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Defining the idea of a “hobby” is surprisingly hard For example you might think low risk is part of it but many hobbies are high risk, like sailing. More so than dangerous professions. Or low impact. Many of the biggest inventions came from hobbyist tinkering.
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There's an interesting argument that a lot of what we now see as hobbies were invented to divert and shape masculine passions as an antidote to a perceived crisis of masculinity (compare feminized cooking as domestic labor and masculinized hobby cooking)
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This is from Michael Kimmel's history of masculinity in the US - it's a smaller chunk than I remembered, part of his broader argument about all the work that had to be done to define "home" as a space that could also be masculine:
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Probably true, but I think there's a large component of US hobby culture that is based in this dynamic, particularly around gender and use of space - stuff like the suburban garage as pseudo-workshop, etc. Also interested in how hobbies break down gender-wise overall though.
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