Snowboarding, motherhood and mobility

Abstract

This paper recounts one mother’s story of living a snowboarding lifestyle as she moves from season to season between America and New Zealand with her husband and pre-school child. Building upon existing research on migrant tourist workers and ‘lifestyle travellers’, Fiona’s story draws on interview texts, diary entries, researcher field notes, and the authors’ own experiences as a mother and snow sport migrant, to explore some of the underlying discourses and assumptions associated with motherhood, mobility and leisure. The paper highlights the ways in which social, political and economic changes have blurred the boundaries between work and leisure. Fiona actively draws on neoliberal discourses of individualism and sub-cultural discourses of snowboarding, lifestyle and feminism to craft her ‘self’ in complex and often contradictory ways. The findings provide a new account of global sport mobility, adding to the research on sport and motherhood and sport migration studies.