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Contemporary outdoor rock and popular music festivals offer liminoidal 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 purpose of this paper is to explore the way gender is negotiated in the festival space.

The rock and popular music tribute festival, known as “Glastonbudget” provides the focus for this conceptual paper. A pilot ethnographic exploration of the event utilising photographic imagery was used to understand the way in which gender is displayed.

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.

This is a conceptual paper which presents the need to advance social science-based studies connecting gender to the social construction of event space. The ideas explored in this paper need to be extended and developed to build upon the research design established here.

There is currently a paucity of literature surrounding the concept of gender within these festival spaces especially in relation to liminality within events research.

Metaphors are used a great deal in theory but are not always fully explained. This paper expands on the carnival metaphor used by Boje (2001) by clarifying the type of carnival the metaphor describes, in this case the sideshow carnival. The sideshow carnival metaphor helps to explain how emotional labor can be used to avoid situations of administrative evil that have been partially caused by the separation of mind/body of public servants operating in public space. The authors of this article illustrate the application of the sideshow carnival metaphor by showing how emergency professionals in the area of natural disaster management have become more professionalized over the last several decades. This professionalization has led to a focus on the rational mind over the emotional body. By engaging in emotional labor, emergency professionals are engaging in carnivalesque behavior that helps to repair the mind/body connection. If the connection is not repaired, the rational mind will take over and the public space wherein the emergency professional exists can co-opt the professional leading them to be unable to see the potential evil acts they might commit.

The Reformation, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch maintains, which redefined the relationship between the individual and God as a personal one, “took pains to regulate the relationship of man to alcohol,” and in so doing laid “an essential foundation¦…¦for the development of capitalism.” In the earlier Rabelaisian world, the Church constituted the major site of popular culture. Virtually all work was seasonal in character punctuated by carnivalesque church feasts that numbered over one hundred yearly. Although generally accepted as a safe means to vent communal anxieties, drink comprised an essential element of these festivals, with drunkenness the socially acceptable outcome.¹⁶ However, as the Reformation progressed and new modes of aristocratic behavior developed, reformative efforts to separate the secular and the sacred within the church resulted in attempts to abandon the popular culture of the lower classes. A broad consensus emerged that too much drunkenness amounted to social evil, and that alehouses represented an “increasingly dangerous force in popular society.”¹⁷ As the influence of the Church declined in the early eighteenth century, Carnival resurfaced in the form of gregarious carnivalesque village and town feasts: “the grotesque body of carnival was being re-territorialized” and writers such as Swift and Pope “perpetually identif[ied] the scene of writing with the fairground and the carnival.”¹⁸ Conversely, in keeping with the symmetrical component inherent in the Carnival/Lent theme, Lent transmuted into organizations such as The Society for the Reformation of Manners, which attempted to reduce drunkenness, cursing, swearing and whoring – all tropes of carnivalesque gregariousness. So, during this period, a contradictory cultural dissonance was being enacted. On the one hand, we find a resurgence of Carnival, but on the other hand, we see “a conservative desire on the part of the upper classes to separate themselves more clearly and distinctly from these popular activities.”¹⁹

This paper aims to examine the cultural heritage of outdoor rock and pop music festivals in Britain since the mid‐1960s, and relates it to developments in, and critiques of, corporate sponsorship in the contemporary music festival sector.

The paper uses extant research materials to construct an account of British music festival history since the mid‐1960s. It then draws upon Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque and the literature on sponsorship, experiential marketing and branding, in order to understand critiques of corporate sponsorship and the changing nature of the sector.

Outdoor rock and pop music festivals were dominated by the ideologies of a “countercultural carnivalesque” from the late 1960s until the mid‐1990s. In the 1990s, changes in legislation began a process of professionalization, corporatization, and a reliance on brand sponsorships. Two broad trajectories are identified within the contemporary sector: one is strongly rooted in the heritage of the countercultural carnivalesque, while the other is more overtly commercial.

It is argued that experiential marketing and brand activation are key methods for achieving a balance between the competing aspects of commerce and carnival. Hence, festival organisers and sponsors need to understand the history of the sector and of their own events and attendees in order to use corporate sponsorship more effectively.

This paper adds historical and theoretical depth to the debate between commerce and carnival within the music festival sector, and makes connections between cultural theory and the literature on sponsorship and branding.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the authentic experiences and sense-making processes of LGBTQ+ participants of Amsterdam Pride as well as their bodily and spatial interactions that arise during the festival.

By taking a critical, poststructuralist stance on pride festivals and drawing on 40 in-depth interviews and participant observation, the data are subjected to an inductive, qualitative, thematic content analysis for key themes.

Amsterdam Pride provides distinct spaces for LGBTQ+ individuals to express their carnivalesque bodily practices freely. While Pride offers an existential authentic experience by creating spaces for LGBTQ+ individuals where they can be themselves, the participants exhibit their “authentic” identities freely only within limited time and space that are not separated from the heteronormative order. Pride is increasingly perceived by LGBTQ+ participants as an arena for demonstrating their “normality”. Thus, the paper “signposts” greater political tensions between the queer movement and growing normalisation/citizenship trends among LGBTQ+ individuals.

The paper contributes to a growing body of knowledge around issues of LGBTQ+ identities within the context of an oppressive heteronormative social order. It also reinforces the need for pride festivals for embracing queer, disruptive, sexually dissident expressions of identity as well as continuing transgressive and sexually dissident spaces. This study fills a significant void in the mainstream festival and event management literature and contributes to the theoretical development of festival and critical tourism research by identifying aspects of LGBTQ+ tourists’ authentic experiences at Amsterdam Pride.

Purpose – Focusing on popular culture as unstructured, emergent talk, rather than encapsulated genre or text, this chapter dramatizes a slice of life riven by constant fear of violent assault.

Approach – I access accusatory discourse as the victim of the robbery that precipitates it. The chapter creates an impromptu alternative arena for reflexive ethnographic analysis of crime.

Findings – Most Brazilians live in South Atlantic coastal cities where beaches are loci of social and symbolic action carried out in a carnivalesque mode. The beach symbolizes the myth of national identity, or brasilidade. Culturally specific, yet transnational, beaches are sexually pleasurable spaces of race and class mixing. Armed robbery is the painful shadow-twin of celebration, as much a part of popular culture as bikinis, drink, and dance, but so, too, are the informal community mechanisms attempting to exclude less desirable carnival propensities from spaces marked safe and respectable. A whirlpool of rumor draws on an array of deviant images and acts.

Originality/value – Crime and social control are part of popular culture not merely as engines of re-presentation but as elemental aspects of practical living.

This chapter considers the reception of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire through the music of the Soviet metal band Chernyi Obelisk. It argues that Chernyi Obelisk's four Baudelaire settings, performed in Russian, as part of their early live sets in 1986/1987, offer an important part of the poet's reception history, within the Soviet Union. Taking as a starting point, Michael Robbins's claim that ‘metal and poetry are […] arts of accusation and instruction’, the chapter explores ideas of alienation and of the carnivalesque in Baudelaire's works, as presented through the medium of metal music. Focussing particular on settings of ‘Spleen’ and ‘Une Gravure fantastique’, the chapter contends that Chernyi Obelisk's intertextual and interlingual dialogue with Baudelaire can be read as an aesthetic response to social and political uncertainty during the era of glasnost and perestroika.

Bureaucratic hierarchy, as the hallmark of the modern organization, has been remarkably resilient in the face of increasingly pervasive attacks on its fundamental value and usefulness. We investigate the reasons for this from a cultural, particularly psychoanalytic, perspective – one that sees hierarchy's perpetuation not in terms of the efficacy of its instrumental potential, but rather in the values that are culturally sedimented within it. We argue that hierarchy reflects longings for a pure heavenly order that can never be attained yet remains appealing as a cultural fantasy psychologically gripping individuals in its beatific vision. To tease out this cultural logic we examine two representations of it in popular culture – the U.S. television comedy The Office (2005–) and comedian Will Farrell's impersonation of George W. Bush (2009). These examples illustrate the strength of bureaucratic hierarchy as an affective cultural ideal that retains its appeal even whilst being continually the subject of derision. We suggest that this cultural ideal is structured through a ‘fantasmatic narrative’ revolving around the desire for a spiritualized sense of sovereignty; a desire that is always undermined yet reinforced by its failures to manifest itself concretely in practice. Our central contribution is in relating hierarchy to sovereignty, suggesting that hierarchy persists because of an unquenched and unquenchable desire for spiritual perfection not only amongst leaders, but also amongst those they lead.

This article aims to offer an ethnographic account of substances and sex and how they are interrelated in the context of one holiday destination popular among British youth. Current research on British youth abroad and their use of substances is based almost exclusively on survey methods. Similarly, the same research works do not explore, in sufficient detail, sexual relations outside of those purely between British tourists.

The article is based on 38 focus groups, observations, and informal conversations undertaken in San Antonio, Ibiza during the summers of 2009, 2010 and 2011.

The paper complements current knowledge on sex and substances abroad by discussing the role of promotion representatives, strippers and prostitutes, and the use of drugs and alcohol, emphasising how substances feature in the promotion of sex. Bakhtin's concept of the “carnivalesque” is adopted to understand these behaviours.

Current research is almost exclusively based on sex between tourists; therefore, sexual encounters with other social players in holiday resorts have been largely neglected.

Much scholarly examination of BDSM and kink attempts to make meaningful various specific practices as cultural “texts,” and analyzes them for what they might signify within a particular culture or subculture. This approach has often focused on interpreting specific acts in relation to human sexuality or psychology – specifically deviance – or on critiquing them from a feminist perspective. I propose to approach an examination of (a particular) BDSM (event) itself as (a) performance, and I argue that it is not only performance but that it is performative, creating a liminal space within the already liminal space of the fetish club in which it occurs. This “kink-space” then becomes the place within which the embodiment, and the dissolution, of binaries occurs, creating possibilities for the audience and upending the structures upon which identity is based. Ultimately, BDSM as performance is an avenue for the understanding of the concepts of liminality and power and how they function to create and contain selves.