Festival Space: gender, liminality and the carnivalesque Purpose -Contemporary outdoor rock and popular music festivals offer liminal spaces in which event participants can experience characteristics associated with the carnivalesque. Festival goers celebrate with abandonment, excess and enjoy a break from the mundane routine of everyday life. The aim of this conceptual paper is to explore the way gender is negotiated in the festival space.Design/methodology/approach -The rock and popular music tribute festival, known as 'Glastonbudget' provides the focus for this conceptual paper. A pilot ethnographic study at the event utilising photographic imagery was used to understand the way in which gender is displayed.Findings -It is suggested that liminal zones offer space to invert social norms and behave with abandonment and freedom away from the constraints of the everyday but neither women nor men actually take up this opportunity. The carnivalesque during Glastonbudget represents a festival space which consolidates normative notions of gender hierarchy via a complicated process of othering.Research limitations/implications -This is a conceptual paper which presents the need to develop social science based studies connecting gender to the social construction of event space. The ideas developed in this article need to be further explored further building upon the research design established here.Originality/value -There is currently a paucity of literature surrounding the concept of gender within these festival spaces especially in relation to liminality within events research.

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Arguably, girls’ and women’s soccer in England is currently experiencing amelioration in terms of participation numbers, media coverage and general public interest. Although, lurking behind these favorable statistics and the pretence of new developmental strategies sits soccer’s cultural millstone, weighing down social progression and limiting the credibility afforded to the game. This paper seeks to unearth how girls and women negotiate their experiences of playing against this backdrop of inferiority by giving them a ‘voice’. The study is explored through a lens of ‘performative pleasure’ as a theoretical standpoint for understanding the basis of activity which involved qualitative methods enagaging with 57 female players aged between 8 and 31 years. The examination uncovered that despite barriers to participation and the management of social stereotyping, girls and women found pleasure through playing. Soccer provided the players with a ‘safe space’ to experience leisure, but ironically this refuge was often needed in response to soccer-based teasing and ‘banter’: conceptualized as the Sanctuary Paradox. The current findings have implications for the management and execution of cultural change within sporting environments.

This article explores the influence participating in football has on the development of adolescent girls’ gender identity, an area which currently lacks academic attention. Data were taken from an ethnographic study with a group of adolescent girls and boys and compared to Jeanes’ research. A social constructionist framework was deployed with links to both critical theory and feminist literature. Qualitative and participatory methods were used to fully engage with the complex issue of gender identity. The girls within this study were aware of the normative gender expectations linked to ‘being a female’ but did not find this restrictive. The girls moved between many changing identities and organised their ‘web of selves’ accordingly. The apparent need to measure success by the parameters of male standards created a barrier to girls’ identity development