Limbs yearning to stretch. Waiting for the skies to clear, if just for a brief moment, to push the door open, to breathe deeply without fear of contamination. From ash particles in the air, to bodies dispersing invisible viruses. The moving body is noticed differently. Athletes stranded, sports events postponed, new questions without answers. Yoga classes cancelled, gyms and swimming centres closed. Walking, cycling, joggingâeveryday physical activities, once taken for granted, now constrained within familiar spaces made strange. Deep longings to run, leap, and jump freely, without the draw of pollutants and toxins into the lungs. The surfaces and objects of everyday life, all holding the possibility for foreign bodies entering silently, dangerously.
Responding to the tingling of desire in her muscles, she pushes away from the computer that is both critical to her social connections and productivity and a source of sadness, panic, and despair. Images of death and destruction increasingly fill the screen. Picking up the phone always at her side, in her palm, at her fingertips, tucking it into the plastic sleeve on her arm. Stepping out into empty streets, to run with and away from ever building anxiety in her chest, and adrenaline and cortisol surging through her veins. But the light thud of her shoes, connecting with asphalt, familiar rhythms offering momentary calm. Sweat appears on her skin only to be wicked away by purpose-built clothing. Leaving just a trail of deodorant in the breeze. Blood flows beneath the Lycra layers as oxygen draws deeply into the lungs. The moving body porous to the environment in all its beauty, wonder, joy, and with all the possibilities of terrors unknown. Bodies, environments , technologies, objects: Entangled.
The year of 2020 has introduced many to the extreme dangers of environmental degradation, climate change, and pandemic. Of course, these processes have been underway for many yearsâdecades, centuries, and beyondâand Indigenous peoples and scientists alike have warned of the long-lasting, and possibly irreversible, damage of colonialist, anthropocentric, patriarchal, and capitalist ways of knowing and being. As many are jolted from their everyday patterns and lifestyles too long taken for granted, new questions are being asked about the possibilities of alternative futures. Perhaps now, more so than ever, is the time to look towards the posthumanisms and new materialisms to explore the offerings for thinking, knowing, and doing differently. As Pitts-Taylor (2016) writes, new materialists are interested in âexposing the movement, vitality, morphogenesis, and becoming of the material world, its dynamic processes,â and in so doing, are working to ârethink the terms of social theoryâ (p. 4).
This book explores the contributions of new materialist thought to the study and understanding of moving bodies and engagements in physical activity, fitness, sport, and physical culture. In so doing, it offers insights into our individual and collaborative journeys working with new materialisms and the ethico-onto-epistemological implications for feminist research practices and processes. Recognizing the diverse and eclectic body of work that constitutes the material turn, we build upon its foundational acknowledgement of matter as lively, vital, and agentic to elaborate understandings of moving bodies and their entanglements with human, nonhuman, biological, cultural, technological, material, and affective forces in contemporary society. This book seeks to extend humanist, representationalist, and discursive approaches that have characterized the landscape of feminist research on active bodies, and invites new imaginings and articulations for moving bodies in uncertain times and unknown futures.
This introductory chapter consists of three main parts. We begin by locating the book in the strong foundational knowledge of feminists of sport, physical activity, and moving bodies, and signposting the growing interest among critical scholars of sport and physical culture in posthumanism and new materialisms. We then offer an overview of some of the key tenets of new materialisms as entangled with sporting bodies, before sharing insights into our collaborative processes of working with feminist new materialisms over time and space. Finally, we provide an overview of the structure of the book and invite the reader to join us on our lively journeys with feminist new materialist theoretical concepts, methods, processes, and embodied practices.
Foundations and Future Imaginings: Feminism, Sport, and Moving Bodies
We write this book in continuation of a long history of feminist theorizing about the physically active and moving body. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist sport studies examined the differences between menâs and womenâs opportunities to participate in sport and physical activity. Since then, feminist studies of sport and physical activity have developed into an expansive field spanning an array of topics and using a multitude of theoretical approaches (Markula, 2005). In the 1980s, more critical sociological approaches to feminist sports studies were being developed with a focus on sex/gender distinction and the negative impacts of patriarchal structures and practices on womenâs roles in sport and society. During this time, feminist sport sociologists and historians used various theories (i.e., Marxism, material feminism, socialist feminism) to explore sports in relation to the ideology of masculinity, womenâs oppression and resistance, and social transformation (e.g., Birrell, 1988; Birrell & Cole, 1994; Hargreaves, 1986; Theberge, 1984, 1985; Vertinsky, 1994).
Building upon this foundation, in the 1990s and 2000s, feminist scholars became interested in social constructionist approaches, using poststructuralist theory to explore the role of sporting discourses in the production of gender and gendered ideologies. This shift meant that scholars began to move away from a focus on ideology, hegemony, and the state, and towards poststructuralism which emphasized competing notions of truth, fragmented and multiple subjectivities, and the relational aspect of power (King, 2015; Markula, 2018). Scholars gravitated towards theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, to explore the relational aspects of gendered power and how it is reproduced and challenged through sporting and physical cultural discourses (Adams, 2005; Birrell & Cole, 1994; Cole, 1993; Fullagar, 2010; King, 2006; Markula, 1995, 2003, 2006; McDermott, 1996). Important research has also drawn upon various strands of critical race and feminist theoryâi.e., transnational feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, post-colonial feminisms, intersectional feminismsâto reveal the politics of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion in womenâs experiences of sport and physical culture (e.g., McGuire-Adams, 2020a, 2020b; Palmer, 2016; Ratna, 2018; see Ratna & Samie, 2018 for an excellent overview). Scholars interested in the lived experiences of women in physical culture have also used theories such as phenomenology, affect theory, and non-representational theory, in addition to concepts such as embodiment to explore the corporeal, sensual, and affective dimensions of womenâs sporting lives (e.g., Allen-Collinson, 2011a, 2011b, 2017; Allen-Collinson & Owton, 2014; Francombe-Webb, 2017; Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2013, 2014). In so doing, critical scholars have continued to draw upon feminist theories of the body and embodiment to examine the multiple ways that power operates on and through moving bodies in a range of sporting, fitness, and physical cultural contexts (for an excellent overview of this work, see Mansfield, Caudwell, Wheaton, & Watson, 2018).
Taking cue from feminist theorizing, a growing number of scholars within sociology of sport and physical culture are engaging with new materialist and posthumanist approaches (Giardina, 2017; Newman, Thorpe, & Andrews, 2020a). In so doing, they are exploring a range of topics such as protein powder as more-than-human foodstuff (King, 2020; King & Weedon, 2020a, 2020b), sand dunes as active agents in golf courses (Millington & Wilson, 2017), swimming and surfing in polluted bodies of waters (Evers, 2019a; McDonald & Sterling, 2020), and the human and nonhuman agents in sport for development (Darnell, 2020). Critical sport scholars are engaging with new materialisms and posthumanism in various ways, but primarily understand them as helpful approaches for exploring âthe complex interactions of language and matter, the human and the nonhumanâ (Hekman, 2010, p. 4). Feminist scholars of sport a...