Gendered leisure: Female university students' leisure perceptions, constraints and negotiations

Date

2025-10-1

Author

Eğilmez, Damla

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This study explores the gendered nature of leisure through female university students’ leisure perceptions, constraints, and negotiations. It aims to understand how female university students’ leisure is shaped by patriarchal power relations and class dynamics as well as their negotiation strategies in order to claim their right to leisure and women’s unique shared experience compared to male university students. Based on semistructured in-depth interviews with 21 university students, both male and female, this study explores how patriarchal, and class relations intersect to shape female university students’ leisure experiences and how their leisure practices are distinctly constrained and negotiated compared to male university students’. To better analyze the distinctive role of patriarchal relations in leisure, the study focuses on the participants’ everyday leisure practices and experiences. The study reveals that while female university students seek joy and freedom in leisure as an everyday practice, they also face patriarchal constraints that differ significantly from those experienced by men. Female university students employ different negotiation strategies within the private and public spheres, often challenging the gendered division of leisure and patriarchal social control. Eventually, findings indicate that, rather than being an apolitical practice, iv leisure becomes a site of everyday struggle where patriarchal power relations are both reproduced and challenged through women’s negotiation. Findings indicate that despite resistance, female university students’ leisure experiences continue to be gendered and constrained by patriarchal power relations and social control of women. Despite different sociodemographic characteristics, female university students’ leisure continues to reflect participants’ feelings of inequality and constraints.

Subject Keywords

Gendered leisure, Leisure constraints, Patriarchy, Negotiation strategies

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116162

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis