PERSPECTIVES ON ANALYZING GENDER, WOMEN, AND LEISURE

Gender is a set of socially constructed relationships which are produc ed and reproduced through people's actions. The purpose of this paper is to describe how research has been conducted about gender, women, an d leisure; how this research has changed over the course of the contem porary women's movement of the past 30 years; and to offer considerati ons for future leisure scholarship which might be conceptualized with gender providing possible organizing frameworks. The retrospective his torical perspective suggests five stages of scholarship: invisible, co mpensatory, dichotomous differences, feminist, and gender research. Us ing gender as a potential analytic framework for further leisure resea rch does not imply only the study of women but offers a way to underst and the behavior of females as well as males. Research acknowledging t he social construction of gender also has implications for leisure res earch on other disenfranchised groups who are ''different.'' These gen der analyses allow scholars to examine society as a whole along with a n examination of the behavior of individuals or groups of individuals within particular contexts.