Dark leisure: The gendered and racialised experiences of kidnapping in contemporary capitalism

The presentation focuses on the design of staged kidnapping packages: packages provided to prospective clients/adventurous consumers of fear, who are voluntarily subjected to kidnapping and captivity by professional artists/kidnappers working for this emerging industry of theatrical terror. The purchase of such ‘experiences’ by Western individuals suggests their interpellation as ‘extreme’ leisure within a broader tendency of contemporary capitalism to co-opt and commoditise terror and suffering. I discuss how the ecological aesthetics and terror atmospheres involved in the staging of such ‘confrontations’ with uncertainty are designed as inherently white, Western, Eurocentric and masculine. In particular, I interrogate the meaningful absences and/or presences of gender and race in this paradoxical leisure activity as an entrenched feature of the ways racial and gendered identities are mobilised and circulated in global markets as ‘objects’.