The grey work of lifestyle entrepreneurialism in skateboarding: carving out pathways in an era of precarity and flexible professionalism

A variety of scholarship has addressed the informal and unconventional trajectories of professional skateboarders—of taking skateboarding as ‘serious leisure’. The consensus is that there is no established sporting infrastructure that clearly scaffolds a skateboarder’s career, and that skate work should be contextualized by its entrepreneurism: as ‘lifestyle entrepreneurism’. Work and play are, on this analysis, integrated with various motivating drives of expression, activity, location, and as we add ‘for the culture’. We make our argument by drawing on four different ethnographic perspectives of skate work from diverse populations: POC, women, trans, and queer skaters, as well as ageing and youth skaters. These perspectives lead to our thesis: that skate work is ‘grey work’, a layered complexity of ‘subcultural labour’ and ‘flexible professionalism’ amidst the norms of skateboard culture. Skateboard careers are thus far more dense than the supposed ‘pro-skater’ moniker ever suggests.