Abstract

Through a consideration of women and the night-time economy, this chapter highlights the complex relationship that exists between gender, leisure and urban space. For many young women, the city at night is both a place of potential danger as well as of pleasure and freedom and includes drug taking and drinking to excess. They also adopt personal and collective strategies intended to manage physical risk and there is evidence that female friends and the carving out of micro spaces of safety and familiarity are important. Explanations of the gendered nature of the night-time economy that focus solely on empowerment and resistance ignore powerful structural contexts and constraints. Equally, it is important to eschew totalizing explanations and attempt to work with ambiguity and paradox; this chapter underlines the view that in order to understand women, leisure and the city, a range of interconnecting approaches and a nuanced interdisciplinary sensibility are required.