Abstract
Door supervisors or 'bouncers' are charged with privately policing Britain's night-time leisure economy, sometimes using 'normal' force to ensure order inside and at the entrances to urban licensed premises. Using ethnography generated in Southwest Britain, this article explores the lived realities of legal risk among these predominantly male workers. As well as empirically charting interrelated factors associated with the imposition, amplification and avoidance of legal risk, this article supports an embodied, non-dualist approach to socio-legal study. Such an approach, in rethinking unhelpful dichotomies (for example, mind-body, reason-emotion, victim-oppressor, conformity-deviance, order-disorder), incorporates the 'lived body' and 'sex-specific corporeality' when exploring legal risk, violence and society.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 453-480 |
Number of pages | 28 |
Journal | Social and Legal Studies |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2004 |
Keywords
- Bouncers
- Door supervisors
- Embodiment
- Ethnography
- Legal risk
- Masculinities
- Night-time economy
- Police
- Violence