the coexistence of different and competing definitions and uses of parkour, this fluid organisational space reproduces tensions among traceurs and weakens their voice in UISP’s decision-making processes

Beyond the Client: Exploring Men's Sexual Scripting

Sexual scripting theory, with its de-essentialising potential, is a powerful weapon in dismantling simplistic, classificatory, and derogatory understandings of men as clients of commercial sex, allowing us to explore how making sense of paying for sex is an everyday accomplishment for men in the scripting of heterosexual masculinity. Drawing upon middle-aged and elderly Italian men\u2019s accounts of their heterosexual sexual biographies, we point to directions along which the potential of scripting theory can further unfold in research on purchasing sex, by considering scripting as a situational, biographical and boundary-drawing process