Representational affectivities in nature-based leisure: the case of game-angling

We explore affective registers that characterise game-angling, particularly fly-fishing, through a critical engagement with the discursive and visual strategies employed in a key game-angling periodical, Trout and Salmon magazine, across a period of sixty years. We examine how angling brands and textual utterances evoke the affective and emotional states of becoming and being an angler, and in doing so bring the sport into a state of being and becoming in which traditional and modern values work with, and in tension to, each other. We focus on three interconnected themes. First, the extent to which the practice of angling is mediated by specific brands and technologies which blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. Second, the extent to which branded technologies and brand values foster angling practices that either adhere to or deviate from traditional understandings of what game-angling is and entails. Third, the ways in which dominant tropes conceptualise, frame, and canonise idealised game-angling spaces and spatial practices. We conclude with an exegesis that game-angling texts and brands tell us much about what it is to be human and animal in the choreographing and enactment of this ever-popular and ever-evolving, yet anchored, leisure world.