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The Nature of the Body in Sport and Physical Culture: From Bodies and Environments to Ecological Embodiment

Samantha King and Gavin Weedon

This article raises the ecological substance and relational co-constitution of bodies as a generative question for sociologists of sport and physical culture. It proceeds from our observation that recent research on the materiality of athletic bodies, and on the environmental issues in which sport is implicated, tends to run on parallel tracks. By exploring how biological, environmental, and social natures cohere in the making and unmaking of healthy bodies, our aim is to connect and extend these vibrant areas of research. We do so by developing the concept of “ecological embodiment,” a descriptor for a fluid state of becoming and a sensibility for thinking about hierarchical socioecological entanglements. To illustrate this concept, we draw on a study of whey protein powder, a key ingredient in contemporary fitness cultures.

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Gender, Sexual, and Sports Fan Identities

Rachel Allison and Chris Knoester

Using data from the National Sports and Society Survey (N = 3,988), this study analyzes associations between gender, sexual, and sports fan identities. The authors find that only 11% of U.S. adults do not identify as sports fans at all; also, nearly half of U.S. adults identify as quite passionate sports fans. Women and nonbinary adults are less likely to identify as strong sports fans compared with men. Compared with identifying as heterosexual, identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or another sexual identity is negatively associated with self-identified sports fandom. Yet, gender and sexuality interact such that identifying as gay (or lesbian) is negatively associated with men’s self-identified sports fandom but not women’s fandom. These findings persist even after consideration of adults’ retrospective accounts of their sports-related identities while growing up and their recognition of sports-related mistreatment.

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Women Caring for Retired Men: A Continuation of Inequality in the Sport Marriage

Steven M. Ortiz

Drawing from longitudinal qualitative research on the heteronormative sport marriage that primarily featured interviews with women married to male professional athletes, this article focuses on how women were affected by and managed their retired husbands’ physical and mental–emotional health issues. It explores the women’s continued use of self-management strategies they developed during their husband’s career as they offered increasingly challenging care work to their husbands and examines how long-held expectations about their caregiver role continued to contribute to post-career gender inequality in their marriages. It captures the women’s voices as they discovered that they were not sufficiently prepared for the emerging personal and relational complexities that emerged in retirement.

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International High-Performance Sport Camps and the Development of Emplaced Physical Capital Among Pasifika Athletes

Wendy O’Brien, Caroline Riot, and Clare Minahan

In this paper, the authors explore how athletes from the Global South interact with the material environment of an international training camp program in the lead up to a major event. Set within the context of Pasifika nations with colonial and missionary legacies, they examine the material, affective, sensory, and rhythmic forces at work to produce enabling or constraining capacities for emplaced physical capital in athletes. Driven by a desire to improve their performance, athletes resisted, appropriated, and adopted various high-performance practices to develop their emplaced physical capital capacities.

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To Live, Play, and Die in Tianjin: Football as Biopolitical Assemblage in Contemporary China

Joshua I. Newman, Grace Yan, Hanhan Xue, and Nicholas M. Watanabe

In this article, the authors provide a Deleuzoguattarian tracing of a specific set of relationships between traditional Chinese medicine, life, death, and football (soccer). More specifically, the authors examine political, economic, and cultural associations formed in and around the Quanjian Group, a major traditional Chinese medicine company once located in the burgeoning industrial hub of Tianjin. The authors follow Aihwa Ong in abductively examining (de)territorializations of life, sport, and death; examining how the media publics’ (in China and beyond) awareness of the death of a young girl in 2015 destabilized a network of capital, state, medicine, and sport and in the process revealed how the vitality of major professional sport in China is situated within, and contingent upon, a vast array of material and nonmaterial (bio)political formations.

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Decolonizing Sports Sociology is a “Verb not a Noun”: Indigenizing Our Way to Reconciliation and Inclusion in the 21st Century? Alan Ingham Memorial Lecture

Paul Whitinui

In this paper, which is a revised and modified version of the 2019 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Alan Ingham Memorial lecture, the author shares four views, contributions, and opportunities that sports sociologists might consider useful in how to decolonize as well as indigenize our discipline together. The need to actively engage in the theory and practice of how to decolonize while understanding what it also means to work toward becoming an accomplice, activist, ally, or co-resistor are important threads underpinning the nature and scope of this paper. The author concludes with a plea to sports sociologists that decolonizing our minds is as much a collective effort as it is an act of reconciliation while maintaining the promise of inclusion, equity, and human rights. As sports sociologists, understanding what it means to be in “good relations” with Indigenous Peoples is fundamental to how we continue to build on and improve our discipline together.

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Moving Beyond Models: Theorizing Physical Disability in the Sociology of Sport

James Brighton, Robert C. Townsend, Natalie Campbell, and Toni L. Williams

In this paper we explore current theoretical approaches available from the discipline of critical disability studies (CDS) for conceptualizing physical disability and advocate how these understandings can advance sociological research on disability sport. After reviewing a dominant “models” approach that has historically been employed, we illuminate how theoretical architecture provided by selected sociological theorists (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Zygmunt Bauman) and from aesthetic, cyborg, and new materialist approaches can help reveal the materialist conditions, sociocultural structures, and lived realities of disability. In doing so, we appeal to researchers of disability sport to develop critical understandings of why alternative theoretical approaches are valuable, what theoretical choices to make, and how we can use theory to highlight oppression and empower those involved in disability sport.

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Making a Case for Sport as Avant-Garde

Robert E. Rinehart

The avant-garde has much to offer sport studies and many paths to explore for sport studies’ scholars. In this article, I makes a case for the use of the avant-garde as a metaphor for sport studies, sport scholars, and the public at large. To do this, I sketch out some of the foundational and pertinent characteristics of the avant-garde, provides exemplars from art, considers the similarities between sport and art (in terms of an avant-garde metaphor), and provides some exemplars from sport.

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Extraordinary Normalcy, Ableist Rehabilitation, and Sporting Ablenationalism: The Cultural (Re)Production of Paralympic Disability Narratives

Emma Pullen, Daniel Jackson, Michael Silk, P. David Howe, and Carla Filomena Silva

In the United Kingdom, significant changes have occurred in the Paralympic media production environment and style of Paralympic broadcasting. Given the generative nature of media texts on cultural representation, the authors explore the circulation of disability narratives in contemporary Paralympic media coverage. Drawing on an integrated data set that brings together textual analysis and audience perceptions, the authors highlight the presence of three disability narratives, termed: extraordinary normalcy, ableist rehabilitation, and sporting ablenationalism. The authors unpack the ways these three narratives differ from the widely and commonly used “supercrip” critique and discuss the implications of these narratives, and the wider cultural discourses and dialogue they generate, in terms of inclusion/exclusion and progressive social change.

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Mountain Equipment Co-Op, “Diversity Work,” and the “Inclusive” Politics of Erasure

Jason Laurendeau, Tiffany Higham, and Danielle Peers

In October 2018, Canadian retailer Mountain Equipment Co-op publicly asked, “Do white people dominate the outdoors?” and acknowledged that their representations were “part of [a] problem.” Relying on Ahmed’s theorizations of diversity work, this paper offers an intersectional interrogation of Mountain Equipment Co-op’s (MEC’s) commitment to including more “diversity” in their representations and considers how both MEC’s statement and their early efforts to diversify simultaneously efface the gendered, ableist, fatphobic, settler colonial and racist structuring of “the outdoors” both in MEC’s practices and in “Canada” more broadly. Our analysis highlights how MEC’s practices continue to reflect and reproduce the appropriation of wilderness for a narrow range of bodies.