2025/07/30 by Chadwick Young, Callie Schultz, Jeff Rose +2 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Psychology · #Outdoor and Experiential Education #Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking #Recreation, Leisure, Wilderness Management
paper · doi:10.1080/01490400.2025.2538722
openalex publication_date 2025/07/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
The outdoors, as a space, is often regarded in popular Western psyches as a cisgender male space, while meanings of being “outdoorsy” are commonly linked to tropes of hegemonic masculinity. These societal expectations of cisgender men can support the production of harmful performances and representations of masculinity commonplace in U.S. outdoor adventure settings. These performances can be detrimental to all genders, limiting the ways people perform their gender and “be” outdoors. Grounded in performance theory, this study explored how cisgender men perform masculinities during outdoor adventure activities and how those performances resist, reinforce, or repurpose dominant narratives of masculinity. Using performance ethnography, we co-performed outdoor adventure activities, conducted interviews and a focus group, and reflexively journaled to produce embodied “scripts” of performances of masculinity. We analyzed these scripts by exploring how performed masculinities are entangled with ideas of competence and competition, and how these entanglements might shape outdoor experiences for cis-men.