Negotiating Permission to Dance: Care-Embedded Serious Leisure in Urban China

Based on six months of ethnography in a third-tier Chinese city, this article shows how middle-aged and older women pursue square dancing as serious leisure while navigating caregiving and gendered time. Access is negotiated—not freely chosen—through household bargaining, moral justification, and temporal coordination. Framed by an ethic of care, participants legitimized dancing via health, duty, and family well-being and, when risks to dependents arose, sometimes withdrew to preserve future permission. The article theorizes care-embedded serious leisure and specifies three sustaining mechanisms under routine interruption: emotional seriousness (dance’s felt necessity), relational legitimacy work (earning and maintaining permission at home), and the interrupted relational leisure career, marked by readiness and rapid reentry. The study contributes to feminist leisure research and extends serious-leisure theory beyond liberal-individualist assumptions by reconceptualizing perseverance as readiness plus return and by foregrounding household authorization and between-practice work, not only skill or identity.