Sport and the challenges to racism

support the importance of an on-going focus on the politics of regulation in leisure contexts. Those chapters that consider leisure in relation to sexuality, erotica, gambling, comedy, reading and drug taking tend to explore, more fully, the intricacies of choice and pleasure. I found Stephen Wagg’s chapter on comedy and Nicole Matthews’ chapter on reading especially enthralling. Wagg provides an extensive account of the politics of public expressions of humour. He traces predominantly Western comic genre through past decades—particularly the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s—and demonstrates shifts in style, acceptability and notions of political correctness. With this leisure experience (and industry), Wagg shows how the links between the comic, his/her material and the audience are central to public expressions of laughter and, as I see it, embodied pleasures. Matthews turns to women’s fiction to explore the noughties (2000s), the notion of sexually naughty and so-called ‘guilty’ pleasures. She focuses on an emerging fiction of horror-romance and gothic-romance, the supernatural and fantastical, to highlight the shifting relations between readers’ pleasures, sexually explicit cultural texts and regulation/deregulation. For me, the chapter by Shane Blackman on ‘rituals of intoxication’ provides an insightful account of young people, youth culture, drug taking and risk. As with some of the other contributors, Blackman elucidates the operation of class as well as youthfulness in media moral panics. He tracks current state and policy intervention through a genealogy that positions drug use by the working class and young as irresponsible and vulgar. Simultaneously, Blackman explores the pleasure aspects of intoxication and associated risk taking for young people and how this might impact positively on their sense of identity and community. Clearly, this is a tricky topic, but one that is covered very well in this chapter. Many of the chapters are similarly intricate and rigorous. Although familiar ground to me, I did find the chapters on the countryside (Ravenscroft & Gilchrist), sport (Horne) and music (Lashua) informative and potential sources of information—both theoretical and issue-based—for future projects with sport and leisure undergraduate and post-graduate students. The entire collection will appeal to academics and non-academics who are interested in contemporary politics, state regulation, agented freedoms and the breadth and fluidity of leisure.