Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness: A Lively Entanglement 3030565807, 9783030565800

Table of contents :
Permissions
Acknowledgements
Praise for Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness
Contents
1: A Lively Introduction: New Materialisms, Feminisms, and Moving Bodies
Foundations and Future Imaginings: Feminism, Sport, and Moving Bodies
Key Tenets of New Materialisms and the Moving Body
Lively Matter
Entangled Bodies
Relational Politics and Vital Respondings
Becoming with New Materialisms: Processes of Feminist Collaboration
Lines of Flight: Overview of the Book
2: New Materialist Methods and the Research Process
New Materialisms, Methodology, and Process
Methodology Without Methods
Research as Assemblage and Scaffolding
Postqualitative Inquiry and New Empiricisms
Diffractive Methodology
Research Boundaries and Processual Tensions
Rethinking Methods with New Materialisms
Media Analysis
Interviews
Participatory Methods
Autoethnography
Arts-Based Methods
Embodied and Movement-Based Methods
Re-turning to the Quantitative: Transdisciplinary and Mixed Methods
Reflexivity, Positionality, and Ethics
Final Thoughts on New Materialist Research Practices
3: Sporting Matter and Living with Objects of Fitness
Critical Understandings of Sporting Objects
Material Feminisms
Feminist Cultural Studies
Phenomenology and Non-representational Theory
Rethinking Sports Objects with New Materialisms
Object Oriented Ontology
Actor Network Theory
Vibrant Matter
Agential Realism
Towards Knowing Objects: New Materialist Methods
Case Study: How We Came to Know the Sports Bra Differently
Contextualizing Enlite
Living with the Sports Bra: A Baradian-Inspired Process
Sports Bra Entanglements
Body-Bra Intra-actions
Knowing the Sports Bra Differently
Agency, New Materialisms and Sporting Objects
Concluding Thoughts
Pedagogical Possibilities
4: Digital Intimacies, Assemblages, and Fit Femininities
Digital Technologies, Gender, and Moving Bodies
Foucault: Digital Discipline, Pleasure, and Resistance
Embodied Digital Data and Sense Making
New Materialisms: Rethinking Digital Fitness Technologies
Donna Haraway, the Cyborg and Companion Species
Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism and Enchantment
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Affects and Assemblages
Case: Self-Tracking and the Motherhood-Fitness Assemblage
Annette: “When it buzzes it’s like a pat on the back”
Affective Intimacies and Digital Practices of Care
Rendering Visible the Unseen (Physical) Work of Motherhood
Re-Assembling Fit Motherhood
Conclusion: Digital Assemblages and Fit Femininities
Pedagogical Possibilities
5: The Biocultural Possibilities of Sportswomen’s Health
Leaning into the ‘Biological Turn’ with Feminist New Materialisms
Lynda Birke: Feminism with ‘Blood and Guts’
Samantha Frost: Biocultural Creatures
Elizabeth Wilson, Gut Feminism, and Biology as ‘Strange Matter’
Gut Feminism and Elite Sportswomen: The Case of LEA and RED-S
Context: Sporting Culture and the ‘Ideal’ Performing Body
Sporting Cultures and Biological Bodies
Knowing the Biological Body: Sportswomen’s Engagement with Biodata
The Biological Body as Dynamic, Unruly, and Agentic
Summary: Biological Encounters with Feminist Sport Studies
Pedagogical Possibilities
6: Apparatus and the Boundaries of Transdisciplinary Research
Feminist New Materialisms, Transdisciplinarity, and Apparatus
Transdisciplinarity: The Possibilities and Pitfalls
The Research Apparatus
Transdisciplinarity: A Baradian Approach
Rethinking Transdisciplinary Research in Sport: A Case Study
Reading Disciplines Through Each Other
Intra-actions and the Everyday Performativity of Disciplinary Boundaries
Locating and Troubling the Boundaries of the Apparatus
Athlete Voice: A “Nodal Point” in the Sport Science Apparatus
The Transdisciplinary Research Apparatus Revisited
Final Thoughts: Rethinking Disciplinary Boundaries with New Materialisms
Pedagogical Possibilities
7: Feminist Ethics, the Environment, and Vital Respondings
The Environment, New Materialisms, and Feminist Theory
Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Environmental Humanities
Feminist Theory and the Environment: Debates and Divergences
New Materialisms, Feminist Theory, and the Environment
Sport, the Environment, and New Materialisms
New Materialisms, Representation, and Ethics: Moving Bodies and Environmental Entanglements
New Materialisms and the Ethics of Representation
Collaborative Creative Writing: Body-Environment Entanglements
Writing-Feeling Together: Part 1
Under Red Skies
Writing-Feeling Together: Part 2
Vital Respondings in Pandemic Times
Final Thoughts: New Materialisms and Feminist Respondings for Vital Futures
Pedagogical Possibilities
8: Epilogue: Feminist New Materialisms and Lively Collaborations
References
Index

Citation preview

NEW FEMININITIES IN DIGITAL PHYSICAL AND SPORTING CULTURES

Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness A Lively Entanglement

Holly Thorpe Julie Brice Marianne Clark

New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures

Series Editors Kim Toffoletti School of Humanities and Social Sciences Deakin University Melbourne, VIC, Australia Jessica Francombe-Webb Department for Health University of Bath Bath, UK Holly Thorpe School of Health University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand

Palgrave’s New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures series is dedicated to exploring emerging forms and expressions of femininity, feminist activism and politics in an increasingly global, consumer and digital world. Books in this series focus on the latest conceptual, methodological and theoretical developments in feminist thinking about bodies, movement, physicality, leisure and technology to understand and problematize new framings of feminine embodiment. Globally inclusive, and featuring established and emerging scholars from multi-disciplinary fields, the series is characterized by an interest in advancing research and scholarship concerning women’s experiences of physical culture in a variety of cultural contexts. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15874

Holly Thorpe • Julie Brice Marianne Clark

Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness A Lively Entanglement

Holly Thorpe University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand

Julie Brice University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand

Marianne Clark University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia

ISSN 2522-0330     ISSN 2522-0349 (electronic) New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures ISBN 978-3-030-56580-0    ISBN 978-3-030-56581-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Tani Klein, Doodlebug Creative Studio This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To human and nonhuman futures, entangled with kindness, compassion, and hope.

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The case study in Chapter Five includes parts of a previously published study: Thorpe, H., & Clark, M. (2019). Gut Feminism, new materialisms and sportswomen’s embodied health: The case of RED-S in endurance athletes. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 1–17. Used with permission. A section in the case in Chapter Six is part of a previously published study: Thorpe, H., Brice, J. & Rolleston, A. (2020). Decolonizing sport science: High performance sport, indigenous cultures, and women’s rugby. Sociology of Sport Journal, 37(2), 73–84. Used with permission. The case study in Chapter Three includes a small section of a previously published article: Brice, J., Clark, M., & Thorpe, H. (2020). Feminist collaborative becomings: An entangled process of knowing through fitness objects. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2020.1820560 Arguments offered in Chapter Six have been explored in more depth in a previously published paper: Thorpe, H., Brice, J., Clark, M., & Sims, S. (2020). The transdisciplinary health research apparatus: A Baradian account of knowledge boundaries and beyond. Health. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459320961429

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Parts of a recent article appear in different sections of this book, including Chapter Seven: Thorpe, H., Brice, J., & Clark, M. (2020). New materialisms, sport and the environment: Imagining new lines of flight. Sport, Education and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.202 0.1837097 Used with permission from Taylor and Francis.

Acknowledgements

Together, we would like to acknowledge the series editors, Kim Toffoletti and Jessica Francombe-Webb, for their unwavering support with this project. Your feminist ethic of care is clear in every email! Also, to Sharla and Poppy at Palgrave Macmillan, thank you for the extensions and for the prompt, clear, and supportive communications over the past two years. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers who offered very helpful feedback on our original idea. We are grateful to Tani Klein from Doodlebug Creative Studio for so expertly capturing our rather obscure theoretical ideas in the cover design. Holly: Writing this acknowledgement at the end of two months of COVID-19 lockdown, I am forever grateful to the humans and nonhumans that have become entangled in this book-writing process. Firstly, to my mom, my first feminist mentor, my best friend and biggest supporter, you continue to give so much of yourself to enable me to pursue this academic dream. Jose, thank you for all of the morning coffees, amazing meals, and midnight Netflix! To my children, Carlos-Tui and Bella-Ana, I write now with a new sense of urgency to try to improve the world that you and your generation will inherit. To my Thorpe, Robertson and Borrero families spread across the world, thank you for your enduring love and support. From the personal to the professional, I am grateful to my academic mentors and friends, and particularly those who have ix

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encouraged (and challenged) my journey into new materialisms, including David Andrews, Douglas Booth, Simone Fullagar, Pirkko Markula, Joshua Newman, and Richard Pringle. To those feminist students and scholars who fill me with hope and joy—Nida Ahmad, Karen Barbour, Megan Chawansky, Lyndsay Hayhurst, Allison Jeffrey, Lynda Johnston, Robyn Longhurst, Mihi Nemani, Grace O’Leary, Rebecca Olive, Adele Pavlidis, Kim Toffoletti (again), Belinda Wheaton, to name just a few— and to my feminist scientist friends, Stacy Sims and Katie Schofield. Thank you for working with me as co-supervisors, co-editors, collaborators, and troublemakers. To Julie and Marianne, thank you for sharing this wild ride with me. Hundreds of Zoom calls and Google Docs later, I feel very lucky to have had co-authors with such a zest and capacity for new ideas, and deep commitment to this project and the underpinning ethic of feminist collaboration. Finally to Maunga Karioi (Mt. Karioi of Whāingaroa) for keeping my family and community safe during these strange and disturbing times: Your slopes cloaked in native flora and fauna, wrapping around our home, along the stream and towards the ocean, the clouds passing over and around you with a beauty that takes my breath away, every day. Aroha nui. Julie: I would like to thank my colleagues from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the United States who have been instrumental in my thinking through new materialist scholarship and ideas. In particular, those scholars at the University of Waikato who have been part of the New Materialist Reading Group, as well as those from across the world contributing to the digital Graduate Student New Materialist Book Club. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the University of Maryland, especially my mentors, David Andrews, Shannon Jette, and Adam Beissel, for not only providing me with a strong foundation in Physical Cultural Studies, but always encouraging me to think more critically and challenge societal hierarchies. To my advising staff at the University of Waikato—Robyn Longhurst, Belinda Wheaton, and Holly Thorpe—I could not feel more appreciative of your constant support and care during my PhD, inspiring me through words and actions to embody a feminist ethos and practice. A special thank-you to Holly, as my chief doctoral advisor, for all of your guidance, and encouragement as I entered the

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world of feminist new materialisms. In addition, a second thank-you to Holly for organizing and leading this book, and to her and Marianne for being such inspirational feminist scholars: listening, supporting, leaning on, and collaborating together during international times of crises. I would also like to thank all of my friends and family for being there every step of the way providing words of encouragement and endless support. As someone who lived far away from home during the writing of this book, I am forever grateful to the technologies that have allowed me to stay easily connected with family back home. Finally, I lovingly thank the Waikato Te Awa (Waikato River), the bush, and the fresh air of Aotearoa New Zealand that ran with me every morning, providing renewed energy and comfort during stressful times. Marianne: The writing of this book has spanned two relocations across the world which have only been made possible with the support and love of my Boyd, Clark, Revington, and Stolp families. I am deeply grateful for the help they have provided across multiple facets of life, not least of which is the love and care they provide our daughter Marilla. I would also like to thank my colleagues in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand for their support and inspiration throughout my academic journey thus far. I write with the kindness and keen mind of Pirkko Markula constantly present over my shoulder. I am continuously energized by my daily conversations with Deborah Lupton, Ash Watson, and Clare Southerton. And I am in awe of the endless energy and enthusiasm of my co-authors Julie Brice and Holly Thorpe who pulled me over the finish line. I am particularly indebted and thankful to Holly Thorpe, for whom my admiration knows no bounds. Your generosity and feminist ethic have deeply inspired me to keep thinking, writing, and doing in more meaningful ways. To my partner Sean Stolp who keeps us afloat with his steadiness and vast capacities for care, thank you is not sufficient. But I thank you with all of my heart. Moving across the world is never easy. To my daughter Marilla, you are my heart. I am more aware than ever of the work that needs doing to preserve our planet, to make this world one you can care for and be cared for by, and to achieve social justice for all. I am moved to work harder at all of this because of you.

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Finally, I extend my gratitude to all of the nonhuman entities present throughout the writing of this book, particularly the Waikato Te Awa (Waikato River), Aotearoa New Zealand; the Grand River, Ontario, Canada; and the Tasman Sea, Australia, for their solace, companionship, and continuous reminder of the power of movement and of forces larger than ourselves.

Praise for Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness “Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness is a wonderful book that offers a timely intellectual map for navigating the political and visceral changes in physical activity, fitness, sport, and physical culture. The authors explore a fascinating range of sport experiences and objects through their engagement with feminist new materialisms. Offering theoretical and methodological insights into the entangled process of researching moving bodies, this book asks compelling questions about how gender matters in practices of knowing and ‘doing’ sport.” —Simone Fullagar, Professor, Griffith University, Australia “Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness seeks to open new materialisms to a wide range of readers. Embedded in their own experiences as physically active women, the authors entangle the works of Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, and Elizabeth Wilson with their innovative feminist collaborative process. Enticingly written and clearly argued, each chapter makes a compelling case for feminist new materialist research to explore the vital connections between technology, physically active humans, and non-humans, particularly in the face of current health and environmental crises. As such, Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness is an essential read for researchers interested in feminist, new materialist, post qualitative approach(es) to the physically active body.” —Pirkko Markula, Professor, University of Alberta, Canada

Contents

1 A Lively Introduction: New Materialisms, Feminisms, and Moving Bodies  1 2 New Materialist Methods and the Research Process 29 3 Sporting Matter and Living with Objects of Fitness 61 4 Digital Intimacies, Assemblages, and Fit Femininities 91 5 The Biocultural Possibilities of Sportswomen’s Health119 6 Apparatus and the Boundaries of Transdisciplinary Research145 7 Feminist Ethics, the Environment, and Vital Respondings177 8 Epilogue: Feminist New Materialisms and Lively Collaborations209 References

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Index261 xv

1 A Lively Introduction: New Materialisms, Feminisms, and Moving Bodies

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, jogging—everyday 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 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Thorpe et al., Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness, New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7_1

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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 years—decades, centuries, and beyond—and 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 “exposing the movement, vitality, morphogenesis, and becoming of the material world, its dynamic processes,” and in so doing, are working to “rethink the terms of social theory” (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

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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.

F oundations 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 men’s and women’s 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 women’s 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, women’s 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

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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 theory—i.e., transnational feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, post-colonial feminisms, intersectional feminisms—to reveal the politics of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion in women’s 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 women’s 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

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approaches for exploring “the complex interactions of language and matter, the human and the nonhuman” (Hekman, 2010, p.  4). Feminist scholars of sport and physical culture have been leading such innovative engagements with new materialisms and posthumanism (Baxter, 2018, 2020; Fullagar, 2017; Fullagar, Pavlidis, & Francombe-Webb, 2018; Jeffrey, 2020; Markula, 2019; Thorpe, Clark, & Brice, 2019). They are using new materialist theory to think differently about a range of issues such as female athlete health (Thorpe, 2016; Thorpe & Clark, 2019; Thorpe et al., 2019), depression, mental health, and recovery (Fullagar, 2020; Fullagar & O’Brien, 2018; Fullagar, O’Brien, & Pavlidis, 2019), women’s yoga lifestyles (Jeffrey, 2020), online media platforms (Reade, 2020; Warfield & Demone, 2018)), Fitbits and digital tracking (Clark & Thorpe, 2020; Esmonde, 2019; Lupton, 2013, 2019c), as well as new ways of “collecting and representing” data (Lupton, 2019b; Markula, 2019). While some feminist sport sociologists are engaging with new materialisms to ask new questions of the gendered moving body, it is no way a dismissal of existing approaches or the important work that has come before. As leading new materialist scholar Karen Barad asserts, new materialisms are “not a breaking with the past, but rather a dis/continuity, a cutting together-apart with a very rich history of feminist engagements with materialism” (Barad in Juelskjær & Schwennesen, 2012, p.  13). Similarly, Davies (2018) makes clear that new materialisms present “new concepts and new ways of thinking-doing our research,” yet such approaches “do not run against post-structuralist philosophy, but with it at the same time bringing new emphases and new priorities” (p. 13). It is these new emphases and new priorities that help to differentiate the nuanced ways of knowing within new materialisms that we turn to now.

 ey Tenets of New Materialisms K and the Moving Body Referred to variously as the ontological or posthuman turn, vitalist theories, and ‘more-than-human’ approaches, among other monikers, the new materialisms refer to an evolving scholarly tradition that confronts

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the assumed boundaries between nature and culture and counters humanist approaches to contemporary thought (Coole & Frost, 2010a; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012; Fox & Alldred, 2018a). Prompted by increasing dissatisfaction across the social sciences and humanities with the privileging of language, culture, and discourse as arbiters of meaning, new materialisms acknowledge the agentic capacities of matter and its role in shaping experience and meaning. This emerging body of knowledge is informed by an eclectic array of disciplinary foundations and draws upon the work of contemporary thinkers such as Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze (with Felix Guattari), Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Brian Massumi, among others. Over the past decade, a series of comprehensive volumes espousing the promise of new materialist thought have chronicled its emergence, contributions, and underlying tenets (see Alaimo & Hekman, 2008a; Coole & Frost, 2010a; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012; Pitts-Taylor, 2016). Some authors have attempted to distil this vast body of literature into guiding principles so as to provide more accessible entry points (e.g., Connolly, 2013; Fox & Alldred, 2016a, 2018a; Lupton, 2019c). While not exhaustive, such efforts help capture and communicate key points. For example, Nick Fox and Pam Alldred (2018a) provide a summary of five characterizing features of new materialisms that “afford a variety of theoretical and practical opportunities” (p.  4). Briefly, these features include: 1. A rejection of discrete boundaries between the social and natural worlds. 2. An assumption that the material world is contingent, relational, and uneven. The authors clarify, “For new materialists, human bodies and all other material, social, and abstract entities have no ontological status or integrity other than that produced through their relationship to other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas” (p. 4). 3. A re-imagining of agency as assigned to and distributed across all matter, including the human and nonhuman, the animate and inanimate. Put simply, agency is not the exclusive feature of the human.

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4. The provision of a socially, politically, and materially embedded framework with and through which to “research the social world and to seek to change it for the better” (p. 5). 5. A concern with ontology over epistemology, or more specifically, with dissolving the binary between them, which the authors note has implications for how we go about conducting research through a new materialist lens (see Chap. 2 of this book for elaboration). Deborah Lupton (2019c) also provides a helpful overview, focusing on feminist new materialisms and with a concerted interest in how this work helps re-imagine human-technology relationships. Lupton emphasizes the following overarching assumptions that underpin feminist new materialisms: 1. Recognition of the contribution of nonhuman actors in configuring material realities in what Lupton  (2019c), drawing on Braidotti (2019a), refers to as “more than human worlds” (p. 1999). 2. An interest in the fleshy, affective, and sensory dimensions of human existence and experience and acknowledgement of distributed agency among human and nonhuman entities. 3. The centrality of the relationships between humans and nonhumans as a focal point for inquiry. 4. The political orientation of feminist new materialisms as it explores gendered dimensions of material processes, power relations, the environment, and the Anthropocene. This necessarily succinct summary does not capture the nuance of the arguments these authors have thoughtfully developed, but is offered to highlight the various efforts to provide concise overviews of new materialist thought. In arriving at our own interpretations and understandings of this broad corpus of work, we too were called upon to identify what we considered defining, overarching themes that guide our thinking practices with new materialisms. The process of writing this book has underlined to us the continuous and necessary evolution and dynamism of new materialist theorizing. Therefore, we are hesitant to offer any definitive characteristics

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here. Instead, we provide the reader with a mapping of the ethico-ontoepistemological ideas that have found particular resonance in our efforts to think differently about moving, sporting bodies. Drawing on those principles outlined by Fox and Alldred (2018a), and Lupton (2019c) above, as well as many others, we share three overarching ideas that have guided our thinking and writing processes over the past five years.

Lively Matter New materialist thought is concerned with the material processes of the world and with the lively capacities of matter itself. In response to humanist ontologies that assume matter as passive and granted meaning only through the determining forces of the human and culture, new materialist ontologies acknowledge matter as agentic, indeterminate, and constantly ‘becoming’ in unexpected ways (Coole & Frost, 2010b). Here, matter refers to bodies, the environment, and nonhuman entities that are continuously implicated in a “field of force relations” that actively shape social phenomena and human lived experience in unpredictable ways (Markula, 2019, p. 1). Working with new materialisms urges us to notice and attend to these dynamic capacities of matter and human and nonhuman bodies in all of their entangled complexities, effectively destabilizing the deep grooves of Cartesian thought, which cleaves mind and body, subject and object, matter and meaning, into hierarchical dualisms. In this arrangement, which underpins so much of contemporary knowledge, matter is conceptualized as inherently inert, nature as subordinate to agentic human and cultural forces, and the body as a passive entity, its vital impetus and self-­ organizing capacities too often overlooked. New materialist thinking pointedly seeks to reconfigure these static understandings by re-assigning agency beyond the human and cultural realm. No longer exclusively located within human actors, agency is instead imagined as a feature and potentiality of all nonhuman and human entities (Bennett, 2010a, 2010b; Latour, 2005). While specific understandings of agency differ among the various strands of new materialisms, all push back on human exceptionalism, which places the

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intentionally acting human at the centre of meaning and experience. In so doing, bodies (both organic and non-organic), environments, ecologies, technologies, and objects emerge as vital forces that demand our attention as they become part of the unfolding of the world (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010b; Braidotti, 2011, 2013, 2019b; Haraway, 1985, 1991, 2003; Latour, 2005) This attention to the liveliness of matter has implications for how we study and understand moving bodies in their diverse environments and socio-political contexts, as well as their relations with nonhuman bodies and entities. Importantly, new materialists are not the first or only scholars to insist on the liveliness and mattering of matter. A rich tradition of feminist scholarship has long called our attention to the fleshy, sensory dimensions of corporeality and embodiment, underlining the serious constraints of the Cartesian mind-body dualism for our analyses and our ability to meaningfully respond to gendered power relations and their effects (Grosz, 1994; McWhorter, 1999; Shildrick, 1997). Many leading contemporary new materialist thinkers have come from this strong feminist foundation, building upon and extending these ideas for the complex challenges facing the world today. In rapidly changing conditions marked by environmental precarity, emerging technologies that extend and augment our bodily practices and understandings, and humanitarian crises that impact bodies (human and nonhuman) and lives around the globe, there is an urgent need for robust and responsive frameworks that attend to and account for the materializations of power relations and the generative role of nonhuman forces in shaping our socio-political contexts (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008b; Coole & Frost, 2010b). These frameworks help us arrive at new questions and curiosities in relation to moving bodies and to their intimate entanglements with technologies and objects, human and nonhuman bodies, ecologies and environments, and social and political structures and forces. They also urge us to develop both our ability to attend to the agentic capacities of matter, as well as create new methods for analysis and representation. As Coole (2010) prompts us to consider: “is it not possible to imagine matter differently: as perhaps a lively materiality that is self-transformative and already saturated with agentic capacities and existential significance that are typically located in a separate, ideal, and subjectivist, realm?” (p. 92).

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Critical sport scholars are increasingly taking up such questions. For example, in the introduction to their anthology focused on new materialisms, sport, physical culture, and moving bodies, Newman, Thorpe, and Andrews (2020b) explore the agentic capacities of gold, and particularly the gold medal won by the late Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) at the 1960 Summer Olympic Games. Also in this book, leading feminist sport scholar, Samantha King (2020) proposes a multispecies sport studies to explore protein powder as vital matter.

Entangled Bodies Attending to the liveliness of matter opens up new spaces in which to imagine, study and attend to the fleshy body itself; its biological dimensions, exertions, and affective embodied experiences. Importantly, acknowledging this liveliness requires a radical rethinking of the boundaries and dualisms that shape the ways we make sense of the world. Put another way, attending to the material calls into question how we think about the material in relation to the discursive or the social. As noted earlier, new materialist thought, although eclectic, has largely emerged from increasing dissatisfaction with the privileging of discourse and culture that resulted from the ‘linguistic’ or cultural turn (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008b; Barad, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010b; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012; Markula, 2019). Specifically, there is shared critique that discursive analyses tend to overlook the materiality of embodied, lived experiences, thus reducing such experiences to by-products of social forces (Feely, 2016; Kuby, 2017). In these analyses the material and discursive are understood as ontologically distinct and the discursive is identified as actively shaping matter and meaning in a linear, causal trajectory (Barad, 2007). New materialist thought seeks to disrupt these binary understandings and to acknowledge the porosity and indeterminacy of the boundaries that maintain such dualisms. Given how deeply entrenched these categorical understandings are within dominant systems of knowledge, new ways of thinking are needed to “allow matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming” (Barad, 2003, p. 802). As feminist scholars

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of sport and physical culture, we embrace ways of imagining the body as vital and agentic without losing sight of the complex ways it is also produced and productive of the social conditions in which it moves and becomes. In line with Markula (2019), we recognize the need to examine not only the body as matter, but also its everyday practices and movements in everyday spaces and places. By troubling the boundaries between mind and body, matter and meaning, we seek to pursue inquiry that acknowledges the “active, self-transformative, practical aspects of corporeality as it participates in relationships with power” (Coole & Frost, 2010b, p. 19). As noted above, feminists working within sport sociology and physical cultural studies have made significant contributions to the scholarship of bodies and embodiment through their engagements with critical theory, phenomenology, poststructuralist theory, theories of affect, and more. Some are turning to new materialisms to interrogate the broader ecologies of materialities encountered and produced by sporting, active bodies (King & Weedon, 2020a, 2020b), and their entanglements with technologies and objects (Brice, Clark, & Thorpe, 2020; Clark & Thorpe, 2020). Making a particularly significant contribution to feminist new materialist understandings of moving bodies, Simone Fullagar (2020) diffracts mind-body relations in her explorations of the entanglement of physical culture in women’s recovery from depression (also see Fullagar et al., 2018; Fullagar et al., 2019). We wish to build upon this increasing momentum, elaborating and extending feminist acknowledgements and expressions of the body as a culturally situated and agentic force, capable of shaping and affecting other bodies, things, and spaces it encounters. By troubling binaries that separate the human and nonhuman, nature and culture, and subject and object, we are catapulted into uncertain onto-epistemological territory, providing new spaces in which to think about, with and through moving bodies.

Relational Politics and Vital Respondings Feminist new materialisms broadly maintain themselves as a political project, yet critiques and caveats have been articulated. Some have

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critiqued feminist new materialisms for a tendency to “displace political considerations by invoking new ethical responsibilities and sensibilities” (Lemke, 2018, p.  31). Writing specifically about Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism, for example, Lemke (2018) argues that “being attentive to the vitality of things translates into a systematic blindness concerning the inequalities, asymmetries and hierarchies enacted in vital materializations” (p. 31). Such claims speak to broader concerns about the tendency of new materialist thought to inadequately account for difference and different lived experiences of the effects of power. Importantly, while new materialisms recognize the vitality of nonhuman matter, it is not advocating for a flat ontology where all humans become ontologically equivalent to nonhuman matter. Nor is it attempting to homogenize humanity where all races, ethnicities, sexualities, and genders become equalized. Rather, it provides a way to think about difference and identity not as structured, fixed entities, but as emergent through relations. For example, in critically considering the implications of new materialisms for thinking about race, Hames-Garcia (2008) describes how new materialisms encourages a way of thinking that does not “simply reaffirm what race is and has been, but rather seeks a transformation of race into something new” (p.  331). A new materialist approach challenges predefined terms and identities based on difference, and instead explores human and nonhuman assemblages that give rise to the appearance and reproduction of difference. Various new materialist, posthumanist scholars provide alternative ways of thinking about difference and identity politics (Barad, 2014; Braidotti, 2013, 2019a; Hames-Garcia, 2008). Drawing upon a history of feminist theorizing of difference, particularly work by Donna Haraway as well as physics philosophy, Barad (2014) uses her concept of diffraction to think about difference not as “an absolute boundary between object and subject, here and there, now and then, this and that” (p. 174), but as “formed through intra-activity, in the making of ‘this’ and ‘that’ within the phenomenon that is constituted in their inseparability (entanglement)” (p.  175). In her theory of agential realism, there is a strong focus on the way relationality and intra-actions give rise to conceptualizations of difference. In particular, bringing her concept of diffraction into dialogue with Chicana feminisms, Barad (2014) offers an approach that

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“queers binaries and calls out for a rethinking of the notions of identity and difference” across spacetimematterings (p.  171). For Bozalek and Zembylas (2017), the key contribution of Barad’s concept of difference is that it is not “grounded in an ontological essentialism between identified categories (man/woman, working class/middle class, white/black, etc.)” but instead is “a relational ontology, that is, an effect of connections and relations within and between different bodies, affecting other bodies and being affected by them” (p. 118). Similarly, Braidotti (2013, 2019b) looks towards alternative ways to conceptualize identity, difference, and subjectivity that is more relational and fluid. Braidotti (2019b) describes the posthuman subject as a “work in process: they emerge as both a critical and a creative project...they interrogate the self-representations and conventional understandings of being human, which ‘we’ have interpreted from the past” (p.  42). She acknowledges the material role that privilege continues to play in society, but also encourages scholars to reimagine difference as an “immanent, positive and dynamic category” (p. 12). Engaging with a posthumanist lens is “about increasing our relational capacity, so as to enhance our power (potential) for freedom and resistance. Posthuman thinking is post-identitarian and relational: it turns the self away from a focus on its own identity into a threshold of active becoming” (Braidotti, 2019b, p. 79). With such reimaginings of identity and difference towards more relational ethics with humans and nonhumans, new understandings of politics also become possible. In new materialist thought, we find a political positioning that acknowledges the complex materialities of (human and nonhuman) bodies embedded in specific power relations (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). According to Clare (2016), the notion of politics that emerges in new materialisms is at its best “not when it redefines politics so as to include non-human and more-than-human forces” but rather when it “reworks understandings of human subjectivity, making it clear how the human is always enmeshed in more-than-human worlds” (p.  61). We concur with Newman et al. (2020b) who take up these ideas in the context of sport and physical culture to explore the possibilities that new materialisms offer for “‘creatively reimagining’ the politics of the moving body as vibrant matter always entrenched within (not beyond) power,

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politics, knowledge, and discourse” (p.  23). Feminist new materialist theory, in particular, offers a robust framework for attending to the body’s movements, responses, and affects, while also acknowledging bodies as socially and culturally produced entities, always “enmeshed” in broader material-discursive arrangements. Critical scholars of sport and physical culture have long focused their attention on the multiple workings of power, and how inequitable power relations press upon bodies differently based on class, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, (dis)ability, and gender. Engaging with new materialisms encourages us to attend to and respond to the complexities of bodies immersed in power relations in different contexts. But, it also requires us to balance our focus on lived experience and bodies within the broader economies, ecologies, and environments in which they are intimately entangled. With power being an important focus of any feminist inquiry, Pitts-Taylor (2016) reminds feminist new materialists of the need to continue to “ask certain questions of matter/ing and its interlocution”: In what ways is matter involved in, or shot through with, sex/gender, class, race, nation, citizenship, and other stratifications? How are these power relations involved in the understanding and management of biology or ‘life itself ’, and how do they materialize in bodies, corporeal processes, and environments? What sort of theoretical and methodological innovations are required to address matter as thusly situating and situated? (p. 2).

Within feminist new materialisms, politics and the political are conceived in a range of ways, ranging from Barad’s (2007) account of knowledge boundaries and ethics of mattering, to Braidotti’s (2015, 2019a, 2019b) posthuman affirmative ethics. Others are taking up such ideas and putting them into action in their own research practices, as seen in Fullagar, O’Brien and Pavlidis’ (2019) “vital feminist politics of personal and public feeling” (p. 1). Throughout this book, we provide insights into various conceptualizations of power, politics, and ethics under different branches of new materialisms, and the implications for thinking, knowing, and acting with/upon moving bodies differently. With Fox and Alldred (2018a) and Lupton (2019c), we also identify the political imperative of new materialist thought as it interrogates the

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conditions of knowledge production processes as well as our own situatedness within these processes. This means that working with and through new materialisms requires us to perform and engage with “response-­ ability” to the conditions of the world around us and to our fellow beings, human and nonhuman (Haraway, 2008). In the research context, we are challenged to notice, account for, and respond to the socio-material contexts and conditions in which active bodies move and become, and to our always politicized locations within such projects. Barad (2012) considers this capacity to respond as key to ethics, which she explains is “about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming, of which we are a part. Ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities” (p. 69). To capture this inseparability between ontology, epistemology, and ethics, Barad (2007) coined the term “ethico-onto-epistemology” (p.  90). This inseparability holds dramatic implications for how we go about conducting inquiry. It demands that we acknowledge the inseparability of our theoretical frameworks, our research methods, and our ethical practices when engaging in knowledge production practices and with the world itself. It means we cannot understand ourselves as observing or thinking or writing from an external perspective, rather we are always implicated in and a part of the world’s becoming. Therefore, engaging in new materialist projects is an act of responsibility and of cultivating the ability to notice and respond to the world in its unfoldings. Response-­ability, Barad (2012) suggests, entails “Listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self ” (p. 69). Importantly, this requires attending to and identifying power relations, the materialization and production of boundaries, and engaging in analyses that seek to articulate how these boundaries come to matter and the processes of materiality through which they emerge. As Haraway (2016a) writes, “We are responsible for boundaries, we are they” (p. 65). While we were vitalized by the tenets outlined above, we were (and continue to be) critical in our engagement with new materialisms. We recognize the concerns about the lack of acknowledgement and the

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limited engagement of some new materialisms with post-colonial and queer scholarship and Indigenous ways of knowing (Ahmed, 2008; Devellennes & Dillet, 2018; Shomura, 2017; Todd, 2016; Tompkins, 2016). As Rosiek, Snyder, and Pratt (2020) state, if new materialist scholars fail to “acknowledge and seriously engage the Indigenous scholars already working with parallel concepts,” they are at risk of reinforcing “ongoing practices of erasure of Indigenous cultures and thought” (p. 2). In Chaps. 3 and 7 we discuss in more depth the complex relationship between Indigenous knowledge and new materialisms, particularly in relation to understandings of nonhuman agency and the environment, respectively. As well as acknowledging the potency of such critiques, we also detail responses to such arguments, including the efforts of some to work critically at the intersection of new materialisms and Indigenous scholarship. For example, some Indigenous scholars are embracing the possibilities for engaging with ethico-onto-epistemologies that similarly critique western anthropocentricism and recognize the vitality of matter (Martin, 2017; Thomas, 2015). Others are responding to such critiques by experimenting with the entangled relations between Indigenous, intersectional, queer, feminist politics, and posthumanist practices, and in so doing are “explicitly grappling with the political and ethical ambivalences, contradictions, and failures of more-than-human research” in highly productive ways (Mayes, 2019, p.  1202; Kerr, 2019;  Niccolini, Zarabadi, & Ringrose, 2018; Springgay & Truman, 2017). We concur with Mayes’ (2019) suggestion that there is much value in thinking new materialist and postqualitative research “together with decolonial, postcolonial and other critiques—as a fraught, frictional encounter” (p. 1204). Throughout the process of writing this book, we have found ourselves ‘troubled’ (Haraway, 2016b) by the issues raised in decolonial critiques of new materialist and postqualitative research, and like Mayes (2019) have attempted to work in and through these tensions “rather than to dismiss, refute or ignore it” (p. 1192). These entangled and “frictional encounters” are addressed in various chapters in this book (in particular, see Chaps. 3, 6, and 7). As well as engaging the critiques about the relationship between new materialism and Indigenous worldviews and methodologies, we also take to heart concerns about the exclusivity and inaccessibility of the language

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used, and its tendency to evoke a certain sensibility without providing tangible insights, or anything ‘new’ (Greene, 2013; MacLure, 2017; Pringle, 2020). These concerns resonate with many of our own encounters with new materialist ontologies. While we concur with some such concerns, we hope the time has come to rethink the familiar refrain (often from those who have yet to engage deeply with new materialist scholarship themselves): So ‘what is new’ in new materialisms anyway? To help us respond to such questions, we turn to St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei (2016) who make clear, “the descriptor ‘new’ does not necessarily announce something new, but serves as an alert that we are determined to try to think differently” (p. 100). Given the complex conditions of the contemporary world and what is at stake for human and nonhuman bodies, ecologies, and environments, we are committed to this challenge, in all its possibilities, tensions, and failings. In our ongoing reading, however, we were struck by the paucity of empirical examples from which to draw upon, and the lack of clarity about how to actually put new materialist theories to work. In short, the promise of new materialisms had been eloquently articulated, but we were now in need of understanding its possibilities, as well as limitations, when explicitly put into practice. Therefore, this book seeks to respond to critiques of new materialisms in two key ways. First, we work to make the ideas and concepts of new materialist thought accessible, to interrogate the concepts we take up and situate them in dialogue with existing scholarship so as to be clear about what they might offer us in the way of thinking the new. As per the title of this book, in the design of the overall project and each chapter, we seek to start the reader in familiar terrain and then invite them into the ‘entanglements’ of sport sociology and physical cultural studies with feminist new materialisms. Furthermore, we seek to achieve this by engaging explicitly with the empirical across diverse contexts and settings, and engaging with new materialist theory to work at the limits of our knowledge and imaginings of the sporting body. We also attend to our language, working to catch ourselves and each other when we write in ways that might exclude rather than explain. Second, we interrogate the process of thinking with new materialisms itself, acknowledging it as a political practice. We attempt to illustrate how we have used new materialist theories in our own inquiry processes

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and articulate how they have shifted and extended our understanding of bodies and of thinking practices themselves. In this process we also share the various roadblocks, detours, and uncertainties encountered along the way.

 ecoming with New Materialisms: B Processes of Feminist Collaboration Some feminist new materialists have advocated alternative forms of feminist connections and writing practices. In so doing, they are building upon and extending the work of collaborative narrative and ethnographic scholars (i.e., Bochner & Rushing, 2002; Diversi & Moreira, 2009; Gale & Wyatt, 2009) to explore new ways of becoming. A notable example is the collaboration between Handforth and Taylor (2016) in which an emerging researcher and a senior academic employ “diffraction as an experimental practice to undo the normalized practices of academic writing by weaving together various kinds of texts” (p. 627). Similarly, drawing upon Deleuze to rethink academic relationships and processes, Fullagar, Pavlidis and Stadler (2017) explore doctoral supervision and collaborative writing as rhizomatic practice that “refuses ontological assumptions of linearity, causality and rationality,” instead following “embodied lines of thought, affective intensities and problematics that haunt the supervision relationship” (p. 23). Taking inspiration from such works, we sought to draw upon feminist new materialist and postqualitative approaches to more carefully and collaboratively orient our focus to the materiality of bodily processes, relationships, and entanglements through new materialist thought. Although there are no clear beginnings or endings for this collaboration, it might be said that the ‘seed’ of this book was planted via a text message. As the supervisor and line-manager of two feminist new materialist projects focused on women’s moving bodies, Holly was walking on the beach after work one evening, while mulling over the overlapping themes of our various independent and collective academic projects. With the black sand of Aotearoa New Zealand’s west coast underfoot, she

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wondered if our efforts and interests could be coalesced into a book that might resonate with others interested in similar themes; the lived experiences of active, sporting bodies, the environments and socio-political contexts in which they are embedded, and the relationships and knowledges that both constitute and are constituted through bodily doings. Quickly texting Marianne and Julie with the idea, her excitement was palpable, emanating through the blue screens on our smartphones. A creative, collaborative culmination of the ideas and concepts that had recently intrigued and moved us made absolute sense. And so, the idea of this book took hold; a fleeting, digitally communicated thought that has materialized in many words on the page, countless more conversations, and a good bit of sweat and tears, as we have alternatively limped and exalted our way to the finish line. Together we share an ongoing orientation to women’s moving, sporting, and physically active bodies in different contexts and settings. Invested in the moving body as a social, biological, and cultural entity, we also share a persistent interest in robust conceptual frameworks that prompt us to attend to the vitality, force, and fleshiness of moving bodies while also acknowledging their situatedness within specific contexts and constellations of power. Consequently, over the course of several years we had all become immersed in and shared a cautious excitement for the emerging new materialist scholarship, curious about what it might offer to those of us well versed in critical and poststructuralist concerns with language and discourse. With its emphasis on the agential capacity of matter (including objects, bodies, and the environment) and refusal of the assumed boundaries between matter/discourse, nature/culture, subject/ object, new materialisms seemingly provided a space in which previously less spoken about and tentatively broached aspects of women’s moving, sporting bodies were explicitly brought to the fore: sweat, blood, emotions, objects, affects, and things. As we read through the work of those scholars who are generally included under the expansive umbrella of new materialist thought, we found resonance in the idea that matter actively shapes meaning and experience, allowing us to expand our understandings of the capacities of the moving body. Consequently, we challenged ourselves to new ways of thinking within our projects, with the hope of extending and elaborating on the existing wealth of feminist scholarship

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in sport and physical cultural studies about women’s sporting bodies, movement experiences, and their construction and representation. Importantly, this book is not the culmination of three separate projects merged together with clever signposting and segues. Rather, our formal collaboration that commenced with a text sent from the beach had been taking shape in many informal intra-actions over a period of many months; office and hallway conversations between a mentor and student, between two feminist collaborators, over coffee and during walks on campus and through local neighbourhoods. The ideas continued to spark through these conversations. As the book became a ‘thing’ bringing us together with a shared goal, we continued to explore new methods to live the theoretical ideas and concepts through our individual and collective projects. These methods often included digital technologies as well as shared movement-based activities. For example, we spent seven months wearing the same brand of high-performance sports bra while reading Barad (see Chap. 4), and regularly commenting and engaging in a digital dialogue using Facebook messenger (see Brice, Clark & Thorpe, 2020). Two of us (Marianne and Holly) did something similar wearing a Fitbit for two weeks and using text messages to share our almost daily theoretically inspired noticings (see Clark & Thorpe, 2020). Alongside these projects, we experimented with a range of movement-based theoretical discussions, such as a shared yoga class (following an online instructor) followed by a critical dialogue with new materialisms. We also established a movement-based new materialist reading group at our university to explore some of the ideas presented in this book, and we acknowledge that this book emerges through and as part of these entangled intra-­ actions and relationships with our colleagues (Barad, 2007). The book commenced when we were all living in Aotearoa  New Zealand, but as is typical of many academic lives, there was a lot of physical movement that impacted our collaborative processes. In particular, as Marianne’s postdoctoral fellowship ended, she moved back to Canada before taking up a new position in Australia. Julie also travelled home to the United States for prolonged periods, while Holly travelled often for conferences and speaking engagements. As our physical locations changed during the writing of this book, we utilized a range of digital technologies (i.e., email, text messages, Facebook messaging, meetings via Zoom,

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Skype and Messenger, Google docs) to support each other in the writing process, and to encourage us to collectively go deeper in our engagement with new materialisms. Importantly, we acknowledge we are three white, cis-gender, able-­ bodied privileged women working in academia, engaged in politicized meaning making practices that have material implications and consequences. The similarities between us are important; they are profoundly political, and throughout the writing of this book we have encountered the various ways they matter, and concede we have much more, ongoing work to be done here. Thinking with and through new materialisms, we have challenged ourselves to imagine and articulate specifically how our similarities and differences come to matter in relation to writing this book. Through such processes we came to understand that we are different in seemingly invisible but important ways. We work within the privileges of academia, but one of us is a tenured full professor, which means she writes this book in a specific set of material-social conditions. One is a PhD student and the other a postdoctoral fellow, with all the freedoms, possibilities, uncertainties, and restraint of such positions. We are implicated in and constrained differently through these power relations. Additionally, we grew up in and are citizens and residents of different countries (i.e., Aotearoa New Zealand, United States, and Canada) where our white, gendered bodies are lived and located in very different histories, processes, and practices of colonialism and patriarchy. Two of us live and write very far away from the countries we call home. Two of us have children. And with a focus on moving bodies, we came to understand age, physical ability, fitness, health, resources, and even body shapes and sizes, as important differences that affected our theoretically informed sporting and physical activity experiences. We each came to this collaborative project with a range of past and present experiences across a variety of elite and recreational sport and fitness contexts and with various professional roles in these industries (i.e., athlete, coach, instructor). These differences do not fall along the defined categorical lines we often explicitly recognize, yet, they matter. They manifest in the repetition of minute gestures and practices and daily rhythms over time, and through this repetition they come to matter quite dramatically. As we grappled with new materialisms and worked our way through this book, we came

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to notice these differences in new ways and consequently, continue to grapple with the concept of difference and its implications for feminist thought and for the lived lives of individuals. Indeed, new materialist theory encourages us to attend to the specificities through which differences emerge, and to rethink how these differences are implicated in the knowledge production processes and the knowledges that emerge (Barad, 2007).

Lines of Flight: Overview of the Book This book is not offered as the definitive text on new materialisms written with the aim of instructing the reader on how to conduct feminist new materialist scholarship on moving bodies. Rather, it seeks to make the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological possibilities of new materialisms accessible to a wide range of readers, to open the door into feminist materialisms with evocative, lively examples from our own works. With this aim in mind, it is structured to include conceptual and empirical chapters in order to introduce and elaborate the major concepts and assumptions of new materialisms, the methodological implications of these assumptions, and to provide examples of how these concepts might be mobilized in research processes and practices. The remainder of this book consists of six chapters. Each chapter thus follows a similar structure, starting with key topics and debates within the field(s), before outlining and illustrating how feminist materialist approaches might encourage us to explore new lines of flight. As Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012) remind us, thinking with new materialisms must exceed describing its tenets and requires putting theoretical concepts to work through performative thinking practices. In Chap. 2 we discuss the challenges, opportunities, and considerations of putting new materialist theory into practice in empirical research. In this chapter we engage with literature from across a range of fields to provide an overview of the many ways that new materialisms is informing the research process and methodology, methods, and researcher positionality. We begin by elaborating on how the onto-epistemology of new materialisms encourages alternative approaches to the research process. Following

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this, we map out some of the diverse ways that scholars are reengaging and reimagining research methods, including media analysis, interviews, participatory methods, autoethnography, arts-related methods, embodied and movement-based research practices, and transdisciplinary and mixed methods. We conclude this chapter with a discussion of how new materialist theory encourages new questions and considerations in relation to the practices and politics of researcher reflexivity, positionality, and ethics. Chapter 3 examines the mundane and often taken-for-granted objects that are a part of sporting cultures. To date, scholars have explored the ways objects become embedded with meaning within sporting cultures. In particular, feminist scholars have shown the ways objects contribute to the development of gendered identities and work to reinforce traditional feminine traits. However, much of this work sees objects as passive item, receptacles for human meaning, rather than recognizing how sporting objects are lively and active. In this chapter we show how four branches within new materialisms encourage rethinking about the active role of objects in sporting cultures: Object Oriented Ontology, Actor Network Theory, Vibrant Matter, and Agential Realism. Inspired by this line of thinking, we share insights from a collaborative project in which we engaged with Barad’s theory of  agential realism to think through the sports bra and recognize its lively intra-actions and entanglements with humans and nonhuman matter. The chapter ends with a discussion of how new materialisms can create space to think differently about the role of sporting objects and understandings of agency. Continuing with the discussion around objects and new materialisms, in Chap. 4 we look towards digital health and fitness technologies and the ways in which new materialisms can contribute to theorizing human-­ technology relations. Similar to other chapters, we begin with an overview of existing literature and common approaches used to explore gendered experiences of  digital fitness and health, specifically mobile apps and self-tracking. This is then followed with a discussion of how new materialisms can offer alternative perspectives and ways of understanding these human-technology relationships. We focus specifically on three approaches within new materialisms: Donna Haraway’s (1991, 2003) cyborg and companion species, Jane Bennett’s (2010a, 2010b) Vital Materialism, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) affect

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theory. This leads into a case study where we use affect theory and assemblages to examine mothers’ engagements with Fitbits, following the various flows, intimacies, and affordances within these relationships. We conclude with a discussion overviewing the important contributions new materialisms can make to thinking about the ever-growing field of digital health and technology. In Chap. 5 we challenge scholars of sport and physical culture to consider the implications of the ‘biological turn in social theory’ and, in particular, the possibilities of new materialist approaches for understanding the bio-socio-cultural complexities of moving bodies. It begins by mapping the important works of feminist and body studies scholars who have been exploring alternative non-dualistic models of feminist engagement with biology, corporeality, science, and matter. It then focuses specifically on the distinctive contributions of three feminist scholars—Lynda Birke, Samantha Frost, and Elizabeth Wilson—whose work has advanced understandings of the complex relationship between the biological and cultural, as well as a rethinking of feminist politics. In the second part of this chapter we take up Wilson’s (2015) Gut Feminism to explore a complex health condition (Low Energy Availability, LEA) affecting female athletes and exercising women. In doing so, we highlight biology as more dynamic, non-consilient and less deterministic than many sport feminists have presumed. Building upon and extending the feminist new materialist theorizing in the previous chapter, we take up Barad’s concept of apparatus in Chap. 6 to rethink the processes, possibilities, and politics of transdisciplinary research. We begin by outlining how a Baradian inspired approach to transdisciplinarity encourages us to not only explore ways of knowing the moving body differently by working across disciplines, but more importantly to pay close attention to the processes, politics, and practices in such research. Herein we detail how thinking with the concept of apparatus can encourage scholars to examine how disciplinary boundaries are both (re)constructed and challenged when working with academics from other disciplines. To put this concept to work, we offer an example of a transdisciplinary research project focused on elite sports women’s experiences of the health phenomenon of low energy availability (LEA), with Baradian-inspired reflections on the processes of working alongside our

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scientist collaborators. As this chapter illustrates, feminist new materialisms (and Barad in this context) offers conceptual tools to help us acknowledge the processes in which boundaries are lived, reinforced, and challenged within our own work, which can encourage research practices that trouble dominant apparatus and disciplinary boundaries. In the final chapter of this book, we explore the potential of using new materialisms to think about the environment from a non-­ anthropocentric view. We begin Chap. 7 by providing an overview of common social science approaches to understanding the environment. Herein we summarize some of the main contributions from environmental humanities, ecofeminism, as well as Indigenous scholarship, before highlighting the ways in which new materialisms mirrors, and in some cases, extends these lines of thought. While there are various strands within new materialisms, herein we focus on the important contributions of two leading feminist scholars, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, who have been particularly instrumental in advancing our thinking about human-­environment relations. This is followed by a more specific review of research on sport and the environment, and particularly the work of critical sport scholars who are drawing upon new materialist theories to think differently about sporting bodies and the environment. The second half of this chapter then explores the challenges of representation in new materialisms. Taking inspiration from those who are embracing performative approaches to represent some of the complexities enabled through new materialisms, we share insights into our collaborative and creative writing practices during the Australian bushfires and COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. In sharing two pieces from our collaborative ‘poetic inquiry,’ we attempt to show (rather than tell) how new materialisms affected our very being and understanding of living and moving bodies as always entangled with the environment during times of deep personal and collective challenge. We conclude with some reflections on how such new materialist and postqualitative approaches enabled new noticings, vital respondings, and thus feminist ethics and response-abilities. Leaning further into the postqualitative calls for alternative, performative, creative modes of representation, we conclude the book with an epilogue that shares some reflections on the feminist new materialist

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collaborative process of writing this book. This is accompanied by a visual montage (inspired by the feminist DIY genre) of the many human and nonhuman entanglements that comprised our journey of writing, thinking, and moving together across time and space. In sum, across the six chapters of this book we draw upon a range of theorists to explore the dynamism of the body as a material-discursive entity. Traversing disciplines, we put the writings of feminist scholars such as Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Wilson, and Rosi Braidotti to work to examine women’s moving bodies across a range of contexts (i.e., sport, fitness), ages, and life stages. While these thinkers assemble from eclectic foundations and backgrounds, together they provide theoretical and methodological tools to advance the latest debates about, and knowledge of, the sport-health-gender nexus while also contributing new theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights across multiple fields. Together, the chapters reveal some of the many ways moving bodies are entangled with objects, technologies, biologies, environments, and processes of knowledge production. We recognize that some of the main criticisms of new materialisms are the language is evocative but too obtuse, the concepts are rarely put to empirical work, and the theories are impenetrable for many postgraduate and emerging scholars. Thus, a key motive underpinning the structure of the chapters and the book overall, is to make new materialist theories and concepts accessible to those students and academics looking to push theoretical and methodological boundaries. Each chapter follows a similar structure in that we seek to locate the reader in familiar terrain before introducing and explaining how new materialist concepts build upon and extend contemporary ways of knowing moving bodies. Later in each chapter we offer a case study to illustrate how the theoretical concepts can be put to work in innovative ways to examine gendered moving bodies across diverse social, cultural, and physical spaces. At the end of each chapter, we then offer some ‘pedagogical possibilities’ (or teaching toolboxes) as prompts for imagining how new materialist concepts might be incorporated into our teaching (at undergraduate and graduate level). Ultimately, this book is intended as a ‘lively introduction’ to new

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materialisms. It is written with the aim to open up the theoretical toolbox of feminist new materialisms, so that others can dive in and use what is needed to respond and intervene in the quickly changing world around us. We write with the hope that others will join us on this journey to explore the possibilities of feminist new materialisms for reimagining moving bodies entangled in more-than-human worlds.

2 New Materialist Methods and the Research Process

This chapter explores the possibilities and challenges of doing new materialist empirical research. In so doing, it is located in the broader context of widespread experimentation with methods and rethinking of methodology in the social sciences and beyond. In efforts to understand the messiness of social life, scholars have long been exploring and experimenting with research ‘after method’ (Law, 2004), ontologies of the body multiple (Mol, 2002), inventive methods (Lury & Wakeford, 2013), live methods (Back & Puwar, 2012), mobile methods (Büscher, Urry, & Witchger, 2010), materialist methods (Pryke, Rose, & Whatmore, 2003), and creative methods (Gauntlett, 2011) (see Bastian, Jones, Moore, & Rowe, 2017). Many such innovations take cue from decades of feminist scholarship that has been working at the intersections between theory-­ method-­praxis to explore experimental and creative approaches to ‘doing’ research differently (see de Freitas, 2016, 2017; Geerts & van der Tuin, 2016; Hultman & Lenz-Taguchi, 2010; Jackson & Mazzei, 2013; Lather, 2016a; Lenz-Taguchi, 2012, 2013; Palmer, 2016; van der Tuin, 2014). Underpinning such methodological creativity, questioning, and reimagining is the feminist conviction that “methods don’t just describe worlds,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Thorpe et al., Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness, New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7_2

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but make worlds” (Bastian et  al., 2017, p.  2; Harding, 1986, 1987; Haraway, 1988; Law, 2004). While the overarching features of posthumanist, new materialist theoretical approaches within social sciences and the humanities have been clearly and compellingly articulated, there has been less engagement with the implications these ontological moves present for empirical practice and even less clear direction provided for how they might be navigated. Many identify a dissonance between the familiar qualitative methodologies that emerged through the interpretivist and constructivist paradigms with roots strongly in humanism, and new materialist frameworks that seek to de-centre the human and acknowledge the distribution of agency among material and discursive forces. New materialist approaches also seek to challenge logocentrism, which is of particular importance and interest to those of us interested in sporting and physically active bodies, as it characterizes much of what we recognize as ‘research.’ Consequently, humanist qualitative research in which data collection, analysis, and representation typically rely heavily on language, “need to be reequipped with different tools” (Markula, 2019, p.  6). We concur with Markula (2020) who claims that “as experts in the force of the bodies in motion”, scholars of sport and physical culture are in an excellent position to “talk about and see the moving body as machinic assemblage of metabolism and mechanics, motion and meaning, and force and politics for social change” (p. 64). In this chapter we explore the many different possibilities of finding and developing such tools. To date, scholars of sport and the moving body have increasingly been exploring the ontological possibilities of a range of new materialist approaches, yet much less attention has been given to how new materialisms might inform the doing of empirical research on/with moving bodies (for exceptions, see Brice, Clark & Thorpe, 2020; Clark, 2020; Fullagar, 2017, 2020, 2021; Jeffrey, 2020; Markula, 2019; Monforte, 2018; Thorpe & Clark, 2019). Leading this charge, Fullagar (2017) has called for greater consideration as to how these new styles of thought might reorient both “our ontoepistemological assumptions and theory-method approaches” in sport and physical cultural research (p. 247). Similarly Markula (2019) reminds us that, “if we are to engage with the material world of the everyday life, new materialism is also an empirical quest for sport sociologists”

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requiring us to “shape our methodologies based on our onto-­epistemological assumptions” (p. 7). Taking inspiration from these arguments, this chapter draws upon a range of literature that is engaging with the challenges and opportunities new materialisms present for our empirical practices. Herein we engage literature across fields (and particularly feminist scholarship) to showcase the ways in which new materialisms has impacted the orientations and understandings of the research process and methodology, methods, and researcher positionality. In the first section we elaborate on how new materialisms and its theory-method and onto-­ epistemology encourages approaching the research process differently, questioning the linearity and structured nature of much qualitative research. Next we discuss the various methods that some scholars have creatively adapted when working with new materialisms. In the final section we explore the topic of researcher positionality, with a focus on reflexivity and ethics in these ‘ontological moves’ (Irni, 2013a).

New Materialisms, Methodology, and Process Over the past twenty years, researchers across diverse and varying fields have called attention to the highly structured and institutionalized nature of qualitative research (Giardina, 2017; Lather, 2016a; St. Pierre, 2011). In questioning the irony that qualitative research has become so formalized and conventional, feminist education scholar Elizabeth St. Pierre (2015) reminds us that qualitative research was initially invented in the 1980s as an “interpretive social science” (p. 75). One of the criticisms of much qualitative research is that it has come to follow  a standardized, linear process. St. Pierre summarizes that this standardized process requires one to: “identify a research question, design a study, interview, observe, analyze data, and write it up” (Interview with St. Pierre in Guttorm, Hohti, & Paakaari, 2015, p. 16). She argues that this formulaic approach to research can result in a lack of deep engagement and connection between theory and method. In so doing, positivist concepts such as validity, bias, coding, and triangulation remain deeply embedded within the qualitative tradition, which has resulted in a strong emphasis on research design (methods) rather than a deep engagement with

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epistemology and/or ontology (St. Pierre, 2015). Similarly, Giardina (2017) described this approach as the “toolbox” method where there are a set number of methods that researchers choose to use in their projects. This toolbox approach “reduces the conduct of inquiry solely to the technical execution of particular methods: that is; a methods-driven approach to research” (Giardina, 2017, p. 262). Such approaches privilege methods as a starting point for research rather than “invoking theoretical engagement” with a topic (p. 262). Building upon this literature, scholars interested in posthumanism and new materialisms have begun to question and reflect upon the “practices, politics, and philosophies of qualitative sciences” (Giardina, 2017, p.  258). These reflections have resulted in fruitful conversations and debates about the need to rethink how qualitative research is conducted. Within some strands of new materialisms (and posthumanities) there is a strong desire to recognize the entangled relationship between theory and method. Stressing the inseparability of theory and method, Scott and Garner (2013) describe the relationship as “dynamically intertwined, mutually influential, and constantly changing” (p.  87). In reference to new materialisms specifically, St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei (2016) explain that, since engaging with new materialist approaches requires us to rethink the very nature of being, it also demands that we rethink the ways we ‘do’ research: “The empirical and the material are so imbricated they must change together, and with those changes comes a rethinking of ontology… As we rethink matter, we must rethink the empirical (about knowledge) and ontology (about being)” (p. 99). Such approaches have implications for the research process, asking scholars to avoid the temptation of choosing from the familiar “toolbox” methods, and instead begin by immersing oneself in theory and then using (creating) methods that align with new materialist tenets and principles. This is no easy task, but scholars from an array of fields have been developing methodological approaches that are onto-epistemologically consistent with new materialisms. Many describe these methodological reorientations as part of the ‘ontological turn’ of posthumanism and new materialisms (Connolly, 2013; Coole & Frost, 2010b; Lather, 2016a; Rekret, 2016). However, as feminist scholars interested in the intersections and overlapping of

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theory-­method and the moving body, we concur with Irni (2013a) who locates such work within recent “ontological moves… instead of a turn” within feminist theory, because, as several feminist theorists (i.e., Ahmed, 2008; Hemmings, 2011) have argued, “it is problematic to represent feminist theory-building as turns that follow after one another and form a progressive movement ‘forward’” (Irni, 2013a, p. 53). In the following sections we outline some of the key contributions to rethinking the research process under the broad umbrella of new materialisms. Importantly, however, the methodological developments presented in these pages are far from a linear, progressive movement forward, but rather part of an ongoing dialogue with feminist theory and methods of past-present-future.

Methodology Without Methods Professor of Qualitative Research, Mirka Koro-Ljungberg is exploring the implications for qualitative research in the posthumanist turn, specifically looking at ways to rethink data (2013 with MacLure) and the entire research process (2015, 2017 with Löytönen, & Tesar). In her book, Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methods, Koro-Ljungberg (2015) calls for researchers to simultaneously work “within and against existing methodological structures, ideas, and established methodological literature” (p.  6). This type of research is fluid, working outside the constraints of predetermined methods and instead creates space for “forces, events and practices that might build from theoretical, cultural, and methodological traditions but at the same time move beyond documented tools of data collection and analysis, thus expanding the notions of normative research” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2015, p. 80). This view of research as a methodology without methods has not specifically been widely taken up from a practical perspective, but has been used by many scholars who are theorizing posthumanist and new materialist implications for research (Giardina, 2017; Gildersleeve, 2017; Ulmer, 2017; Wolgemuth, 2016). For example, Wolgemuth (2016) draws upon Koro-Ljungberg, Yendol-Hoppey, Smith, and Hayes (2009) in the development of a qualitative methods university class aimed at having students

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“play” with paradigms. In her class, students do not simply learn the basic principles of paradigm, but similar to Koro-Ljungberg’s methodology without methods, are asked to play “with them like my five-year-­old plays with toy cars, observing what happens when they crash, fall apart, and recombine with other toys to make something different—a purpleflying-cat-car—the possibility of doing research differently” (p.  518). Koro-Ljungberg is not providing scholars with definitive ways to conduct research, but rather a methodology without methods is about exploring the possibilities of doing research differently.

Research as Assemblage and Scaffolding Other scholars are drawing upon various Deleuzo-Guatarrian concepts to rethink the research process (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013; Masny, 2013). Key proponents, Nick Fox and Pamela Alldred (2015, 2018b) conceptualize research itself as an assemblage, or a process comprised of different “machines that link elements together to do something, to produce something” (Fox & Alldred, 2015, p. 403). Within the research assemblage, there are multiple interconnected ‘machines’ (data collection, analysis machine, reporting machines) with various affects, connections, and flows between them that work together to analyse an event or phenomena of interest. Viewing research as an assemblage encourages us to imagine research as a non-linear process as it “discloses the affective flows between the many elements involved in research,” and asks us to think how these elements work together to “progressively turn an event into ‘knowledge’ or policy” (Fox & Alldred, 2015, pp. 410–411). Therefore, within new materialist approaches, Fox and Alldred argue that we do not always need to change our methods, but rather broaden our understandings of the socio-materialities of the research process.

Postqualitative Inquiry and New Empiricisms In an introduction to a special issue on new empiricisms, Lather and St. Pierre (2013) wrote, “At some point, we have to ask whether we have

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become so attached to our invention—qualitative research—that we have come to think it is real. Have we forgotten that we made it up? Could we just leave it behind and do/live something else?” (p. 631). They raise these questions in response to the increasingly common critique that qualitative research has become too standardized, and thus based in a “scientism of positivist social science” (p. 630). In response to this critique, and in light of the posthumanist turn, many are turning towards postqualitative inquiry (PQI). St. Pierre (2011, 2016) has been a key figure within PQI. Her interest in PQI stems from her belief that new materialist scholars cannot continue with traditional qualitative methods because such approaches were devised to value the human voice and experience, which is inconsistent with new materialist ontology. She summarized this by writing, “If we no longer believe the individual, the person, the knowing subject of humanist empiricisms can be the point of departure in our inquiry, I am at a loss to see how anything we’ve learned about humanist empirical social science research is possible in the new empiricism” (St. Pierre, 2016, p. 112). She advocates for flexibility and creativity, and research that is not constricted by methodological frameworks and structures. In a recent keynote at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, St. Pierre (2019) proclaimed: “postqualitative inquiry is not a rejection of qualitative inquiry or any other pre-existing social science research methodology. It’s something different altogether.” Continuing, she explained: “It must be invented, created differently each time. The goal of postqualitative inquiry… is to experiment and create something new and different that might not be recognizable in existing structures of intelligibility.” Although postqualitative inquiry is fluid and different for every researcher, she has laid out specific steps for those looking to pursue PQI: “refusing qualitative methodology, reading, beginning with theory/concepts instead of methodology, and trusting ourselves in not knowing” (St. Pierre, 2015, p.  86). Within such an approach, there is space for the researcher to try different things, make mistakes, and to attempt “new” ways of conducting research. Feminist scholars are increasingly engaging with such approaches (Murris, 2021). In an important sporting example, van Ingen (2016) uses PQI in her work on boxing, art, and gendered violence to challenge the

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“methodological authority that positions researchers as experts” (p. 472) within sport for development and peace (SDP) research. Drawing upon PQI and Lather’s (2007) similar notion of “getting lost” in data, van Ingen (2016) does not follow a traditional research design but rather allows the boxing art project and research to “unfold,” being “open to its uncertainty” (p. 474). We similarly were inspired by PQI, using an openended research process as we lived with new materialist theory and sporting objects as detailed in Chap. 3. Overall, those working within PQI in physical cultural studies and within other fields (Brice, Clark, & Thorpe, 2020; Fullagar, 2017; Fullagar, Pavlidis, & Stadler, 2017; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; MacLure, 2013a; Martin & Kamberelis, 2013; van Ingen, 2016) emphasize the need to think with and through theory, rather than relying on more familiar research designs and ‘toolbox’ methods.

Diffractive Methodology First introduced by Donna Haraway (1992) and elaborated by Karen Barad (2003, 2007), diffraction is both a concept and a strategy for thinking, producing, and reading data differently; it acts as a method for attending to both the emergence and effects of difference. As is common in her work, Barad draws upon physical phenomena as metaphor, defining diffraction as the “way waves combine when they overlap and the apparent bending and spreading out of waves when they encounter an obstruction” (Barad, 2007, p.  28). With each encounter the waves are altered and dispersed differently, so the outgoing pattern is always different from the incoming pattern. However, and importantly, the ‘old’ pattern is always part of the expression of the new pattern. There are no binary distinctions made between what is ‘old’ and ‘new’ within the diffractive method. Rather, multiple patterns and knowledges refract from one another in order to imagine alternative possibilities. In the research setting, this means multiple theoretical perspectives, encounters, and knowledges are thought alongside and with one  another rather than being understood in opposition. This has important implications for multi- and trans-disciplinary research, which we elaborate on in Chap. 6.

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A number of scholars across an array of disciplines are taking up Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemological approach to “revitalize [sic] the research process”, with diffraction providing “additional affordances through its connection of the discursive and the material, with knowledges making themselves intelligible to each other in creative and unpredictable ways” (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017, p. 123). A common approach seems to be diffractively reading two (or multiple) bodies of literature—often from disparate fields—in a kind of critically constructive dialogue (Handforth & Taylor, 2016; Sehgal, 2014; van der Tuin, 2014). Others have put diffraction to work to encourage new ways of thinking about data (Davies, 2014; Jackson & Mazzei, 2013; Lenz-Taguchi, 2012; Phillips & Larson, 2013). In embracing diffractive methodology, some feminist scholars have also advocated alternative forms of feminist connections and collaborative writing practices (Handforth & Taylor, 2016; Lenz-­ Taguchi, 2013). Taking inspiration from such works, we have also used diffraction to re-read existing ways of knowing women’s engagements with digital technologies and recent literature about motherhood, sport, and physical activity in order to more carefully and collaboratively think how these relationships extend beyond the human and nonhuman (Clark & Thorpe, 2020). In so doing, our diffractive project explored the liveliness of digital data and women’s moving bodies, and the intricate relationships that develop between them (see Chap. 4). Importantly, we did not take up diffraction in an attempt to ‘move on’ from or counter previous approaches to studying women’s engagements with technology or motherhood, sport, and physical activity. Rather, our approach to diffraction was an effort to “work the limits” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 743) of theory–method to prompt new connections, relations, collaborations, and transformations. As we explain below, diffractive methodology also has significant implications for knowing the boundaries of our researching bodies, positionalities, and subjectivities.

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Research Boundaries and Processual Tensions As illustrated in the four examples above, those working with new materialist theories are rethinking relationships between theory and methodology. Whereas some are reworking the boundaries of more traditional research paradigmatic processes (Fox & Alldred, 2015, 2016a), others recognize the paradigmatic inconsistencies that arise when using new materialist theory with humanist methods (St. Pierre, 2015). Responding to calls to fully embrace the ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions of new materialisms, many are starting with theory before imagining methods that may (or may not) involve human and nonhuman subjects, participants, and/or collaborators. However, we recognize that this is not a straight-forward process and can involve deep critical questioning, confusion, and moments of slippage back to more familiar ways of knowing and doing research (also see Monforte & Smith, 2020). Over the past few years, we have reflected on the tensions involved in departing from more humanist and social-constructionist ways of knowing, and fully embracing new materialist theory and research processes. In so doing, we have argued for the value in transparency in these processes, sharing insights into our journeys towards new materialist theorymethod, as well as the benefits of collaboration to support one another as we move away from familiar research knowledge processes (Brice, Clark & Thorpe, 2020; Clark & Thorpe, 2020; Thorpe, Clark, Brice & Sims, 2020; also see Jeffrey, 2020; Jeffrey, Barbour & Thorpe, Under Review). While many new materialist scholars continue to write at the theoretical level, those that are engaging empirically with new materialisms are doing so in a range of ways. Some are designing projects consistent with their theoretical approach, using new materialist theory to guide process and methodological choices. Yet others are drawing upon new materialist theory to revisit previously collected sets of data. For example, in their research on preteen boys and girls diagnosed with eating disorders, Levy, Halse, and Wright (2016) adopted a diffractive methodology to revisit “resistant data,” and through a “re-turning differently/diffractively” to the interview data, came to “reconsider how the ‘matter’ of what the children said, could come to matter differently” (p.  186). Similarly, years after finishing her Foucauldian-informed doctoral research on young women’s

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experiences in dance classes, Marianne revisited the project with a feminist new materialist approach, with the curiosity of “what else we might know about the ballet body beyond the discursive meanings ascribed to it” (Clark, 2020, p. 209). Drawing upon the work of Barad, she was able to reimagine the vitality of the ballet body and attend to various encounters (in the change room, in the studio space, and in performance) that she had “returned to over and over again… that troubled and excited me but with which I did not know what to do” (Clark, 2020, p. 211). Some may question the ethico-onto-epistemological consistencies of collecting and/or revisiting data gathered under a different set of paradigmatic assumptions, motivations, and intentions. But it is important to consider that new materialist approaches also encourage us to rethink the boundaries of the research apparatus. As Barad (2014) reminds us: “there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind. There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then. There is nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new” (p. 168). Here we might consider such statements in relation to previously collected data, but also in relation to the paradigms and theoretical frameworks that we may have previously worked within. For those of us who have spent years (sometimes many decades) working within critical and/or interpretive paradigms, and/or feminist and poststructural frameworks, how feasible is it to simply ‘step away’ from such deep-seated ways of knowing and producing knowledge? Here we take up Barad (2007) to encourage the rethinking of research projects as “not objects with inherent boundaries and properties”, but rather as “material-discursive phenomena” (p. 153). Where the research apparatus begins and ends may not necessarily be clearly defined within the tidy boundaries of one paradigm, nor is it possible to cast aside our previous ways of knowing, cleanly stepping into a new set of ethico-­ onto-­epistemological assumptions. New materialist theory encourages us to rethink the boundaries of our research projects. For some, revisiting previously collected data may enable researchers to enliven ‘resistant data’ and to know the matter of their subjects differently. For others, even when embracing wholeheartedly the ethico-onto-epistemology of new materialisms from the onset, there needs to be a critical reflection of how previous (and sometimes lingering) ways of knowing may fold into future projects. Acknowledging the tensions, challenges, frustrations, and joys

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of such processes is an important part of the journey into new materialisms.

Rethinking Methods with New Materialisms There is a growing body of scholarship that has begun to engage with the “reequipping” of methods, using a wide array of techniques for thinking beyond the human and human experience (Allen, 2018; King, 2020; McKnight, 2016; Ray, 2019). In this section we provide a summary of some the many different ways that new materialist scholars are rethinking the theory-method relationship. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer all of the possibilities here, we focus on a range of familiar and new methods, including media analysis, interviews, participatory methods, autoethnography, arts-based methods, embodied methodologies and movement-based methods, and transdisciplinary and mixed methods. Our intent here is not to advocate one approach over another, but rather to offer the reader an overview of the many possibilities, as well as key considerations, when doing new materialist empirical research. We acknowledge that some approaches will suit some projects better than others, and we hope readers are inspired (or, at least, intrigued) by the diverse options offered by new materialisms for reimagining familiar methods and/or opening new opportunities for empirical practices. Either way, new materialisms encourage us all to approach our work with a willingness to explore ethico-onto-epistemological issues with “genuine curiosity, no matter how challenging or ironic they may appear” (Mancini, van der Linden, Bryan, & Stuart, 2012, p. 9).

Media Analysis The focus on material practices and their active role in meaning making processes opens up new ways of thinking about media production and analysis. While examples of new materialist-inspired analyses in conventional media studies are relatively few, some media theorists have been grappling with what such approaches might offer (Flynn, 2016;

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Parikka, 2013). These authors generally agree that the overarching principles of new materialisms provide welcome disruption to the representational paradigm underpinning much media theory that understands media images and texts as separate from the bodies and technologies that capture and produce them. In contrast, new materialist analyses seek to blur these boundaries and acknowledge the material forces and practices at work in media production and engagement (Liao & Markula, 2016; Reade, 2020; Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2020; Warfield, 2016). For example, Katie Warfield (2016) examines the phenomenon of selfies through Barad’s agential realism to reveal how selfies work as “networked material–discursive entanglements wherein bodies, photos, cameras, and expressed selves are always and already touching” (p. 6). Combining interviews with photo voice and photo elicitation, Warfield asked the participants to orally narrate their thoughts and feelings as they engaged in the process of taking selfies. Therefore, selfies were not understood as a ‘text’ that could be read for meanings of gendered bodies. Rather, both material and social forces actively shaped both the process of selfie taking and responses to the images. More recently, Josie Reade (2020) adopted a feminist new materialist approach in her analysis of a global women’s online fitness community. Drawing upon interviews with women who use Instagram to post and engage with fitness inspiration (fitspo) content, she explores how “various body parts, objects, platform functionalities and discourses come together to create affective encounters” between women using Instagram for fitness inspiration (p.1). These examples provide some insight into how new materialist theories are challenging representationalism and being put to work within media analyses.

Interviews There has been a growing debate amongst new materialist and posthumanist scholars as to the use of interviews (Fox & Alldred, 2015, 2018b; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Mazzei, 2013; St. Pierre, 2016). Among some, there is a belief that interviews prioritize human experience and language, and thus are unable to fully recognize the materiality of the world and

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nonhuman entities (St. Pierre, 2016). Others argue that such ontological incongruences do not mean the interview must be abandoned altogether, but can be adapted in ways that align with new materialist ontology (Alldred & Fox, 2015; Jeffrey, 2020; Lupton, 2019d; Marn & Wolgemuth, 2016; Mazzei, 2013; Monforte, 2018; Reade, 2020; Rich, Lewis, & Miah, 2020; Søndergaard, 2016; Warfield, 2016; Woodward, 2015). For example, engaging with the ideas of Deleuze and Guatarri, Mazzei (2013) offers the concept of the Voice without Organs (VwO) as an alternative approach to analysing interview data. A VwO approach removes agency and voice from the human alone, instead viewing voice as an “assemblage, a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceeds the traditional notion of the individual” (p.  734). Therefore, during a new materialist interview, the human voice cannot be privileged alone but must be seen as an assemblage of forces, including geographies, families, institutions, gender norms, hopes, and bodies. In another example, Monforte (2018) retroactively analysed his interviews with “Patrick” (a participant with cancer and spinal cord injury) with a new materialist lens, thus “flattening [sic] the relations between humans and non-human elements in the stories, reading them horizontally rather than vertically” (p. 385). In her new materialist research on women’s use of health and fitness apps, Lupton (2019d) uses interviews to explore the human-­ nonhuman entanglements with such technologies, and the multiple affordances and agential capacities of the women-technology entanglement. In addition to these scholars using interviews, others have used focus groups in ways that align with new materialist ontological and epistemological implications (Safron, 2019; Shelton, Guyotte, & Flint, 2019).

Participatory Methods Scholars across disciplines are exploring the new materialist possibilities of participatory methods (Cardinal, 2019; Rautio, 2013). A particularly important contribution is the recent anthology titled Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (Bastian et al., 2017). The editors and authors of this book contribute to the growing body of literature that recognizes the agency of nonhumans in knowledge production by

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working at the intersection of participatory research (PR) and new materialisms. Following calls from more-than-human geographers for methods that enable researchers to ask “what matters” to nonhumans (Buller, 2015; Hodgetts & Lorimer, 2015), the editors approached this project with a series of posthumanist-inspired methodological questions: What might it mean to invite ‘the more-than-human’ to be an active participant, and even partner, in research? How are prevailing ways of conceiving research in terms of issues of knowledge, ethics, consent and anonymity challenged and transformed when we think of the more-than-human as a partner in research? How might it be possible to transform existing frameworks, practices and approaches to research? What would this transformed research look like? (p. 1)

The authors explore in a range of ways the possibilities of inviting specific nonhumans (i.e., animals, insects, plants, the elements) into the research process at the outset. Across the anthology there is an acknowledgement of the many challenges of “giving voice” (Pigott & Lyons, 2017) and “listening” (Heddon, 2017) to both human and nonhuman subjects as co-participants, and care is taken to articulate and unpack some of these difficulties, including ethical relationality, the problem of representation and of exchange across different perceptual worlds, and familiar arguments of anthropocentrism. Ultimately, such work is making a highly valuable contribution to questions of methodology, methods, ethics, and representation in posthuman, new materialist research, and the potential of radically rethinking methods with human and nonhuman participants. Others are taking up the possibilities of new materialist-inspired participatory methods in a range of disciplinary contexts (Cardinal, 2019; Rautio, 2013).

Autoethnography Autoethnography is a popular method for those seeking to vividly evoke lived experiences within sporting and physical leisure cultures. Although such human-experience-centred methods may seem antithetical to new

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materialisms and posthumanism, some are making a case for new materialist-inspired autoethnographic approaches (Dickinson, 2017; Hammoor, 2019; Ray, 2019). For example, in his autoethnography of the Australian Football Club, Ray (2019) clarifies that he chose to use autoethnography “as a way to engage with the live surface of the world rather than fall back onto a modernist understanding of the researcher as an objective observer” (p. 91). He thus uses autoethnography to recognize the researcher as “entangled within the assemblages of study” (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013, cited in Ray, 2019, p. 94). This approach enabled him to discuss the human and nonhuman objects within Australian football—bodies, jumpers, ball, beer—that work together to create a particular Australian masculine identity. In another highly personal account, Dickinson (2017) brings together autoethnography with posthumanist theory to explore her complicated relationship with eating and food. In so doing, she focuses her attention on a cookie and the associated feelings, sensations, and intensities that become part of that moment. In acknowledging the materiality of an object (cookie), she develops a material-discursive “writing practice that considers a focus on forces—sensations, vibrations, breathing—as agents in the story process” (p. 89). In this way she suggests that posthumanism itself can broadly be seen as “an ethnographic practice highlighting flows of relation, forces, and energies of materialities” (p. 89). While autoethnography has received less attention in new materialist discussions of method, Dickinson (2017), Ray (2019) and others are showing the ways this method can be adapted to focus on materialities within and beyond the human.

Arts-Based Methods Creative and arts-based methods have also emerged as fruitful approaches to generating and collecting ‘data’ within inquiry projects inspired by new materialisms. The potential value of such approaches is readily resonant; in order to acknowledge the material processes of meaning making we need to disrupt our comfortable tendencies towards the textual and linguistic by engaging with methods based in creation and invention (Shomura, 2017; Tompkins, 2016). Some scholars working in new

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materialist and postqualitative inquiry use the term ‘research-creation’, describing it as a process of ‘thinking-making-doing’ to emphasize the generative and emergent nature of inquiry (Springgay & Truman, 2018). Referring to the complex intersection of research, art and theory, research-­ creation is defined by philosophers Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2014) as an “experimental practice” oriented towards “catalyzing an event of emergence” (p. 89) that cannot be determined in advance. These arts and creation-based approaches both reorient our attention away from language as the primary means of knowing and highlight the messiness of posthuman inquiry that understands researchers as always actively implicated in knowledge production processes. Within research-creation practices, those conducting inquiry inhabit the intersections of art, theory, and research and therefore are actively involved in the production of what it is they also seek to know. Consequently, the impossibility of observing or interpreting from outside of the research assemblage is made more intelligible. Indeed, creative artistic practice illuminates meaning from within “the social spaces and cultural contexts of those people being researched” (Parry & Johnson, 2007, p. 120). Numerous examples of researchers turning to creative and arts-based research approaches in efforts to think with and through new materialist concepts are emerging across a range of disciplines (e.g., Coleman & Osgood, 2019; Hickey-Moody & Page, 2015; Lupton, 2019b, 2020; Safron, 2019). In the introduction to their special issue on PhEmaterialism (a term coined by a working group in the UK that combines feminist posthumanism and the new materialisms), editors and feminist scholars Katie Strom, Jessica Ringrose, Jayne Osgood and Emma Renold (2019), suggest arts-based approaches as particularly useful for new materialist inquiry: [They] can enable affective flows, emergent knowledges, and articulations of relationalities to move beyond the capabilities of solely linguistic or textual modes of inquiry. This can also involve co-creating artful encounters with participants that facilitate emergent, speculative ways of working, where new techniques are invented, and where new things might be noticed, felt, made, and enacted. (p. 22)

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In this special issue, the contributors offer several examples of creative practices being put to work through artistic and visual methods. For example, Carri Safron (2019) utilizes the visual method of collage as both a data generating and analytic process to explore young Black and Latinx people’s encounters with health and fitness. In this project, participants were invited to use health and fitness magazines as well as a collection of other art materials to create collages, or what Safron calls “re-­assemblages,” that worked to produce alternative understandings and narratives about health, fitness, gender, race, and bodies. Safron (2019) suggests that the creation-based experimental process of collage created space for affective flows and responses, and prompted both researchers and participants to actively re-evaluate and re-imagine what matters, how it matters and for whom it matters in health education and pedagogy. While some have focused on visual arts-based methods, poetic and alternative writing practices are also important examples of creative, arts-­ based methods and modes of analysis. For example, drawing upon the work of St. Pierre (2011) and Jackson and Mazzei (2013), Fullagar (2020) “pursued the analytic possibilities informed by postqualitative inquiry” (p.  180) in her research on the materiality of movement in women’s accounts of recovery from depression. After organizing data from interviews with 80 Australian women about their experiences of depression, she then turned to a new materialist-inspired “postpresentational approach” using poetry that “attends to the forces of affect, as they are entangled with recognized emotions, to identify what they ‘do’ through particular intraactive relations of embodied movement” (p.  180). Similarly, Lupton (2020) uses materials generated in a story completion project to “create poetic representations” of understandings of health. Combining the artsbased methods of story completion and poetic inquiry, she identifies “the affordances, affective forces and relational connections in the human-nonhuman assemblages” (Lupton, 2020, p. 1). Fullagar (2020) and Lupton (2019b, 2020) are among a growing number of feminist scholars engaging with new materialist theory who are using poetry (and other creative artsbased methods) to represent previously gathered data (also see Jeffrey, 2020). Such examples (which are continuing to proliferate) emphasize how the explicit re-focusing of attention away from text-based

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practice affords more space for the sensory, emotional, and material dimensions of knowledge production to emerge.

Embodied and Movement-Based Methods Elaborating on the arts-based methods above are methodological approaches that explicitly acknowledge and/or incorporate the role of the moving body in processes of knowledge production. This turn aligns with feminist new materialisms and their call for “an embodied, affective, relational understanding of the research process” (Hickey-Moody & Page, 2015, p.  2). Scholars across a range of disciplines have long acknowledged the body and its affects as an important site of teaching, learning, and meaning making, and articulated the value of embodied forms of inquiry (Ellingson, 2017; Hickey-Moody & Page, 2015; Thomas & Ahmed, 2008). This work has inspired, and is being extended by, scholars leading feminist new materialist research who recognize the moving body—and its intra-actions with space, place and other human and nonhuman entities—as both a performative and generative force (Coleman, Page, & Palmer, 2019; Hickey-Moody, Palmer, & Sayers, 2016; Springgay & Truman, 2018). A recent special issue of the journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture titled “Feminist New Materialist Practice: The Mattering of Methods”, highlights a range of new materialist research-creation projects that explicitly harness the affective vitality of the body. In these works, movement is not used to unearth or represent meaning, but rather is integral to the production and disruption of meaning, and to rendering visible its instability, affects, and flows. For example, Anna Hickey-Moody, Helen Palmer and Esther Sayers (2016) explore the “disruptive and generative potential” of a diffractive pedagogical practice involving teaching and learning through dance in a university setting. The authors outline how dance-inspired practices can create opportunities for embodied self-­ expression and creation that in turn can lead to new imaginaries of belonging. In such research, ‘moving methods’ within new materialist projects are not engaged with in order to tap into a so-called ‘deeper’ knowledge that can then be represented through talk or text. Rather they

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acknowledge the potential of the moving body to elicit a generative response (Springgay & Truman, 2017). The dynamism of the body emerges—and is embraced—as an active, affective force within the material practices of knowledge and cultural production (Barrett & Bolt, 2013). Stephannie Springgay and Sarah Truman’s WalkingLab initiative (2017, 2018) provides another example of affective and bodily approaches to inquiry practices that are in dialogue with new materialist and posthumanist perspectives. The WalkingLab is described as a queer, feminist collaboration involving a series of walking research-creation events that interrogate what it means to move and the entangled relations between the human and more-than-human. Taking up concepts of land and geos, affect, and transmateriality, the WalkingLab entails a performative ‘walking-­with’ queer, feminist, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour theories, as well new materialisms and posthumanisms, in efforts to disrupt the White-cis-hetero-ableist-patriarchal canon of walking scholarship (Springgay & Truman, 2017). Here, the moving body is implicated in both the exploration and disruption of taken for granted knowledges and boundaries that define contemporary relationships among humans, nonhumans, space and place. In addition to queer, feminist, and health scholars, many within the fields of sport sociology, leisure studies, and physical cultural studies have long explored the role of the moving body in knowledge production and inquiry processes (Allen-Collinson & Leledaki, 2015; Francombe-Webb, 2017; Giardina & Newman, 2011; Humberstone, 2011; Markula, 2019). Over the past few years, some of these scholars have begun turning to new materialist frameworks in order to expand analyses and ways of thinking about moving bodies as social, material, and cultural entities with their own energies and forces. For example, Markula (2019) has recently extended a rallying cry for more experimental and innovative approaches for qualitative inquiry on moving bodies from those of us who call these fields our disciplinary ‘home’. She urges, “This is the task for us, as the researchers of the body in motion, to imagine and to experiment. This is an exciting opportunity that we, as socio-cultural scholars specializing in physical activity, are more qualified to undertake than other social science or humanities new materialist scholars” (p.  7). Embracing such opportunities, Markula (2019) has explored the

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entanglements of theory, method, and representation through Deleuzian-­ inspired performance ethnography. Importantly, while Markula emphasizes that such posthumanist experiments may not always succeed, they are necessary to explore the possibilities of new materialist theory put into practice. As feminist scholars of the moving body, we too have grappled with how to accommodate and acknowledge the force and multiplicity of moving bodies in our research endeavours. Arguing along a similar line to Markula (2019), Holly (Thorpe, 2014, 2016) has long insisted that we need expanded vocabularies to fully account for the capacities and complex socio-materialities of moving bodies and that these vocabularies may be created through increased engagement with the biological sciences. Marianne (Clark, 2020) has wondered how to articulate the role of the visceral respondings of researching bodies as they intra-act with research settings and spaces, while also attempting to re-imagine the corporeal, material, and affective entanglements at work in recreational dance studies. In our collaborative work, we have prioritized the entanglements of our own moving, researching, feminist bodies within our new materialist inquiry processes (Brice, Clark, & Thorpe, 2020; Clark & Thorpe, 2020). Collectively, and through this book, we continue these threads and attempt to acknowledge and articulate the productive entanglements of our own moving, researching, feminist bodies within our inquiry processes and to think what it is these entanglements do. We explore the complex relationships between moving bodies, subjectivities, and fitness-­ related objects, as well as the material-discursive-affective processes involved in navigating and traversing disciplinary boundaries through open-ended ‘experiments’ that emerge, grow, and linger in the intersections of theory and method.

Re-turning to the Quantitative: Transdisciplinary and Mixed Methods With the aim of attending to matter and mattering, feminist new materialist scholars have long embraced the “positive possibilities of working critically with scientific knowledge, technologies and methods” (Bastian

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et al., 2017, p. 3). In so doing, some are advocating a critical reengagement with mixed methods approaches (Fox & Alldred, 2018b; Woodward, 2015), while others are exploring the possibilities (and challenges) of a re-turn to quantitative methods (Bastien et  al., 2017; Markula, 2019; Woodward, 2015). For example, in a special issue bringing together new materialisms with a cultural studies of numeracy (i.e., computer sciences, information sciences, and statistics), Lather (2016a, 2016b) expresses excitement about “the opening up of measurement, assessment, and quantitative methods to (post)critical inquiry” (Lather, 2016b, p. 502). Those working in critical sport studies have similarly expressed enthusiasm for this ‘opening up’ to big data (Jette, Esmonde, Andrews, & Pluim, 2020) and quantitative methods (Thorpe & Clark, 2019; Markula, 2019; Pringle, 2020). For scholars interested in the moving body, thoughtful engagements with the so-called natural sciences may offer valuable new avenues for expanding our capacities to attend to bodily movement and force. For example, Markula’s (2011, 2014) new materialist-­inspired work puts the theoretical insights of Deleuze, Foucault and Latour to work alongside anatomical analyses to imagine how Pilates practice might transcend the disciplinary workings of biopolitical power. Importantly, new materialist approaches to quantitative and/or mixed methods are not a disciplinary free-for-all, and instead they require heightened attention to the ontological assumptions, disciplinary boundaries, and micro-politics within and across such projects. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad (2007) is encouraging of mixed methods and transdisciplinary research projects, but remains adamant that we must not simply “draw from an array of disciplines” (p. 93). Rather, we should always be “thinking insights from scientific and social theories through one another” (p. 92). Such processes call for close attention to the “fine details of different disciplinary approaches,” as well as engaging in deep inquiry into “the histories of the organization of knowledges and their function in the formation of subjectivities” (p. 93). In an early example of a feminist new materialist approach to transdisciplinary research, Irni (2010) embarked on a mixed method study on sex, age, and gendering practices in the workplace. Drawing upon Barad’s concept of apparatus, Irni (2010) comes to understand the various intraactions, including bodily processes, technologies, practices, and

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meaning-making, that produce the phenomena of the “troublesome ageing woman.” For Irni (2010), a Baradian focus on the research apparatus revealed many feminist tensions and contradictions in such mixed method research, such that she occasionally found herself “sinking in transdisciplinary quagmires” (p. 127). Importantly, such quagmires were not insurmountable, but part of the feminist politics of the project. In her later work, Irni (2013a) critically engages with the claim that feminist new materialists should bring biology and the physiology of bodies into their analyses, and advocates for more ontological questioning about these objects of study. Focusing on sex hormones, she adopts a posthumanist performative approach to offer a radicalization of their ontology. Approaching transdisciplinary and mixed-method research from an ontological perspective encourages new turns in thinking about the possibilities, politics, and challenges of working across disciplinary boundaries. In Chap. 6 we offer a more detailed discussion of a Baradian approach to transdisciplinary research, and how the concept of apparatus encourages new noticings of the ways boundaries are produced and negotiated within mixed method sport and health-related research projects. In doing so, we take cue from the work of feminist new materialist scholars such as Irni (2010, 2013a, 2013b) as well as health scholars (McDougall, Goldszmidt, Kinsella, Smith, & Lingard, 2016) who are drawing upon new materialist approaches to revisit the processes of doing mixed methods and cross-disciplinary research. We hope to illustrate the possibilities of new materialist re-engagements with quantitative and mixed methods approaches for innovative research that seeks to examine the complexities of human and nonhuman relations, as well as the processes, positionings, and politics of working across disciplines (also see Thorpe, Clark, Brice & Sims, 2020).

Reflexivity, Positionality, and Ethics Working within new materialist frameworks poses questions for how we go about conducting inquiry, how we think about and understand the phenomena we engage with, and our own embodied engagements with theory and method. The onto-epistemological underpinnings of these

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perspectives specifically require that we acknowledge our messy involvement with knowledge production, while also providing us the tools to do so. Before discussing new materialist approaches to researcher reflexivity and positionality, we first consider some of the tensions that can emerge in the encounter between postqualitative research projects and ethical review boards. As some scholars engaging with postqualitative methodologies have revealed, such projects can result in challenges in working with ethical review boards that remain grounded in positivist and/or humanist assumptions. As Nordstrom (2018) writes, putting to work an antimethodology—a creative and generative methodology—in her study about an “assemblage of humans, nonhumans, living and nonliving in family geneology” (p. 215), required careful negotiation of her university Institutional Review Board (IRB): I have to clearly delineate research questions even though I anticipate and know they will change with individuation and ontogenesis. I have to position the methodology and methods of data collection as static entities. I have to anticipate all the data I will collect and all the ethical issues that might arise during the study. I have to anticipate how participants might respond to interview questions and any possible discomfort and gains from participating in the study. Simply put, I have to both discursively and materially produce a study within positivism so that it will be sanctioned by those in power, in this instance the IRB (p. 221).

Whereas ethical review boards typically require the researcher to anticipate any ethical issues that may emerge in a clearly designed project, a new materialist approach to ethics recognizes that each moment in the research process raises ethical questions; ethics become “borne of situated response, ethics enacted in the pulse and pause of attentiveness” (Beausoleil, 2015, p. 2). While few new materialist scholars have written explicitly about the challenges of navigating ethical review boards, we expect that many are drawing upon longstanding critiques of IRBs by other critical, qualitative and creative and arts-based researchers. Some new materialist scholars are likely drawing upon similar strategies as Nordstrom (2018), working critically

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and consciously within the requirements of IRBs. While Nordstrom (2018) did not try to change the structure or challenge the assumptions of the IRB, her encounters were informed by new materialist theory. Throughout the research process Nordstrom (2018) attended to how the forces of “royal science”—a term coined by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in critique of the more sedentary practices of science that work to “normalize qualitative research through a series of disparate processes that form an imperative” (Nordstrom, 2018, p.  220)—reterritorialize her research, and how her own “strategic enactments of royal science helped me to navigate not only my everyday politics but also the larger politics of research” (p. 222). Consciously using terms of “royal science” such as ‘data’ and ‘methodology’, and providing familiar documents such as an interview guide in her ethics application (knowing that she would unlikely use it), helped Nordstrom (2018) navigate some of the tensions that emerged in conducting a postqualitative project within an overarching system that remains firmly grounded in particular assumptions about what the research process should look like, and what ‘ethics’ means. More work is needed to interrogate the power relations at play and to reveal the tensions and challenges experienced by postqualitative researchers and their strategies for working within the constraints of ethical review boards that have yet to acknowledge the ethico-onto-epistemological turn. Ethical considerations, of course, extend beyond ethics review processes and permeate all aspects of inquiry. In the wake of the material turn, some are calling for greater engagement by new materialisms “with the ethics and politics of voice in (post)qualitative work” (Mayes, 2019, p. 1200). Summarizing such critiques, Mayes (2019) writes that there is risk in some new materialist research that “human voices may become tools for play and appropriation in (post)qualitative research assemblages, creating new (if inadvertent) oppressions” (p. 1201). Importantly, however, while voice is reconceptualized in postqualitative research, it does not mean that “questions of history, politics and ethics” are sidelined (Mayes, 2019, p. 1202). Rather there is concerted impetus for researchers to engage with, and respond carefully to, such questions throughout the inquiry process. We engage more fully with these issues in Chaps. 3 and  7, with a particular focus on the challenges and ethical considerations of giving voice to objects (Chap. 3), and representing ‘nature’ and

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the environment (Chap. 7) (Alaimo, 2008; Neimanis, 2018). While all qualitative researchers make choices in how voices (of humans) are represented in their work, for new materialist scholars such ethical decisions are predicted on human and nonhuman entanglements, with researchers becoming “responsible to entanglements of which we are a part” (Barad in Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 52). Put differently, throughout the research project, we must remain attentive to the agential cuts that we make, how we engage with participant (human and nonhuman) voice, and the implications of such cuts. As Barad (2007) reminds us, new materialist researchers “can’t simply bracket (or ignore) certain issues without taking responsibility and being accountable for the constitutive effects of these exclusions” (p. 58). Although new materialist researchers using postqualitative methods may conceptualize voice differently than those engaging in humanist research, integral to such work is the acknowledgement that we are always deeply implicated in the agential cuts that have been made (i.e., whose voices and what parts of verbal and nonverbal communication are included) and their consequences. Of course, examining one’s situatedness in research projects is in no way unique to new materialisms. Feminist scholars have a long history of interrogating the power relations and their asymmetrical effects within the processes of knowledge production (Ackerly & True, 2008; Daley, 2010; Harding, 1996, 2006; Olive, 2020; Olive and Thorpe, 2017). Within feminist new materialisms, this interrogation is expanded by the radical disruption of binaries these ontological frameworks present. That is, the boundaries between researcher and researched, theory and method, analysis and representation are dramatically blurred, prompting the need for ‘new’ ways of understanding and articulating one’s positionality within inquiry processes. In a special issue of Gender and Education devoted to feminist new materialisms and its implications for inquiry in education, Hughes and Lury (2013) rework the feminist concept of situatedness to exceed questions of position and identity and instead map patterns of movement such that “the multiple relations between figure and ground, object and subject become visible as matters of concern” (p. 795). Here we start to see the unravelling of long held assumptions about what and who ‘acts’ within research processes and new lines of flight for thinking about knowledge production and our implicated-ness within it.

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While reflexivity has become a key tenet of most contemporary feminist research, it has also come under some criticism from both feminist and non-feminist qualitative scholars alike (see Lynch, 2000; Patai, 1994; Pels, 2000; Pillow, 2003; for an overview of such criticisms see Pringle & Thorpe, 2017). In particular, Haraway (1997) levelled a pointed critique at reflexivity, suggesting it fails to acknowledge how materialities are entangled with the production of matter, and meaning, and difference. Instead she suggests diffraction as a way to read different knowledges and perspectives through one another in order to pay attention to “the difference in the world” as well as “the interference patterns on the recording films of our lives and bodies” (p. 17). Building on Haraway’s (1997) concept of diffraction, Barad’s (2007) ethico-onto-epistemological framework insists upon the inseparability of knowing and being, and consequently, the inability to examine phenomena from outside of the research apparatus (see Chap. 6 for an extended discussion of apparatus, research boundaries, and researcher positionalities). As previously noted, Barad offers diffraction as both a concept and a metaphor, and defines it as a “mov[e] away from the familiar habits and seductions of representationalism (reflecting on the world from outside) to a way of understanding the world from within and as part of it” (Barad, 2007, p.  88). Distinguishing diffraction from reflexivity, she explains: “diffraction is not reflection raised to some higher power. It is not a self-­ referential glance back at oneself ” (p. 88). Rather, diffraction is a performative practice of knowing, entangled engagement “as part of the world in its differential becoming” (p.  88). Therefore, diffraction is not an ‘inner’ cognitive exercise that takes place within a discrete human actor, rather it is an unfolding, performative, intra-active relationship  that involves humans, nonhumans, discourse, time and space (Hultman & Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). Importantly a diffractive analysis posits practices of knowing as part of the material processes of the world’s becoming, of which researchers are always already a part. We recognize the value of this personal and political exercise. In a diffractive experiment examining the Fitbit/motherhood entanglement, Marianne and Holly (Clark & Thorpe, 2020) worked to put Barad’s concept and method of diffraction into action to think how differences come to matter differently, both within and outside of boundaries, instead of

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understanding difference in terms of binaries and opposition (Haraway, 1992). This could not be achieved by reflecting ‘back’ on our experiences but rather “marking differences from within and as part of an entangled state” (Barad, 2007, p.  89). However, through this activity,  we were prompted to consider the boundary making processes and constitutive exclusions through which these differences came to matter, and specifically how they came to matter in the doing of this project. Thus, while Barad draws categorical distinctions between diffraction and reflexivity and advocates for the former, we questioned this oppositional stance that in turn, draws its own boundaries. In recognizing a long and important tradition of feminist contributions to understandings of reflexivity and positionality, we see the value of reflexivity for feminist projects of the moving body, and continue to explore the possibilities of using diffraction reflexively. As we signpost above, working within and through new materialist and posthuman frameworks also requires a re-imagining of our understandings of ethics that are intimately connected to practices of reflexivity, positionality and diffraction and, ultimately, the politics of knowledge production. Braidotti (2013, 2019a) reminds us that posthuman ethics are located in a relational ontology, which means humans and entities do not exist separately outside of their relationships, nor is ethical practice ever a priori. Rather, the ability to act and think ethically emerges and is performed through relationships with other humans, nonhumans, and the material world. As researchers, we are always ethically entangled and engaged in all that we do. Yet, importantly, these ethical relationships are not just with our ‘human subjects’ as typically conceived by research ethics boards, but also with human and nonhuman co-participants (even collaborators) of past-present-future. As we have grappled with new materialisms, we have come, through our reading, practices, conversations, and ‘slip ups’, to a more animated understanding of ethical practice not as designed or determined, but always emergent, generative and performative. Barad’s (2007) ethico-onto-epistemological framework further highlights this inseparability between being (ontology), knowing (epistemology), and ethics. Her theory of agential realism suggests knowledge

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making practices must always be understood as ethical, relational engagements. Cecilia Åsberg (2013) suggests these relationships be understood as “relations of obligation” (p. 9) and that part of performing this obligation means extending our understanding beyond humanism by attending and responding to all matter and entities, even (especially) when this falls outside of our comfort zone. As Barad (2010) emphasises, “Ethics is an integral part of the diffraction (ongoing differentiating) patterns of worlding, not a superimposing of human values onto the ontology of the world” (p. 265). In order to avoid this ‘superimposing’ of humanism, so easy to do in qualitative inquiry, we turn to the concept and practice of response-­ ability as embraced by Haraway and Barad. By responding and attending to the material and nonhuman forces with which we are always in relation, we can then begin, in small ways, to disrupt these deeply sedimented humanistic tendencies. Such respondings and response-abilities may mean many things in different contexts, but in the research context we seek to do this by noticing and accounting for the ways in which we are always entangled with our theoretical and methodological frameworks and how our own politicized researching subjectivities act upon and are transformed through knowledge production practices. We acknowledge the challenge of this practice, yet embrace the tools afforded through feminist new materialisms to lean into what Braidotti (2013) calls an ‘affirmative ethics’, a reassembling of new ways of becoming. To do so requires thoughtful experimentation with theory-method that is the focus of the following chapters. Guided by feminist new materialisms and postqualitative inquiry, our individual and collaborative research has involved iterative and deep engagement with theory, as well as a focused concern with the everyday movements, doings, and becomings of our researching, active bodies as they are entangled with our processes of knowledge production. In these subtly creative and performative everyday practices, our projects emphasize how the specificities and fine details—including what might be considered mundane movements— come to matter in processes of meaning making, knowledge creation, and ethical relations.

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F inal Thoughts on New Materialist Research Practices As this chapter has highlighted, new materialist theory encourages important questions about the research process, the possibilities of reworking familiar methods and exploring new methods, as well as rethinking researcher positionality and ethics. From our own engagements with new materialist theory and through our own empirical projects and lived experiences, we recognize the importance of paying close attention to all dimensions of the process, and continually returning to theory to inform our research decisions and empirical practices. At times this journey into unknown methodological terrain can be daunting, disorientating, and bewildering. We have certainly experienced our fair share of such moments! There are many challenges, incompatibilities even, between new materialist ontologies and (some humanist-oriented) methods (Monforte & Smith, 2020). However, we concur with Springgay and Truman (2018) who argue that, rather than a refusal of (any) method, we must embrace and reveal in the “(in)tensions... immanent to whatever method is used” (p.  203). Continuing they explain: “If the intent of inquiry is to create a different world, to ask what kinds of futures are imaginable, then (in)tensions need attend to the immersion, friction, strain, and quivering unease of doing research differently” (p.  203). Recognizing different projects will benefit from particular research processes and methods, we are unwilling here to advocate any one (new materialist) methodological approach over another. However, from our experiences of working with new materialist theory-method, and living it in and through our bodies, we feel strongly that any new materialist empirical research should pay close attention to these (in)tensions, strains, and frictions. Indeed, there is much to be learned by attending to these fractures and fissions, including how they are felt in and through the body, and by following these unpredictable trajectories. We hope this chapter helps researchers to build the confidence to step away from familiar “toolbox” approaches, and towards processes that are

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more creatively consistent with the ontology of new materialisms. Yet, amidst such calls for innovation, our new materialist reimaginings of method, analysis, and representation should always be “grounded in the ethical imperative to rethink relations of being” (St. Pierre et al., 2016, p. 108), and always with the aim of aiding in the care, concern, and justice of humans and nonhumans alike.

3 Sporting Matter and Living with Objects of Fitness

Within new materialisms, scholars have been calling for a (re)newed focus on the dynamism and vitality of matter (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010b; Coole & Frost, 2010b; Monforte, 2018). This requires a shift in the way we think about things and objects, and asks us to disrupt understandings that reassert matter as a “passive base that has been infiltrated and animated by various cultural practices” (Davis, 2009, p. 73). Rather, we are called upon to engage in inquiry that assumes matter as “saturated with agentic capacities and existential significance” (Coole, 2010, p. 92). This chapter seeks to explore how new materialisms can provide such avenues for thinking about the liveliness of matter in our sporting and physically active lives, with a particular focus on sporting objects. Our daily sport, fitness, and leisure activities bring our bodies into contact with many seemingly mundane objects: running shoes, soccer balls, tennis rackets, surfboards, bicycles, yoga mats, fitness trackers. In some cases, people form intimate relationships with their lucky cleats, favourite socks, and their most comfortable sport shoes; many experience pleasure and pride when handed golden trophies or medals; other feel deep sadness when they lose their favourite team’s jersey or a revered

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Thorpe et al., Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness, New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7_3

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article of sporting gear. Scholarship has examined how these material elements gain meaning within certain societies and sporting communities (Beaver, 2014; Du Gay et al., 1997; Flanagan, 2014; Van Ingen & Kovacs, 2012). While this work has been extremely valuable, it largely conceptualizes humans and objects as ontologically distinct, with objects only becoming meaningful through human and cultural forces. New materialisms disrupts this human exceptionalism and interrogates the meanings that emerge through human-object relations, emphasizing the agentic capacities of nonhuman bodies and things. In this chapter we provide an overview of the possibilities offered by new materialist theories for rethinking the relationships that unfold between humans and sporting objects. We then focus specifically on the sporting objects that are an integral part of women’s sport, fitness, and leisure experiences. This chapter consists of three parts. We begin by highlighting common  sociological approaches to studying  sporting matter and objects. This is followed by some of the theoretical strands within new materialisms that have a strong emphasis on objects, including Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), Actor Network Theory (ANT), Vibrant Matter, and Agential Realism. The final part of the chapter provides a case study to illustrate our efforts to live with and think through the agentic capacities of an everyday sporting object, the sports bra. We end with a discussion of how new materialisms contribute to new understandings of agency, and, specifically, in relation to sporting objects.

Critical Understandings of Sporting Objects Feminist new materialisms are in dialogue with a number of other theoretical approaches concerned with human relations with objects and nonhumans. In this section, we describe four broad approaches that have centralized materiality and objects—material feminisms, feminist cultural studies, phenomenology, and non-representational theory. While many other approaches could be explored, we focus on these for purposes of space and relevance.

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Material Feminisms Within the broad theme of material feminisms lies a history of feminist theories that have explored the materiality of women’s lives. Some of these theories include Marxist feminism and historical material feminism. Marxism asserts that the key to understanding social life is examining the economic structure of society, specifically class structures and relationships of exploitation (Carrington & McDonald, 2009). It is premised on the notion that “material needs” (food, clothing, shelter) are the most basic needs for human life, and therefore, the structure of society and the economy is based on the “modes of production” of those material needs. Hence, Marxism is often considered materialistic. Historical material feminism (HMF) and Marxist feminism extend Marxism to more pointedly address the role of sex and gender in capitalism and modes of production (Wingrove, 2016). Although there are many strands, Marxist feminism and HMF generally follow the principle that women’s oppression is tied to labour and capitalism. Women are often restricted from (or paid less) in waged labour and are often responsible for the labour conducted outside of the market-place (domestic duties and child-producing and rearing) (Birrell, 2000). Therefore, women are able to accrue less capital than their male counterparts resulting in dependence on men and an oppressive state. While Marxist feminism and historical material feminism have been described as materially based theories, matter is understood differently than in new materialisms. In these approaches, the material refers to the “subsistence needs of the human body and the ‘sensuous activities’ undertaken to meet those needs” (Wingrove, 2016, p. 456). The focus is less on the capacities of materialities and objects, and more on the “entrenched regularity of unequal material resources” (Mann, 2012, p. 149) able to be accrued by women (in contrast to men) as a result of inequalities in the production of capital and labour. Within feminist sporting cultural research, Marxist feminist scholarship has tended to focus on women’s paid/unpaid roles within sporting cultures (Beamish, 1984; Bray, 1984; Green, Hebron, & Woodward, 1990; Theberge, 1984; Thompson, 1988). For example, looking at the intersections of leisure, gender, and

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the economy, Green et al. (1990) examine women’s dual roles as both a labour source and domestic caretaker, and how this double responsibility limits women’s opportunities to engage in leisure, sport, and recreation. Also exploring women’s economic responsibilities and sport, Thompson (1988) uses the 1981 South African Rugby Springbok tour to Aotearoa New Zealand (and the ensuing protests) to illuminate the ways in which women’s domestic and reproductive labour historically has benefited male-driven rugby culture and contributed to unequal gendered power relations. Furthermore, in her important work, Mothers Taxi, she examines the invisible labour that women—as wives, mothers, girlfriends—do to support their families sporting participation (Thompson, 1999). These studies focus on the domestic labour distribution that indirectly leads to unequal material accumulation, rather than focusing directly on the materiality of objects within society. Since both HMF and Marxist feminism concentrate on the material conditions of everyday life and the production of materiality in society, there are often ties between Marxist feminism and new materialisms. However, Hird (2009) summarized the differences between new materialisms and previous material feminist theories as follows: [Marxist feminism] is concerned with women’s material living conditions…These analyses in broad brushstrokes, draw attention to the often mundane, repetitive, and tedious daily activities of daily life…[and] tend not to engage with affective physicality of human-nonhuman encounters and relations. What distinguishes emerging analyses of [new] material feminism…is a keen interest in engagements with matter. (pp. 329–330)

It is specifically this engagement with and recognition of the “resiliency of matter and its productivity in concert with the human” (St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016, p.  101) that distinguishes new materialisms from previous theories/frameworks and has led to the moniker of “new” materialism. Some have argued that in Marxism and historical material feminism, materials are able to “enchant and mislead beholders” (Weedon, 2015, p. 435) and thus yield agency within capitalist markets. However, objects are only considered agentic “once they have been infused with a capacity to act by capitalist hands and brains” (Weedon, 2015, p. 435).

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This position is entrenched with human exceptionalism as  it reasserts matter as ontologically inferior to humans. In contrast, new materialisms acknowledge agency and meaning as enacted and emergent through human and nonhuman relationships.

Feminist Cultural Studies Along with material feminisms, feminist cultural studies have yielded a plethora of work that examines the impactful role of objects within varying cultural contexts. Broadly defined, feminist cultural studies is a branch of cultural studies that “specifically examines the role of gender within our cultural interactions and the reproduction of gender inequality” (Krane, 2001, p. 406). A diverse array of approaches have been used within feminist cultural studies, but often this work focuses on issues of ideology, hegemony, subjectivity, and the construction of a feminine cultural identity. While not feminist in nature, one of the most well-known studies within cultural studies that focuses on an object is Du Gay and colleagues’ (1997) Doing Cultural Studies which uses the Sony Walkman as a case study to critically examine the important role of objects and media within cultural practices. This study famously illustrates the circuit of culture in which meaning is produced “through the practice of representation” (Du Gay et al., 1997, p. 40) at various stages in the production and consumption of the Sony Walkman. Drawing upon such cultural studies approaches, critical sport and leisure scholars have examined the cultural significance of sneakers (Miner, 2009), sporting goods and equipment such as skis and soccer shorts (Hallinan & Jackson, 2008; Ohl & Taks, 2007), commemorative sports jerseys and memorabilia (Andon, 2011) and a range of other objects. For example, in her research on windsurfing culture, Wheaton (2000) described how the boards themselves were assigned symbolic value and contributed to the identity of the surfer. Those with shorter (more advanced) boards signified higher skills providing them with more status within the windsurfing world, with this cultural object distinguishing the “true” windsurfers from the novices. The

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board became a physical representation of the windsurfer’s expertise and identity within that community. Feminists have expanded upon such approaches to examine the roles of objects in the creation of certain (gendered) sporting identities (Ohl & Taks, 2007; Thorpe, 2004; Wheaton, 2000). A host of scholars have focused specifically on how uniforms contribute to the continued sexualization of women in multiple sports such as boxing (van Ingen & Kovacs, 2012), volleyball (Bissell & Duke, 2007), and roller derby (Beaver, 2014). In their work on women’s boxing, van Ingen and Kovacs (2012) showed how skirts were used as a way to feminize boxers participating in one of the “ultimate masculine sports” (p. 461). The skirt is imbued with discourses of femininity and some argue that by forcing boxers to wear skirts, it sent a message to the world that “women’s sports are all about looks, not athleticism” (p. 462). Feminist and surfing scholars have also examined the cultural significance of performance and recreational clothing (i.e., boardshorts, bikinis, wetsuits) for women’s status and lived experiences of gender and sexuality within this male dominated sporting culture (Booth, 2001; lisahunter, 2017). Within such cultural-studies-­ inspired research, objects are important symbolic identity markers and work to reinforce various sporting identities, discourses, and relations. While scholars within feminist cultural studies, leisure studies, and material feminisms have studied objects, these studies generally take a ‘representationalist’ approach to examine what objects represent in society and the meanings attached to them.

Phenomenology and Non-representational Theory Sport scholars have also turned to phenomenological and non-­ representational approaches to explore the meaning of objects beyond representation. Many have drawn upon the phenomenology of philosopher  Maurice Merleau-Ponty which is largely concerned with embodiment and perception. Although there are multiple strands of phenomenological thinking, it has long explored processes of meaning making as a “dialogue between body, consciousness, and the world” (Markula & Silk, 2011, p. 35). In such approaches, the “physical body is an important aspect of meaning making as the body perceives the world around it”

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(ibid, p. 35). For phenomenologists, there is an explicit recognition that we “both live in and experience the world through our bodies” (Mayoh, Jones, & Prince, 2018, p. 2). Sport scholars have engaged with phenomenological approaches to consider experiences of joy, pleasure, affective connections, and haptic knowledges with sporting objects and environments (e.g., Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2010; Allen-­Collinson, 2011a, 2011b). For example, Allen-Collinson (2011b) discusses the various sensuous experiences that occur during running and ways the body becomes affected by scents (fresh-cut grass), sounds (mp3 players), and the material body itself (jiggling and moving flesh). Other research has made connections to some psychological approaches that explore experiences of ‘flow’ and athletes relationships with equipment and technologies as a blurring of bodies and objects (Jackson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). Non-representational theory was developed by British cultural-­ geographer Nigel Thrift (2007), as a way to “move the focus of inquiry away from ‘drilling down’ to find meaning in things” (Andrews, Chen, & Myers, 2014, p.  211), and towards the active world and the “human body’s co-evolution with the co-equal non-humans, and thus its relatedness to the world” (ibid, p.  211). The theoretical lineage of non-­representational theory is diverse, including a re-reading of phenomenology, and the incorporation of elements and engagements with the work of Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Latour, among many other philosophers. Some sport scholars have engaged with non-­representational theory to consider the dynamic and sensuous relationships humans have with objects. For example, in his non-representational examination of recreational runners, Barnfield (2016) recognized the important role of devices, particularly shoes, watches, GPS devices, heart rate monitors, music players, and specialist clothing. He concludes that the interactions between runners, devices, and their participation in a “network of actors” (human and nonhuman) draw attention to how the “human body acts and is acted upon with devices that modify the experience of recreational running” (p.  1131). Similarly, informal and action sport scholars have engaged with non-representational theory in the acknowledgement that the “objects define the activity itself ” (Thorpe & Rinehart, 2010, p.  1273). In so doing, they have studied how the objects (i.e., surfboards, skateboards, windsurf board and sails) in action sports enable particular cultural formations, as well as movement practices, such that

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the equipment actually feels as if it is a “hybrid extension of the body” (Ford & Brown, 2006, p. 162; also see Booth, 2008; Dant, 1999; Thorpe & Rinehart, 2010). The research on sporting objects has shown the various ways that humans and culture inscribe meaning onto objects, as well as how humans develop deep relationships with objects in various sporting activities. While phenomenology and non-representationalist approaches have helped extend our focus beyond the meanings these objects represent (i.e., as cultural symbols of status, identity, belonging, performance), they largely maintain a strict human/object divide, with the object only granted meaning through an agentic human subject. In this sense, the sporting object—i.e., running shoes, heart rate monitor, surfboard—is rarely considered to contain agentic capacities of its own. The ability of objects to exert influence over and affect human bodies and nonhuman objects and environments in ways not recognized by humanistic ontologies is eclipsed. Therefore, some scholars are turning towards new materialisms to rethink the capacities of objects and the role they play in shaping experiences, meanings, and understandings of moving bodies. New materialisms assumes matter (and therefore objects) as containing “an excess, force, vitality, relationality or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (Coole & Frost, 2010b, p. 9). It is this “force, vitality” of matter and objects that we wish to explore in relation to women’s moving, active bodies.

 ethinking Sports Objects R with New Materialisms In this section we provide an overview of some of the key new materialist theoretical approaches to understanding objects. While many strands of new materialisms seek to extend understandings of objects, in the following discussion we briefly touch upon four—Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), Actor Network Theory, Vibrant Matter, and Agential Realism. With the “heterogeneity of approaches and intellectual resources” (Wingrove, 2016, p. 461) captured within posthumanism and new materialisms, inevitably divergent ways of thinking about objects exist. In

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some strands, such as OOO and ANT, humans and objects are seen as discreetly autonomous, existing independently in their own right. In other new materialist frameworks (proposed by Barad, Deleuze, Haraway, for example), a more relational ontology is employed that understands human and nonhuman entities as non a priori and only emergent through their relations. We briefly touch on some of these understandings below, before offering a Baradian-inspired case study.

Object Oriented Ontology Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a less popular strand of new materialisms than ANT, Agential Realism, or Vibrant Matter, but has been argued by some to be an important theoretical tool for the study of sport (McLeod & Hawzen, 2020). Developing in the early 2000s, OOO is a theoretical approach grounded in the work of scholars such as Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton, and Martin Heidegger. While OOO has many concepts and theoretical contributions, it has been briefly defined as “a theoretical commitment to thinking the real beyond human experience” with a focus on the “existence of things” (Lemke, 2017, p.  133). Within OOO, a fundamental belief is that objects are what make up the world and that everything can be considered an object—bodies, concepts, things, materialities, and signs. Therefore, OOO research begins by “starting with objects only, and nothing else [which] means objects must be separate from their context, their own pieces, and any other objects they related with” (McLeod & Hawzen, 2020, p. 90). Unlike other new materialist approaches which often focus on relationality and connectivity, OOO emphasizes the independence of objects where each is “existing in their own right, as autonomous from their relations with other things” (Harman, 2011, p.  69). In this way, objects—bodies, rocks, logis, sporting leagues—are ontologically equivalent. Thus far, few scholars are using OOO to study objects in contexts of sport, health, and fitness. One exception is the work of McLeod and Hawzen (2020) who emphasize the utility of an OOO approach for studying the moving body. Through the example of the “concussion

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crisis” within American football, they showcase the ways in which OOO can contribute to new knowledge production within sporting cultures. In a different vein, Bunds, McLeod, Barrett, Newman, and Koenigstorfer (2019) draw upon object oriented politics (in addition to using Latour) to illustrate the ways environmental issues and nonhuman actors play a role (or are ignored) in the building of sport stadiums. Although some scholars are advocating the use of OOO, it has been critiqued by feminist scholars for its “exclusively male philosophical lineage” (Lemke, 2017, p. 147). Lemke (2017) calls out OOO for its “willful theoretical ignorance” (p. 147) and failure to recognize the history of feminist thought which has proposed similar ideas. In line with Lemke (2017), we are also concerned about some the universalizing assumptions within OOO and its lack of attention to how difference comes to matter, or how objects “and their power disproportionally affect the universe of things” (p. 134). As feminist scholars, we recognize the need for our theoretical frameworks to have the capacity to adequately engage with power and with local and cultural specifities. Perhaps not surprisingly, OOO has not been widely taken up by feminist sporting scholars to date. This is not to say, however, that feminists might not critically engage in fruitful synthesis and engagement with OOO for thinking through objects in the future. Recently, an edited collection focuses on the adaption of the principles of OOO to develop Object Oriented Feminism (OOF). According to the editor of the collection, OOF “seeks to capitalize perhaps somewhat parasitically on the contributions of that thought [speculative realism, OOO and new materialism] while twisting it toward more agential, political, embodied terrain” (Behar, 2016, p.  3). Recognizing that OOO often “steers clear of the political” (p. 6), OOF looks to bring important aspects of feminist thinking—power, politics, erotics, and ethics—into the philosophy of OOO.  In so doing, OOF may offer some useful ideas for feminist scholars of sport and fitness interested in the relationships between objects, bodies, and environments.

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Actor Network Theory Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) is a new materialist theory that focuses specifically on the way objects and humans (material and social) work together and are related. ANT was developed within the science and technology fields as Latour, in association with John Law and Michel Callon, was interested in the sociological study of scientific knowledge production (Quinlan, 2012). From their observations and various case studies, the scholars eventually developed ANT, defined by Law (2009) as a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations. (p. 141)

ANT recognizes that everything—social, natural, material, humans, objects—exists in systems of relations (networks) composed of heterogeneous actants, and that there is no outside to these multiple networks. Within these networks, objects play different roles (mediators, intermediaries, unpredictability). It is not within the scope of this chapter to elaborate on each of these varying roles, but what is important is the emphasis on objects in relation to humans. Within sport this means recognizing the role of those often overlooked, mundane objects, and seeing that they are influential as they are in continuous relation to moving bodies. Fox and Alldred (2016a) write that the greatest contribution of ANT to new materialisms is its “extension of the sociological imagination beyond its limited concerns with ‘social forces’…to address a wide range of materialities” (p.  160). In so doing, ANT challenges sociologists to look outside the more traditional sociological actants (texts, people, organizations) and towards material objects. Scholars within sporting and health spaces have recognized the possibilities of ANT and have put it work through an array of topics. A particularly noteworthy example is in the work of Rosslyn Kerr (2014, 2016). Drawing upon ANT to theorize gymnastics and power, she

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described the agentic role of nonhuman actants—video camera, equipment, ribbons, and bars—in mediating how the gymnast performs and practices. Kerr (2014) gives a powerful example of a ribbon malfunctioning in competition (i.e., having a knot) and the effect this knot would have on the entire performance. With this example, she shows the ways in which objects play an important role in human behaviour and within wider networks. Other examples include Bob Carter and Simon Dyson’s (2015) use of ANT to think through the multiple human and nonhuman actants that worked together to create a harmful narrative about Sickle Cell Disease/Sickle Cell Traits and a student athlete’s death, and Katelyn Esmonde’s (2019) engagement with ANT to examine the multiple components that are part of heart rate monitoring in physical education classrooms. The use of ANT is also gaining popularity in the field of Sport for Development studies, with some interesting analyses emerging that reveal the multitude of human and nonhuman forces at play within programmes and the sector more broadly (Darnell, 2020; Lagesen, 2012; McSweeney, Millington, & Hayhurst, 2020). While scholars are increasingly engaging with ANT as a useful theoretical guide to understand complex sporting networks, some feminist scholars have been critical of ANT arguing that it has disregarded gender and power inequalities, and is largely apolitical in orientation (Quinlan, 2012). Despite such criticisms, others are envisioning new intersections between feminist theory and methodologies and ANT that hold much promise for feminist scholars of sport and physical culture (Corrigan & Mills, 2012; Quinlan, 2012, 2014). Indeed, for those scholars working in the pursuit of re-assembling gender within feminist technoscience studies (Asberg & Lykke, 2010) and the overlapping field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Lagesen, 2012; Sørensen, Faulkner, & Rommes, 2011), there seems to be ample potential in feminist re-­turnings to ANT for understanding objects in gendered networks of sport and fitness.

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Vibrant Matter In line with new materialist thinking, American political theorist and scholar Jane Bennett developed the concept of Vibrant Matter to explore the agency of objects. In her foundational text, Vibrant Matter (2010b) Bennett shifted attention from the way humans interact with matter to matter itself. For her, there needs to be a focus on the agency of “nonhuman or not-quite human things” (Bennett, 2010b, p. ix) in order to explore the “vital materialities that flow through and around us” (ibid., p. x). While Bennett’s work reiterates some similar ideas to other new materialist scholars, her concept of ‘thing-power’ is helpful in understanding the role of objects in sporting practices. Drawing upon historical modern vitalists such as Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch, Bennett explores the notion of materiality where “matter is figured as a vitality at work” that exerts thing-power (Bennett, 2010b, p. 62). She describes thing-power as a force created by something that is not necessarily human, but acted upon by humans. In order words, thing-power refers to how objects “speak to us” and affect other objects and people (Tesar & Arndt, 2016). However, Bennett makes clear that single nonhuman actants are not agents in the creation of power alone, but rather that agency is located in a “complex interinvolvement” of humans and nonhumans (Khan, 2009, p.  102). In an interview with Khan (2009), Bennett clarifies the relationship: “There is a difference between a human individual and a stone, but neither considered alone has any real agency. The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman collective” (p.  101). In this way, there are parallels in Vibrant Matter with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages, Barad’s notion of entanglement, and Latour’s networks. However, thing-power arguably offers a more tangible and conceptual tool to consider how objects exert power. According to Bennett, such reconceptualizing of objects allows for a rethinking of politics and developing a  less anthropocentric political agenda. In Vibrant Matter (2010b), she gives the example of an electricity blackout in North America and how the government response was to identify a human (or corporation) responsible for the failure. Yet this narrow anthropocentric view limited the government from exploring the

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range of other nonhuman actants that played a role in the blackout (for example, a crumbling infrastructure) meaning the threat of another blackout remained long after the ‘problem’ was solved. For Bennett, politics must change to address the complex network in phenomena in order to remove agency from being a solely human-based quality. Challenging her readers to think differently about politics, Bennett (2010b) wrote: “How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?” (p. viii). As Bennett suggests, perhaps using a more object oriented view and revisioning the world’s problems as caused by a multitude of material and discursive factors, can help us develop more effective solutions and enact more meaningful change. Bennett’s work is often cited within feminist new materialist scholarship alongside other scholars such as Deleuze and Guattari, and Barad. Although she provides a useful concept for thinking through new materialist implications, to date she has not been widely used within sport, physical activity and health research. One exception is the work of prominent health scholar, Deborah Lupton (2019a) who has drawn upon Bennett in her work on digital health technologies. Engaging with thing-­ power and vital materialism, Lupton uses various case studies from previous research to think differently about how people live with digital health technologies, and to explore the thing-power generated through human-­ health app assemblages. In this way, Bennett’s Vibrant Matter has been a useful way to rethink the relationships between humans and objects, with considerable potential for exploring the power and politics of sporting and fitness objects. In Chap. 4 we extend upon this discussion with a focus on the potential of Bennett’s vital materialism for thinking about fitness technologies.

Agential Realism Feminist physicist Karen Barad has been described as “one of the most influential and important representatives of contemporary materialist scholarship” (Lemke, 2014, p. 5). While Barad does not specifically focus on objects in isolation, her theory of agential realism and corresponding

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concepts of entanglement and intra-action offer a particularly useful way to think about the inseparability of objects and people and the relationalities that develop between them. Barad (2007) describes agential realism as “a posthumanist performative account of the material-discursive practices of mattering” (p. 146). Taking up Barad’s (2007) ethico-onto-­ epistemological positioning requires examining the “relationality between specific material and (re)configurings of the world” (p. 139). Put simply, Barad (2007) encourages academics to “take matter seriously” (Hein, 2016, p. 134). Her theory of agential realism questions pre-established boundaries, privileges neither the material nor the social, recognizes matter (and objects) as agentic, and has a strong focus on relationality. At the heart of agential realism is the concept of phenomena defined as the “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components” (Barad, 2003, p.  815). Therefore, the primary unit of any Baradian-­ inspired study is not independent objects with their own properties, but phenomena consisting of a series of intra-acting entities. Within phenomena, entities/things/objects become entangled which “is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence” (Barad, 2007, p. ix). These entities come together through what Barad describes as intra-­ action. Importantly, intra-action is ontologically distinct from “interaction” which assumes two distinct boundary-ridden entities relating to each other. In contrast, intra-action insists upon the inseparability of those entities. Højgaard and Søndergaard (2011) elaborate on this writing, “The concept of intra-action demands a thorough co-constitutional thinking… It is the co-constitution—the intra-action of subject and object—that forms the subject matter (so to speak) of the analysis” (p. 347). Unlike ANT, which maps relations between objects within networks, Barad argues that objects do not have set predetermined boundaries but are created through their relations, which may or may not be with humans. Feminist sport and health scholars with an interest in objects are increasingly taking up Barad’s theory of agential realism. Much of this work draws upon Barad’s emphasis on relationality to map the object-­ human intra-actions and entanglements within women’s sporting and health phenomena (Baxter, 2020; Brice, Clark, & Thorpe, 2020; Clark,

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2020; Clark & Thorpe, 2020; Fullagar, 2020; Jeffrey, 2020). For example, Baxter (2020) uses Barad (in conjunction with Bennett) in her new materialist-­inspired analysis of female boxers and boxing gloves. Placing the gloves at the centre of her research, Baxter (2020) explores the entangled interactions between the glove and the female boxers, social discourses of femininity, boxing spaces, and bodily boundaries. Through such an approach, she emphasizes the gloves as part of a powerful, agential experience. According to Baxter (2020), using Barad to study objects provides new opportunities to explore the “ongoing ebb and flow of agency” within phenomena created from human-object intra-actions (p. 161).

Towards Knowing Objects: New Materialist Methods Barad’s Agential Realism, OOO, Vital Materialism, and ANT are just a few of the many theoretical strands within new materialisms that provide ways to think differently about objects. With the exception of OOO, they each encourage researchers to look beyond the human, question boundaries and explore the ways in which objects, matter, and humans become interwoven within phenomena. However, how do we put such theories and concepts into practice? Recently, a small but growing number of scholars have been developing alternative methods that allow explorations into the importance and impact of objects in everyday lives (Nordstrom, 2013; Woodward, 2001, 2015). In so doing, this work is implicitly and explicitly informed by new materialist theoretical ideas. For example, Susan Nordstrom (2013) developed “object interviews” to study the entanglement of humans and nonliving objects in the lives of 11 Midwestern American families over time. She describes the object interview as an “entangled conversational interview of objects and subjects,” through which both “subjects [humans] and objects produce knowledge” (p.  243). Throughout the interview, Nordstrom (2013) continues to “mediate [sic] folds of objects, subjects, [and] events” (p. 243). In such methods, the object is seen as part of an entanglement, seamlessly folded into the “ensemble of life” (p. 238). For Nordstrom, the ensemble of life is “a constantly shifting group of objects associated with a person’s life” (p.  238). Similarly interested in the

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entanglement of people and objects, in her research on jeans, Sophie Woodward (2015) adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining methods from the material sciences (textile fabric testing) with qualitative object interviews (object is present and becomes focus of the interview) and life-story interviews (interviews focused on human experience). Her belief is that through a combination of methods that revolve around the jeans and their stories, she can “understand the multiple vitalities of jeans, as they materialize biographies and bodily practices” (Woodward, 2015, p.  363). In the following sections we build upon such work by drawing upon Barad’s agential realism to explore the possibilities for knowing sporting objects differently using the case study of the sports bra.

 ase Study: How We Came to Know C the Sports Bra Differently Various feminist scholars of sport and physical culture have revealed the social, cultural, and political significance of women’s clothing (Flanagan, 2014; Marfell, 2019; Robinson, 2002; Schultz, 2014; Simpson, 2001; Tredway, 2016; Tredway & Liberti, 2018; van Ingen & Kovacs, 2012; Weaving, 2012). Among this group, a small number have focused specifically on the sports bra (Farrell-Beck & Gau, 2002; Schultz, 2004). In so doing, feminists have highlighted the discursivity of the sports bra and the multiple and various ways it is linked to understandings of identity, power, feminist politics, as well as broader social notions of women’s empowerment. However, given the multiplicity of contexts in which sports bras are worn and the intimate relationship they have with women’s moving bodies, we understand the sports bra as more than a signifier or a discursive construction. Therefore, we turned to new materialisms to explore the material and affective dimensions of the relationships and intra-actions between women’s moving bodies and sports bras. Inspired by postqualitative inquiry (PQI) (discussed in Chap. 2), we set out on a yearlong experiment to put the concepts provided by new materialisms ‘to work’ by wearing, living and thinking with the lululemon Enlite sports bra (see Brice, Clark, & Thorpe, 2020).

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Contextualizing Enlite Canadian-based global activewear company lululemon has played a significant role in the quickly growing women’s activewear industry. The company has been credited as starting the ‘activewear trend’ (Segran, 2018), and in 2018 became the fifth highest revenue grossing athletic apparel company (Leading Athletic, 2018) following sportswear juggernauts such as Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. While lululemon is a global leader in the activewear industry, it has also been critiqued for its use of neoliberal hyper-individualism and self-help rhetoric (Brice & Thorpe, 2020; Lavrence & Lozanski, 2014; Stokes, 2008). Popular press articles have also critiqued lululemon for catering to particular women, describing the brand as an “elite fitness status symbol for the skinny and wealthy set” (Wakeman, 2013, n.p.). Lululemon has a history of fat shaming as exemplified by comments made by their former CEO and is known to have an extremely high price point (Kim, 2015; Moore, 2013; Peterson, 2014). Indeed, Enlite itself carries the hefty price tag of US$98. For all of these reasons, as feminist scholars of sport sociology and physical culture, we felt compelled to dismiss Enlite as a marketing ploy. We acknowledged the ways in which Enlite, as a high-priced athleisure product designed and marketed by a controversial leader in the fitness-industrial commercial complex, contributed to problematic discursive constructions of fitness and femininity. However, these tensions also presented the Enlite as a fascinating case study; the very materiality of the bra was being marketed specifically through particular discursive formations. For example, lululemon positions Enlite as decidedly ‘high-tech’, with newly developed fabric and a unique shape (encapsulated, pronounced cups, wide straps that both cross and sit straight along the back, free cut edges), culminating in the production of a so-called ‘revolutionary bra’ (lululemon, 2017). Enlite is also marketed as a relatively more inclusive lululemon object; available in 20 sizes and promoted as a bra for ‘every woman’ with lululemon using a range of models that vary in both skin colour and body size (although, not surprisingly, all are young and beautiful). Thinking through a new materialist Baradian lens, we were encouraged to expand upon our initial discursive ‘takes’ on Enlite and recognize it as

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a socio-material entity actively entangled with other social and cultural forces, materialities, and knowledges. Therefore, we sought processes that helped orient us to these material-discursive intra-actions.

Living with the Sports Bra: A Baradian-Inspired Process Over the course of a year, we challenged ourselves to move away from our humanist tendencies of reflecting on our experiences, feelings, and thoughts to the complex entanglements between Enlite, our moving bodies, and our socio-material contexts. Embracing the challenge of PQI, we did not follow a predefined method, but rather sought to embrace a more responsive, improvised methodology guided by Baradian theory, Enlite, and our lived and embodied experiences. After each acquiring an Enlite bra, we embarked an open-ended and continuous digital dialogue to capture and share our experiences of living and moving with the Enlite while engaging with Baradian theory. Over seven months we collectively shared over 100 messages in an ongoing Facebook Messenger dialogue and countless text messages. Some of these were long, highly personal reflections. Others were responses to another’s post, which at times prompted iterative dialogues that continued for days as we sought to read our ‘experiences’ through a Baradian lens. In these messages, we focused on the entanglements of Enlite with our (sometimes more and less) active bodies involved in a range of sporting, fitness, and everyday physical activities (i.e., running, fitness classes, walking, hiking, yoga), and the various material-discursive forces we encountered. In our attempts to embrace posthumanist ontologies, we tried to move away from focusing primarily on personal experience. Our collaborative reflections helped us acknowledge, challenge, and catch each other as we occasionally (often) slipped into more familiar, humanist ways of knowing. We encountered a constant tension between our tendency towards engaging in ‘confessional’ reflections (Pillow, 2003), which align with humanist understandings of knowledge production, and a posthuman and new materialist orientation in which our “responsibility is no longer to the privileged human but to the assemblage, which is always more-­ than-­human and always becoming” (St. Pierre, 2015, p.  88). This was

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greatly facilitated by our feminist collaboration which we have discussed in greater detail elsewhere (see Brice, Clark & Thorpe, 2020). In the following sections we share some of the key findings from this process in order to bring to life Barad’s agential realism and to illustrate how thinking with Barad prompted us towards different ways of thinking about this particular sporting object.

Sports Bra Entanglements As we began our sports bra experiment, we started by focusing on the multiple entities that comprised our Enlite entanglement. As noted above, entanglements are a key concept within Barad’s agential realism, emphasizing relationality and inseparability between objects, entities, and humans. To think beyond our bodies and Enlite as discrete entities, we mapped the various entanglements we noted while living with Enlite. Through this mapping exercise, we recognized the many human and nonhuman forces at work within our daily experiences of wearing a sports bra. Excerpts from our digital dialogue provide examples of this thought trajectory: During a walk following a long-haul work-related travel: My Enlite entanglement is a strange combination of post-meeting exhaustion/sleeping tablets in my blood stream left over from last night/fresh (2 deg) mountain air stinging my nostrils, bright sun/white light on my face/layers of clothing unpeeling as my body warms up to the morning walk/other exercising bodies walking and running past, all speaking French/I feel envious of the runners, feeling guilty I’m not running, too tired to move/lift my limbs higher. To simplify: Weather/travel/ work/fitness/clothing entanglements. After a gym training session: I wore Enlite, I did have moments of pause about my body, I hadn’t looked carefully in a full length mirror in a long time, but in the gym, to perform the movements well, I had to. And I wrestled with affective reactions to my body. The stomach that protrudes more, decreased tone in my arms and legs, the flesh around the armpit that the Enlite calls attention to...Enlite is entangled with discursive understandings of the fit feminine body ideal and my affective responses to them, physical and geographic spaces, dynamic and shifting biologies….muscles, tissue, flesh etc., and gravity.

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Here we start to notice the various other entities (i.e., weather, fatigue, hormones, discourses) that came to matter in our experiences with Enlite. Thinking with agential realism encouraged us to (try to) de-centre our experience as the unit of analysis and instead focus on what emerged through our relations with Enlite. As we did this, our Enlite reflections began to shift. For example, the following comments refer to an image taken of an Enlite sports bra on a bathroom vanity surrounded by beauty products: As I look at this situation again I notice the name brands and various materials and products and their entanglements with gendered discourses, human and non-human bodies and economics... lotions (Aveeno body lotion, antipodies face cream), vegan leather pouch (Matt and Natt) the lululemon bra of course and my slightly tattered toiletries bag made by my friend out of recycled products. An interesting snapshot of consumerism, globalization, (gendered) marketing strategies, sustainability and non sustainability, ‘natural’ and ‘human made’ materials and substances, mass produced and handmade products... an array of economies and ecologies.

Thus, we came to recognize Enlite as entangled with capitalism, privilege, globalization, (non)sustainability, environmental degradation, and climate change across many spatiotemporalities. In particular, we turned our attention to the bodies involved in the production, consumption, and washing practices of the bra that are largely absent from our day-to-­ day experience with it; the women who designed it, sewed it, shipped it, live with it once its discarded, and those women who will feel the worst effects of climate change caused in large part by the consumption practices and lifestyle of western lifestyles (Norgaard, 2012). In turn we recognized with greater focus how material objects such as Enlite (and we, as women wearing and writing about it) are entangled with, produced by, and productive of the power relations that define privilege, oppression, class, capitalism, and environmental degradation. We also began to recognize Enlite as entangled with scientific, technological, and engineering knowledges and practices. Far from being a simply designed garment created from stretchy fabric, lululemon’s research director described the sports bra as the most difficult and complex piece

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of athleisure clothing to design and Enlite as feat of engineering. Women’s moving bodies encounter gravitational forces that intra-act with flesh and exerting muscle in multiple ways; breast tissue does not simply move up and down, but moves multi-directionally and responds to a compound of forces—gravity, velocity, friction (McGhee, Steele, Zealey, & Takacs, 2013). Therefore, designing a bra to support and limit such movement requires a large team of specialists (physicists, exercise physiologists, biomechanists, sewers, neuromechanics) and a range of equipment to both fabricate and test the materials. Enlite itself was the result of three years of research involving a variety of material and human agents. Enlite is also part of the socio-material neoliberal-healthism nexus that has come to dominate western societies (Brice & Thorpe, 2020). Neoliberalism and healthism are mutually symbiotic and work to reinforce particular ideologies around health and active living. These ideologies promote the notion of health as an individual affair where, although health problems may originate outside the individual, the solution rests within the individual and their behaviour and choices. In this context of neoliberal-healthism, ideas of individualism, choice, lifestyle, and consumerism pervade society. It becomes a moral and societal obligation for an individual to follow—or at least appear to be following—societal codes for health maintenance through normalized health measures (physical exercise, healthy eating). As we wore Enlite, we came to understand this entanglement of fabric, bodies, and discourses, intra-acting in ways that contributed to the continuation and development of healthism and neoliberalism. Many studies that discuss neoliberalism and healthism often look at the social discourses that contribute to these ideologies— magazines, advertising, social media (Nash, 2016; Roy, 2008; Wiest, Andrews, & Giardina, 2015). However, approaching these ideologies through Enlite, we saw how neoliberalism and healthism are not limited to language and images, but are also material, produced through (and producing of ) bodies, fabric, and actions. Our Baradian sports bra experiment also turned our attention towards the environment. For example, during our conversations, we recognized the amount of time Enlite spent being laundered and its entanglements in these laundering intra-actions; sweat, skin cells, oils, deodorants,

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laundry detergent, water molecules, and plastics. As Enlite and other synthetic fabrics are washed, they shed microfibers and microplastics into the ocean, which has resulted in widespread dispersal of this material into the wider environment. According to non-profit organization Ocean Clean Wash, plastic particles washed from synthetic clothing contribute up to 35% of the plastics in our ocean (Microfiber Pollution, 2019). While the practice of purchasing and wearing a sports bra is often experienced as far removed from these broader ecological forces, our project prompted us to recognize how simple, everyday practices such as laundering our sweaty activewear are always entangled with broader ecologies and environments. In this brief section we have highlighted some of the many layered and complex entanglements with the sports bra, bodies, technologies, neoliberalism, and the environment. Enlite is not simply a material garment but the product of multiple material-discursive-scientific intra-actions. The sports bra, and human consumption and wearing and washing of the sports bra continues to produce effects in the world in unpredictable, and often ‘invisible’ ways.

Body-Bra Intra-actions When we first started wearing Enlite, it remained in the periphery of our focus. Initially it felt uncomfortable. It was very different from our other sports bras, and we noted distinct boundaries between the bra and the body as we pulled and tugged at the fabric, struggling to get it on and do it up. We remained ambivalent at best towards its unique design. However, as the weeks progressed and we became more familiar with Enlite, we found a redrawing of bodily boundaries. The “iterative intra-activity” (Barad, 2007, p. 151) between body and bra meant we no longer ‘felt’ the object of clothing on our bodies, rather the boundaries between fabric and flesh blurred. A reflection from our ongoing dialogue demonstrates this mutual constitution: The bra stopped being something I wore ON my body and became part of my moving body, constraining and enabling specific movements in certain ways. As

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I walked home I started thinking about this in relation to the fabric and the dynamism of the fabric itself, and how it is constantly intra-acting not just with flesh and muscle and fatty tissues, but also other material forces such as gravity, exertion, etc.

This questioning of predefined boundaries is very much in line with previous feminist thinking such as Donna Haraway’s (1985) writing on the cyborg. In this germinal text she suggests a rearticulation and understanding of humanity, asking: “Why should our bodies end at the skin?” (Haraway, 2016a, p. 61). Our flesh did not end at our skin, but extended to Enlite. Our bodies and the bra moved together, intra-acting to produce and constrict movements. This is reminiscent of various literature that explore the unique relationship between surfers and their boards, cyclists and their bikes, and technology and disabled athletes (Butryn, 2003; Butryn & Masucci, 2009; Ford & Brown, 2006). Yet, in our experiences, we also found the sports bra pushing back against us—enabling (and constraining) our movement, affecting our moods—actively working in the intra-actions.

Knowing the Sports Bra Differently As we explored the concept of intra-action through the sports bra, we saw the many forces and fluids through which the bra intra-acts. As it is worn and moves with the body, the fabric intra-acts with skin cells, sweat, bacteria, gravity, deodorant, and sunscreen. These forces and entities transform the very fabric of the bra, permeating and becoming embedded within the bra’s material fibres. The bra itself is constantly being made and unmade with each intra-action—the elasticity in the band being stretched, the colour of the fabric dulling, the strength of the straps being worn down with each bounce. As the bra and human body intra-act during movement they become entangled, constantly responding to and with the world in a process of becoming. By paying attention to Enlite’s multiple entanglements and intra-­ actions, we moved away from our traditional humanist-based tendencies and towards the ways in which Enlite is animated and “lives in this

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world.” Through this perspective we came to recognize the sports bra as an important object that does in multiple and specific ways, and it is in this doing that we recognize its agency. The sports bra prompts bodies to move; it evokes feelings of guilt for not moving (enough); it facilitates potentially pleasurable movement experiences; it enables and constrains what bodies can do; it ignites memories of moving bodies traversing spacetimemattering; it both reinscribes consumer healthism but is implicated in resistance to; and it can draw un/wanted attention as it intra-acts with discursive understandings of feminine beauty, heterosexual femininity, and athleticism. Enlite (and the sports bra more broadly) has implications not only for our bodies and what they can do, but for how women feel in their bodies, for how women’s bodies are read differently within and across time and space, for consumer practices and the different ways these matter, for the environment, for other objects, and for whose bodies come to matter. These material-discursive entanglements produce different lived realities for different bodies; from those for whom purchasing an Enlite is a taken-­ for-­granted aspect of life, to those who might covet the Enlite or notice it on other women’s bodies, to those women who work in lululemon’s production factories in Sri Lanka, to those in developing nations who will feel the effects of climate change most keenly of which westernized material waste culture plays a key role. These noticings and differences came to life for us through our entangled thinking processes and as we sought to extend our thinking beyond ‘our’ relationships with Enlite.

 gency, New Materialisms A and Sporting Objects In agential realism and other new materialist strands—ANT, Vibrant Matter, posthumanism—agency is dislocated from its human roots and understood as not something that can be possessed, but as something that emerges through intra-actions and in entanglements. It is important to note, however, that such ideas are not original to new materialisms, and in fact have some parallels with Indigenous ways of knowing. Many

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Indigenous cultures are grounded in ontologies that recognize nonhuman agency and have long understood “force” and “vitality” in ways similar to those being called upon by new materialists. Rosiek, Snyder, and Pratt (2020) explore these similarities and differences, explaining that whereas new materialist scholars are constantly justifying their “departure from their inherited humanist ontologies” that privilege the human agent, within Indigenous scholarship “non-human agency is taken as a given” (Rosiek et  al., 2020, p.  337). For example, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee scholar Watts (2013) describes how assuming all matter as agentic means “that nonhuman beings choose how they reside, interact, and develop relationships with other nonhumans. So all elements of nature possess agency, and this agency is not limited to innate action or casual relationships” (p. 23). Importantly, while new materialist understandings of agency show similarities to Indigenous knowledge, they are certainly not the same with more work needed to explore these intersections and divergences (Rosiek et al. 2020). Australian Indigenous scholar Brian Martin (2017) has begun to explore these connections, and sees potential in the intersections of new materialisms and Indigenous ways of knowing within the research process. In particular, Martin (2017) sees value in Barad’s onto-­epistemological approach, and the emphasis within agential realism on relationality and understandings of agency as “cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit” (Barad, 2003, p. 16). For Martin (2017), there are similarities in Indigenous and Baradian ways of knowing that work to “reconfigure approaches to research that privileges the agency of all things relational” (p. 1399). Also working at this intersection, other scholars are engaging Baradian theory in dialogue with Indigenous knowledge, education, and research practices (see Kerr, 2019). In Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism, agency is understood as “‘doing’ or ‘being’” (p. 178). In other words, agency should be seen as an “enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements… it is about the possibilities and accountability entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p.  54). Drawing upon a Baradian approach, our case study helped us recognize the vitality of sporting objects. Focusing on the example of the sports bra, we noticed the agentic forces that emerged

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through the entanglement of sporting objects, bodies, and environments. Every time a woman puts on a sports bra, intra-actions occur between the material, micro-fibres, flesh, sweat, skin, and gravity, and as these work together, a certain movement is created (and other movements constrained), which in turn prompts new bodily capacities. For example, for women with larger breasts—many of whom experience pain with vigorous movement (Coltman, Steele, & McGhee, 2019)—sports bras support breast tissue, working against strong gravitational forces, enabling movement and sporting participation. Through our experiment, however, we came to understand the physical support offered by Enlite as meaningful through the entanglements of our bodily differences (i.e., small and large busts, post- and breast-feeding). Beyond these fleshy differences, we acknowledged the privilege of such items and the material-­ discursive affects on women’s moving bodies (i.e., desire, pride, guilt), as well as the boundaries that create inclusions/exclusions for women of different bodily shapes, sizes and socio-economic positionings. Carrying a price tag of US$98 Enlite offers some women’s bodies support, and not others. Put simply, the sports bra is agentic in its relationality with (some) women’s moving bodies—flesh, skin, gravity, socio-economic, and material forces, entangled. It is important to recognize that some scholars have raised concerns about the appropriation of objects in new materialist research, including worries that new materialist scholarship might “come to speak on behalf of ” nonhuman actors and objects, and in so doing, “come to colonise [them]” (Peterson, 2018, p. 12; Mayes, 2019). In our case study, we acknowledge that we made agential cuts in the object selected, and the approaches to understanding it, and that such research practices prioritize some bodies over others (Brice, Clark & Thorpe, 2020). Recognizing the limits to such approaches, we argue that the intersection of new materialisms with Indigenous knowledges could further enhance understandings of the meanings and capacities of sporting matter and objects (e.g., lacrosse stick, waka ama paddle, alaia/surfboard). As Newman, Thorpe, and Andrews (2020b) explain, more work is needed to recognize the objects of sport and physical culture that “live their own lives… that come to encapsulate a position that refuses a norm… [or that] are overdetermined by meanings ascribed to black, Indigenous, and other historically

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enslaved and colonized subjects (Karina & Coffey, 2017)” (p. 33). Taking cue from Martin (2017), there is the opportunity for sport scholars working with the knowledges of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) communities to challenge and expand understandings of sporting objects of past-present-future. However, it is important for all of us to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016b) that materialize at the intersection of decolonial critiques and postqualitative research on objects. As Mayes (2019) reminds us, these “entanglements with past troubles and present frictions” are a “response-ive mode of ethics” (p. 1205).

Concluding Thoughts In this chapter, we have looked towards the possibilities of using new materialist theory to rethink sporting objects. We began by reviewing just some of the many approaches that have been used previously to examine the importance of objects in sporting cultures—material feminisms, feminist cultural studies, phenomenology and non-representational theory. While this research is important, these ways of understanding objects and matter have often maintained a boundary between humans and objects, seeing the human as possessing power and authority over the object— inscribing it with meaning, using it for their own purposes, placing significance on the object. Recognizing the limits to such approaches, we then turned our attention towards new materialist understandings of objects. We discussed just four of the many theories within new materialism—OOO, ANT, Vibrant Matter, and Agential Realism—and how these approaches view and understand objects as vital and lively. Using Barad’s agential realism, we challenged our own anthropocentrism and explored the possibilities of living with and thinking through a sporting object. The process, inspired by Barad and PQI, allowed us to expand beyond our traditional humanist-based approaches and to recognize the bra as dynamic, as part of “the ongoing reconfigurings of the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 141). Our attention shifted towards the production of the bra, and its various intra-actions with technology, the environment, discourses of gender, femininity and health, and physically (in)active bodies. We came to understand the sports bra as doing, which encouraged a

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reworking of our understanding of the operations of power and agency. New materialisms thus offers ample opportunities for rethinking objects of sport and fitness as not only of the world, but also in the (re)making of it. In the following chapter, we build upon this discussion to explore the relationship between digital technologies as objects of fitness and motherhood.

Pedagogical Possibilities Here we offer an activity that can be performed in educational settings to help students grapple with new materialisms and posthumanism, and relating concepts. This activity builds upon and extends approaches used by sociologists of consumption (i.e., Circuit of Culture with cultural studies), by encouraging students to engage with new materialist concepts. Similar to our experience with the sports bra, we suggest an activity titled, “Living with a sporting object,” that consists of some or all of the following steps (and not necessarily in sequential order): 1. Have students choose one new materialist concept (i.e., the four components of an object proposed in OOO, thing power from Vibrant Matter, entanglements from Barad, mediating actants from ANT). After reading about this concept and considering how it might enable particular understandings of sporting and/or fitness objects, they should be encouraged to embark upon the following activities in dialogue with this particular concept. 2. Ask your students to pick any sporting or fitness object that is important to them. 3. Encourage the students to think about (and possibly draw or map) the “birth” of the object. Consider: When and where was it created? From what materials was it created? Where did those materials come from? Who created it? Who physically put it together versus who designed it? 4. Ask the students to map the connections from the object’s ‘birth’ to when the student actually received the item. Consider: How did the object travel? Why was it at that particular store? What bodies touched the object before you?

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5. For a period of time (1–2  weeks), have the students live with and think about that object and document its activities, and their intra-­ actions with this object: Consider: Where did this object live? What human and nonhuman objects did it touch? What organic and inorganic materials did it come into contact with? 6. Encourage your students to trace the object’s ‘death’. Even if the student is keeping the object, ask them hypothetically where it would go if/when they were to “discard” of it? Consider: What happens to this object once it leaves you and/or when it is no longer of ‘use’ to anyone? What happens to the materials? What chemicals does it mix with? What other objects and bodies does it intra-act with as it decomposes over decades and centuries? 7. At the end, encourage the students to reflect: Did this activity prompt them to rethink their relations with this and/or other sporting objects? Might such reflections influence their future relationships (i.e., consumption, usage, recycling) with objects of sport and fitness?

4 Digital Intimacies, Assemblages, and Fit Femininities

Digital health technologies are increasingly entangled with contemporary fitness and leisure practices. Varying widely in their capacities and usage, these technologies range from sophisticated diagnostic tools used in clinical settings to widely available mobile apps and wearable self-tracking devices designed to capture any number of physical outputs and performances. In recent years, digital health technologies, such as mobile apps and wearable devices—the Fitbit and Jawbone—have been widely embraced as they become increasingly accessible and affordable. Recent data from Statista suggests there are over 1000 million health and fitness mobile app users worldwide and more than 440 million people own wearable devices (Statista 2020a, 2020b). While roughly the same number of men and women report owning a digital self-tracking device, women slightly tip the balance. Given the potential implications of these technologies for women’s movement experiences and practices, in this chapter we explore the gendered, embodied, sensory, and affective dimensions of the relationships that unfold between humans and digital fitness technologies. These relationships are important to examine because as these technologies become increasingly integrated in our daily routines, they present the capacity to transform the way we understand, relate to, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Thorpe et al., Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness, New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7_4

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and experience our bodies and their embodied physiological processes (Lupton, 2016; Millington, 2016). While these novel technologies present many socio-cultural implications for moving bodies, we are particularly interested in what is at stake for women’s moving bodies and experiences and understandings of everyday leisure and fitness activities. The corporeal and embodied dimensions of such technologies are unmistakable. The smartphone that houses fitness and health apps for example is often carried around in the palm of our hand, in a sleeve on the arm, or nestled up against the body in a back pocket. Using these devices is contingent on physical gesture: phones are reached for and held, fingers slide over and tap smooth screens, wearable tracking bands and smartwatches are fiddled with and adjusted. These devices sense and touch fleshy bodies, capturing endless flows of information about bodily performances and responses that are then used to shape both bodily practices and knowledges about moving bodies. In this way bodies and technologies are continuously evolving together (Haraway, 2003). Yet as digital cultures scholar Lupton (2017a) notes, “We have yet to fully understand how people engage with the personal data produced from self-tracking. These data are lively, constantly moving and changing as they are generated and contribute to new forms of data assemblages” (p. 4). She stresses that the sensory and pleasurable dimensions of self-­ tracking practices are integral for gaining more robust insights into how they shape affect our bodily subjectivities and knowledges. In this chapter we outline and explore the potential utility of posthuman and new materialist approaches for examining human-technology relationships, specifically as they are implicated in women’s health and fitness practices and embodied knowledges and experiences. To do so we organize this chapter in three parts. We first provide an overview of existing literature and approaches to gendered engagements with digital fitness and health technologies, focusing on mobile apps and self-tracking devices. We then outline three new materialist strands of thought that may be helpful in extending this literature. These include the contributions of feminist science and technology scholar Donna Haraway and her cyborg and companion species tropes, political theorist Jane Bennett and her concepts of vibrant matter and enchantment, and an overview of Deleuzian-inspired affect and assemblage theories that have gained

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traction in both feminist physical cultural studies and feminist media and digital cultural studies. We then provide a case study of women’s engagements with Fitbits that we analyse through the notion of ‘affective assemblages’ to explore the specific intimacies and affordances these engagements present.

 igital Technologies, Gender, D and Moving Bodies Over the past decade, social science scholars have examined various aspects of digital health technologies, including user experience and motivations for engagement (Nafus & Neff 2016; Nafus & Sherman, 2014; Ruckenstein, 2014), issues related to data privacy (Kunstman, Miyake, & Martin, 2019; Wicks & Chiauzzi, 2015), and the implications of digital practices for understandings, experiences, and representations of ‘healthy’ bodies within contemporary socio-cultural and political contexts (Fors, Pink, Berg, & O’Dell, 2020; Millington, 2016; Pantzar & Ruckenstein, 2015). Much of this research illuminates the ways these technologies are invested in and through narratives of self-optimization (Lupton, 2016; Millington, 2016). By monitoring and quantifying bodily outputs and rendering them visible in new ways, such technologies afford new knowledges about one’s body which then prompt and guide efforts to improve some aspect of the self, often around physical health and appearance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the design and user engagements with these technologies, as well as the body projects they prompt, are deeply gendered. Their use is embedded within contemporary social messaging in which women and girls are continuously urged to alter and transform some aspect of their bodily appearance by engaging in appropriate consumption, fitness, dietary, and grooming practices, of which mobile app use and self-tracking are a part (Depper & Howe, 2017; Lupton, 2017a; Sanders, 2017). Consequently, digital health and fitness technology practices act as pedagogical practices of embodied selfhood (Pink & Fors, 2017; Fotopoulou & O’Riordan 2016; Kristensen & Ruckenstein 2018;

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Lupton, 2016; Rich, 2019) implicated in the (re)production of normative standards of desirable and heteronormative femininity and the neoliberal imperative to produce one’s self as a healthy, responsible citizen (Fullagar, O’Brien, & Pavlidis, 2019; Millington, 2016; Sanders, 2017). As pedagogical tools, digital technologies teach users how to monitor and regulate the body in ways that are imbued with a “moral ethic, a social and regulatory moral code” (Rich & Evans, 2011, p. 365). For these reasons, feminist scholars have articulated the need to carefully examine the social and cultural contexts in which these technologies are produced and consumed, and interrogate the gendered dimensions and consequences of engagement (Parry, Johnson, & Fullagar,  2019; Lupton, 2019c, 2019d; Rich, 2019, Sanders, 2017). In the concluding chapter of their book, Digital Dilemmas: Transforming Gender Identities and Power Relations in Everyday Lives, Simone Fullagar, Diane Parry, and Corey Johnson (2019) underline the importance of these lines of inquiry, drawing our attention to the ways, “gender norms, patterns, and power relations are bound in and among the increasingly indistinguishable sociotechnical relations that entangle our offline and online lives” (p. 227). An evolving body of scholarly literature from a range of perspectives exists that helps us understand women’s engagements with such technologies and prompts us to think further about what is at stake for women’s moving, physically active bodies in contemporary digital contexts. Much of this research has drawn on the theoretical works of Michel Foucault to examine the potential for these technologies to discipline women’s bodies and produce gendered subjectivities.

Foucault: Digital Discipline, Pleasure, and Resistance Many critical social analyses of digital health technologies have employed a Foucauldian approach, drawing attention to how these devices act as mechanisms of biopolitical power apparatuses that seek to normalize and govern bodies in particular ways. Foucault’s (1997) notion of biopolitics refers to the ways whole populations are governed and controlled through the deployment of seemingly benign strategies and social arrangements

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that encourage people to assume responsibility for their own actions and health, thus ensuring the health of the population. This logic underlies the neoliberal assignment of responsibility for one’s health and conduct at the individual level, while broader social, economic, and contextual forces remain unchallenged. Scholars have articulated how self-tracking technologies act as vehicles for biopower as they intensify the notion that personal behaviour and health states are the sole responsibility of the user with little consideration of the socio-political conditions in which they are embedded (Esmonde, 2020; Fotopoulou & O’Riordan, 2016; Lupton, 2013, 2016; Sanders, 2017). This concept has been applied in varying ways in analyses of the gendered dimensions of self-tracking and the production of disciplined, datafied bodies (Barrie, Waitte, & Brennan-­ Horley, 2019; Depper & Howe, 2017; Esmonde & Jette, 2020; Sanders, 2017). Here we provide examples of feminist scholarship taking up a Foucauldian approach and consider what it means for our understandings of women’s moving bodies and digital practices. Rachel Sanders (2017) examines self-tracking among women from a feminist Foucauldian perspective to explore the encounters between digital technologies of the self and contemporary workings of biopower. Here she positions self-tracking technologies as digital ‘technologies of the self ’ which she defines according to Foucault (1997) as “instruments and techniques ‘which permit individuals to [reflect and act] on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (pp.  224–5)” (p.  39). Locating herself in a public health paradigm and concerned with the western obesity crisis, Sanders demonstrates how self-tracking supports patriarchy and neoliberal-era biopower by maintaining, monitoring, and regulating norms and promoting practices that produce idealistic gendered bodies. However, she also acknowledges the pleasurable dimensions of self-tracking and suggests these need to be further theorized. In line with Foucault’s theorizing, power relations are not totalizing or repressive, rather those engaged within these relations have varying abilities to act and respond. This response can take the form of what we might recognize as resistance, albeit in seemingly minute ways. Through her careful theorizing, Sanders emphasizes the relational dimensions of

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human-technology interactions. Acknowledging that a world devoid of digital technologies is imminently unlikely and that such devices are implicated in practices of self-care and pleasure (see also Pantzar & Ruckenstein, 2017; Smith, 2018), Sanders (2017) concludes, “Given that radical re-engineering of and outright abstinence from digital self-­ tracking technologies are somewhat impracticable, it may be more fruitful to theorize resistance (1) from the perspective of the user and (2) in terms of subversion rather than renunciation” (p. 55). Feminist sport sociologist Katie Esmonde (2020) answers this call in her Foucauldian examination of women runners who self-track. Esmonde draws upon Foucault’s notions of biopolitics and surveillance to examine how technologies of femininity intersect with women’s experiences of fitness tracking and to understand how women might perform resistance to self-tracking. She clarifies that “within Foucauldian theorising, to resist power is not to put oneself outside of power; it is to reconsider how power is exercised” (p. 79). This position disrupts notions of power as totalizing or oppressive and re-invigorates Foucault’s understanding of power as relational and productive. In so doing, Esmonde (2020) is able to engage with the messiness of self-tracking more closely and notes how women often subvert their digital data by making decisions about their running practices based on embodied feelings and responses that are themselves generated through their moving bodies. Here digital data, while compelling, does not dictate women’s actions, behaviours, or emotions, rather it is negotiated alongside bodily cues and knowledges. Esmonde (2020) also notes that although self-tracking acts as a mechanism of surveillance, women also find pleasure in self-tracking practices and create ways to resist technologies of femininity. She further emphasizes the capacity of women to negotiate, accommodate, and resist self-­ surveillance practices simultaneously in ways that are irreducible to predictable and totalizing workings of power. In these examples, women’s responses to self-tracking devices, expressed and performed through their embodied actions and practices, are acknowledged and legitimized. As a result, techno-dystopian narratives of the oppressive and disciplinary dimensions of self-tracking and other digital health devices are disrupted. Contributing to this disruption are the bodily experiences and responses that emerge within women’s

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relationships and interactions with technologies. Consequently, we begin to see that self-tracking, although clearly embedded in power relations and social contexts, does not occur solely at the discursive level. Rather it invokes, involves, and invites the sensing, feeling, moving body. While Foucault is concerned with the relational workings of power upon and through moving bodies, scholarship examining how bodies respond and make sense of digital data practices at the level of the sensory remains limited. Given the explicit corporeality of self-tracking practices, the sensory dimensions merit further attention. Doing so allows us to consider how the body’s own responses and forces may be implicated and recruited for the disruption and negotiation of the normalizing and disciplinary workings of power. We now turn to scholarship that is exploring these sensory and embodied dimensions of women’s relationships with digital technologies.

Embodied Digital Data and Sense Making The sensory affordances of digital technologies and people’s corporeal responses to these technologies have been garnering attention from scholars in digital and feminist physical cultural studies (Adams, 2020; Lupton, 2017b, 2019a; Lupton & Maslen, 2018; Maslen, 2016; Pink, 2015). These approaches draw from phenomenology, particularly the work of Merleau-Ponty, and strands of sociology and anthropology that explicitly consider the role of the body and bodily senses in social meaning making. Lupton and co-author Sarah Maslen (2018) note that as individuals have access to more digital information about their bodies, they must negotiate how to make sense of it, decide how useful it is, and incorporate it into their daily lives. These sense making processes are configured through, and contingent upon, discursive understandings circulating in one’s social milieu, but so too is the moving body and its sensory responses an active participant (Lupton, 2017b; Lupton & Maslen, 2018; Maslen, 2017). In order to acknowledge the role of the body’s sensory capacities within human-technology encounters, Lupton (2017b, 2020) developed the concept of data-sense, which she explains “brings the body back in” to

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our analyses of how humans interact and make meaning of digital data and digital devices (Lupton, 2020, p. 76). She elaborates, “we learn in and through our bodies. [Data sense] incorporates the entanglements of the digital sensors with the human senses in the process of sense making” (p. 20). This explicitly acknowledges the fleshy, haptic, and spatial dimensions of engaging with digital data and data materializations. Putting this concept to work, Lupton and Maslen (2018) interviewed Australian women about their experiences with digital health technologies. While a broad range of topics were covered in these conversations, including fitness, parenting, and bodywork, common themes emerged illuminating the role of the sensing body. The authors reported that women actively tuned into sensory cues and embodied perceptions as they engaged with health apps and wearable devices. This embodied feedback was then used to assess the accuracy of biodata provided by their digital device and to evaluate how useful this information was in the context of their daily lives. How the body felt and the sensations evoked in response to its changing environments and practices were recognized as valuable forms of information. Participants moved back and forth between information provided, their physical sensations, and their digital data to make sense of and interpret their bodies. Therefore, digital data did not act linearly and predictably upon women’s bodies nor did women passively allow their digital devices and data to define their interpretations of their body; rather women valued and actively attended to their bodies’ sensory perceptions and expressions. The sensory dimensions of women’s bodily encounters with digital technologies have been further explored in a range of social contexts (Adams, 2020; Farrington, 2018; Lupton & Maslen, 2018; Pink et al., 2019). In an intriguing study about the experiences of pregnant women in England who used an artificial pancreas monitoring system to manage diabetes, participants expressed reluctance at the diminished reliance on their own sensory relations with their bodies resulting from increased dependence on the automated digital system (Farrington, 2018). This loss of embodied knowledge was lamented, even though the system afforded new forms of freedom, as it was valued as an important dimension to the women’s sense of self. Through their reflections, women recognized both the powerful capacity of their bodies to generate deeply

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personal and intimate knowledges productive of selfhood, as well as their precarity and complex interdependencies on machines. In the context of physical activity and fitness, feminist sport sociologist Mary Louise Adams (2020) draws upon the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau Ponty to reflect on the implications of fitness tracking devices for women’s embodied subjectivities. Drawing on her own experiences of wearing a Fitbit, Adams uses Merleau Ponty’s ideas, which challenges the mind/body dualism and places the body at the centre of the ways we know and engage the world, to challenge instrumental views of movement as something we engage in simply to avoid becoming ill. Through her chapter she explores how self-tracking devices alter the way the embodied subject engages with the world by maintaining the body “as the locus of perception and thus the basis of knowledge and experience… as the vehicle through which we are able to encounter a world of openings and possibilities. Movement is one of the means by which we and the world become open to each other” (p. 83). By acknowledging the materiality of the body and its capacity to know and shape meaning, Adams (2020) suggests we may disrupt the tendency of digital self-tracking practices to frame movement as something undertaken for the attainment and performance of ‘good’ health. In considering these examples together, the sensing, responsive, dynamic body emerges as an active force as women make meaning of their health, bodies, digital data, and data practices. In some cases, the importance of ‘more-than-human’ elements in shaping these processes emerged, expanding our focus from digital data and human bodies to other vital forces such as emotions and environments. Consequently, we begin to see how women’s encounters with digital technologies are shaped not only by power relations and discursive forces, as Foucauldian approaches emphasize, but also by the vital capacities of the body and other material forces. This prompts us to consider how multiple agentic forces come together to shape meaning and experience. These ideas are at the centre of new materialist thought, and are increasingly being explored in relationship to digital health and fitness technological and corporeal assemblages.

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 ew Materialisms: Rethinking Digital N Fitness Technologies New materialist scholarship is rapidly gaining momentum in digital culture studies as it presents novel ways of analysing and imagining subjectivity, embodiment, power relations, agency, and entanglements of humans and nonhuman bodies. Recently, posthumanist and new materialist perspectives have gained popularity among feminist sport sociologists, physical cultural studies scholars, and those working at the intersections of health and digital cultures (Clark & Thorpe, 2019; Fullagar, 2017, 2020; Fullagar, Rich, Francombe-Webb, & Maturo, 2017; Henne, 2020; Lupton, 2019a, 2019c; Lupton & Maslen, 2018). These perspectives explicitly acknowledge the agentic capacities of both digital devices and the sensing, feeling, physically active body, and are concerned with the generative relationalities that emerge through their encounters (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010a, 2010b). Instead of thinking how humans or technologies act upon or discipline the other, new materialisms imagine the intertwinings of humans and digital fitness technologies as more-than-human assemblages that exhibit and express their own lively capacities (Lupton, 2019a). Women’s moving bodies both constitute and are affected by these assemblages in multiple and unpredictable ways. While an exhaustive overview of the various strands of new materialist thought and their utility for examining women’s entanglements with health and fitness technologies is beyond the scope of this chapter, here we focus on three perspectives that we believe raise intriguing questions and possibilities for imagining women’s embodied and sensory encounters with digital devices and data: Donna Haraway’s cyborg and companion species tropes; Jane Bennett’s concepts of vibrant matter and enchantment; and the Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conceptualization of affect and assemblage. As well as outlining the key ideas offered by these scholars and concepts, we consider their possible and existing applications to research on digital technologies and women’s moving bodies. We follow this with an empirical example applying affective and

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assemblage theories to previously collected data on mothers’ experiences of using Fitbits to self-track for fitness.

Donna Haraway, the Cyborg and Companion Species Donna Haraway is perhaps one of the most recognizable theorists interrogating the blurred boundaries between human and technological bodies. Her most well-known figure, the cyborg (Haraway, 1985), is a hybrid of human and machine, with no discrete boundaries existing between the two. In presenting the cyborg, Haraway emphasizes the intimate relationships between the human and technologies; it is no longer possible to tell where humans end and machines begin, or vice versa. While the cyborg has not been taken up explicitly in relation to women’s physical activity and sport, in an interview for Wired magazine (1997), Haraway turns to sport to provide further clarification. She suggests we imagine the cyborg through the technology of athletic shoes: “Think about the technology of sports footwear… before the Civil War, right and left feet weren’t even differentiated in shoe manufacture. Now we have a shoe for every activity.” In this example, technology and the performance of the moving body are inseparable, and thus the idea of the body’s ‘natural’ capacity is disrupted. Rather, elite sporting performances emerge from “the interaction of medicine, diet, training practices, clothing and equipment manufacture, visualization and timekeeping” (para. 4). Elaborating on the cyborg, Haraway (2003) later penned her companion species manifesto that interrogates the co-constitutive relationships and engagements between human and nonhuman species. She argues that all human and nonhumans (including technologies) living alongside one another constitute what she calls ‘companion species’ in that they continuously transform, learn from, and influence one another. Companion species “make up each other, in the flesh” and are continuously co-evolving (Haraway, 2003, p. 3). Haraway’s concern is with what emerges through these relationships. This provides a fruitful lens to think about the ways humans generate, engage with, and respond to digital technologies and personalized digital data. Lupton (2016) ponders the utility of Haraway’s companion species trope and suggests it allows us to

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consider how humans respond to their digital companions as well as interrogate the contexts in which these responses are prompted. While limited work has taken up Haraway’s companion species to understand the relationships between fitness technologies and moving bodies, Lupton (2016) clearly signposts the possibilities such approaches offer for studies of sport and fitness technologies. In an examination of mothers’ experiences of self-tracking in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Marianne (Clark, under review) imagines women and Fitbits as companion species to consider how humans and digital data devices ‘co-evolve’ with each other and what might be transformed in the process. Her results suggest women’s engagements with their digital data companions prompt new understandings of bodily capacities and re-configure the meaning of the inherent 10,000-step goal programmed into the Fitbit.

Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism and Enchantment As introduced in Chap. 3, Jane Bennett’s (2001, 2010a, 2010b) vital materialism is a variant of new materialist theory that acknowledges the influence of nonhumans and nonliving matter in the unfolding of events and the production of meaning. Drawing on biology, ecology, and physics, as well as diverse philosophers and writers such as Foucault, Spinoza, Thoreau, Deleuze, and Latour, Bennet explores human encounters with objects, which she calls ‘things’, and how they affect each other (also see Chap. 3). Bennett is particularly interested in the vibrancies and agencies that emerge through human-nonhuman relationships, agencies she refers to as ‘vital materialities’. Central to vital materialism is the concept of ‘thing power’, which she refers to as “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (2004, p. 351). Bennett was particularly interested in the capacity of these forces and effects within the realm of the socio-political and ecological. With a focus on the environment, Bennett (2001) highlights the capacity of humans to be “enchanted” by matter and the natural world, describing enchantment as “a mood of lively and intense engagement with the world” and “a mixed bodily state of joy and disturbance, a transitory and sensuous condition” (p.  111). Bennett suggests we can find

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enchantment in unexpected places, including modern technologies, and that it can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity. In her book, Vibrant Matter (2010b), Bennett develops her theory of vital materialism, which acknowledges and attends to the agentic capacities and forces—the vital materialities—that emerge through human and nonhuman assemblages or configurations. Bennett’s work is widely taken up in political science and environmental studies, with some in the humanities and social sciences drawing upon her concepts to rethink human relations with technologies. Recently Deborah Lupton (2019a) and Lupton with Sarah Maslen (2018, 2019) have integrated Bennett’s vital materialism in their research on digital health technologies and software. As Lupton (2019a) suggests, “when applied to human-technological assemblages configured when people use digital devices and software, a vital materialism perspective can draw attention to their potentialities, challenges and limitations as humans learn to live with and through them” (p. 128). In these works, mobile apps are the primary focus and the authors identify the specific affordances, relations, affective forces, and agential capacities that contribute to the thing-power of the human-app health assemblage. While this research articulates how digital technologies such as health apps and self-­ tracking devices are part of a more-than-human world, an explicit consideration of power relations is largely absent.

 illes Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Affects G and Assemblages The theoretical writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and Deleuze with Felix Guattari, have inspired and been taken up widely among new materialist scholars (Coole & Frost, 2010a, 2010b; Fox & Alldred, 2019). While there is some division around whether or not Deleuze would consider himself a ‘materialist’, his writing nevertheless continues to guide the vast and eclectic scholarship that generally falls under this umbrella. The concepts of affect and assemblage have been particularly evocative and widely adopted and adapted by feminist scholars working in the new materialist space. In so doing, some engage in theoretical syntheses,

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bringing Deleuze and Guattarian concepts into dialogue with other new materialists theorists and concepts (Coffey, 2019, 2020; Fullagar, 2020; Taguchi, 2012). Through the concepts of affect and assemblage, and many others encompassed by their vast philosophical work, Deleuze and Guattari seek to reconfigure humanist notions of agency and trouble the Cartesian mind/dualism. Affect according to Deleuze and Guattari is a force of relations in constant flux: a force that moves between human and nonhuman entities creating change in bodily capacity (Fox & Alldred, 2019). This understanding draws from Spinozist philosophy and is further defined by Brian Massumi (1987) as “an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (p. vii). These relational arrangements between human bodies as well as all other material objects, ideas, and abstract entities are referred to as assemblages (Fox & Alldred, 2019). In the Deleuzian sense, assemblages are defined as “complex constellations of objects, bodies, expressions, qualities, and territories that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of functioning…” (Parr, 2010, p.  18). Key to this understanding is that assemblages are more than simply a collection of heterogeneous entities; rather they produce something new through their affective and continuous unfoldings. The work of Deleuze and Guattari has been particularly influential in some strands of feminist new materialist thought, most notably in the writing of Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz, and Rosi Braidotti, as it is largely concerned with the distributed, affective capacities of human and nonhuman entities. Concepts such as affect and assemblage, and the acknowledgement of matter as agentic, have also resonated with feminist scholars interested in the gendered, affective, and embodied dimensions of digital technologies and digital social networks (Kuntsman, 2012; Lupton, 2016; Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2014; Renold & Ringrose, 2017; Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2019). In this work, scholars draw upon the concepts of affect and assemblage to interrogate the ways material and social entities overlap in digital contexts to both stabilize and disrupt gendered subjectivities. The concepts prove fruitful for mapping the complex ways in which bodies, technologies, and social and affective forces cohere, and

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the implications of these dynamic coherences for how women understand, experience, and feel about their moving bodies and for the production of embodied feminine subjectivities. Digital scholarship located more firmly within new materialisms has also emerged examining the various social assemblages created through women’s engagements with social media, mobile apps, and self-tracking devices (Barrie, Waitt, & Brennan, 2019; Fullagar, Parry, & Johnson, 2019; Lupton, 2019a, 2019d; Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2013; Reade, 2020; Rich, 2019). For example, Josie Reade (2020) explores Australian women’s engagement with ‘fitspo’ on Instagram, conceptualizing women’s body parts, objects, technological affordances, and discourses as an assemblage of authenticity that creates specific digital intimacies and affective encounters between Instagram users. She uses Deleuze’s concepts to not only provide a more nuanced understanding of what can be read as a superficial phenomenon, but to “critically attend to the micropolitical work these practices do, to what end and for whom” (p. 17). In another example, Lupton (2016) offers the concept of a “digital data assemblage” which she imagines as a configuration of discourse, data, devices, and human users to further understand what new knowledges and practices might emerge through human-technology interactions (p.  336). In both of these examples, digital assemblages are generative and inseparable from the affective forces that flow through them. In Reade’s example, an explicit connection is made between the affective and the political, resulting in a robust analysis of women’s everyday engagements with digital media, whereas in Lupton’s (2016) work we see an emphasis on mapping the vital capacities of human-technology assemblages. We are interested in further exploration of these productive capacities of human-technology assemblages and their affective dimensions, especially in relation to women’s moving, physically active bodies. In particular, we seek to move beyond mapping in order to articulate what these assemblages might do. Parr (2010) reminds us, “The result of a productive assemblage is a new means of expression, a new territorial/spatial organization, a new institution, a new behavior, or a new realization. The assemblage is destined to produce a new reality, by making numerous, often unexpected, connections” (p. 18). Therefore, the concepts of affect and

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assemblage deployed in new materialist projects offer great potential for rethinking the vital, affective, and generative entanglements between digital technologies and women’s moving bodies. Imagining human encounters with digital data as assemblage means the boundaries between dynamic human bodies, digital artefacts, and digital data are ontologically blurred, thus creating space for thinking beyond humanist notions of causality and totalizing understandings of power. Through the lens of new materialisms, we are urged to lean into and be curious about the affects, vibrancies, and lively messiness these encounters produce in order to imagine new lines of flight and create more capacious conditions for women’s moving bodies. To do so requires attending to and further theorizing the agentic capacities of women’s moving bodies and considering how they might be expanded or constrained through their encounters with digital devices and data. Through this lens then, we are encouraged to imagine human-­ technology relations as transformative and as continuously evolving in unpredictable ways. Instead of seeking to understand what these relationships mean, we instead attend to what they do and how they act to constrain or expand the conditions of possibility for women’s moving bodies.

Case: Self-Tracking and the Motherhood-Fitness Assemblage Our empirical example focuses on the practice of self-tracking, and particularly the digital self-tracking assemblage formed between women’s bodies, digital devices, objects, and social and discursive forces. A Deleuze and Guattarian-inspired approach to self-tracking shifts the focus from visual representations of the gendered body and the affective forces these might generate (and those involved in their creation) to the affective dimensions of digital processes concerned with capturing, and rendering visible, bodily outputs and processes. Given that “assemblages produce affects and effects” (Parr, 2010, p. 18), we ask: what is it that women’s embodied encounters with self-tracking technologies and digital data do in this world? What are the implications for women’s embodied

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subjectivities and fleshy moving bodies? Answering these questions requires a responsive analysis that traces the unfoldings of human-­ technology engagements at the sensory, affective, and political levels, somewhat simultaneously. We argue this is a productive and rich lens through which to re-imagine and re-assemble the capacities and possibilities of women’s moving bodies, without abandoning the critical or the political. In the remainder of this chapter we take up these ideas and apply them to a case study of one mother’s use of a Fitbit device. We begin by providing a brief overview of the literature on motherhood and digital technology followed by our analysis. Motherhood in contemporary western societies has become a highly intensive project defined by extensive expectations of what is required of women physically, emotionally, and socially (Maher & Saugeres, 2007). The culturally endorsed model of motherhood often referred to as ‘intensive mothering’ (Hays, 1996) demands women put their child/ren’s needs above their own and participate in energetically and economically demanding practices, including careful body monitoring, appropriate consumer behavior, and seeking and following expert advice to demonstrate their competence and commitment to ‘good’ motherhood (Song, West, Lundy, & Dahmen, 2012). Women’s pregnant and maternal bodies are subject to particularly intense medical and social scrutiny (Dworkin & Wachs, 2004; Jette, 2006) and urged to “bounce back” (Dworkin & Wachs, 2004, p. 615) to their pre-pregnancy body shortly after giving birth by participating in prescribed fitness regimes. Drawing from transdisciplinary perspectives, Shannon Jette, Katie Esmonde, and Julie Maier (2019) have noted how this messaging often overlooks the social, economic, and material barriers that makes regular physical activity participation difficult for many women. A vast array of digital technologies including mobile apps, social media platforms and digital fitness devices exist that encourage and support expectant and new mothers’ efforts to achieve healthier, fitter bodies as well as provide a forum for the sharing of parenting information and support (Johnson, 2014, 2015; Lupton, 2016; Lupton & Pedersen, 2016; Rich, 2018). While these forums can provide important opportunities for accessing information, support, and connection, they can also often work to (re)produce dominant social expectations of motherhood and

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intensify the surveillance of maternal bodies (Johnson, 2015; Lupton, 2019d; Rich, 2018). Here we extend this work to focus specifically on the self-tracking assemblage and to explore the affective, more-than-human forces at work in these arrangements. Assemblage thinking encourages us to conceptualize digital self-tracking practices as an always contingent and shifting arrangement of bodies, systems of understandings, and material contexts through which women make sense of active motherhood. Through our case-study we attempt to map the capacities and affects produced through the self-tracking assemblage, as well as articulate the implications for women’s moving bodies in order to elaborate our understandings of women’s embodied relationships with digital data in the context of motherhood and care.

Annette: “When it buzzes it’s like a pat on the back” As part of her postdoctoral research at the University of Waikato, Marianne interviewed 17 women in Aotearoa New Zealand who belonged to a Facebook group designed for mothers who wore Fitbits in order to improve their fitness (see Clark, under review). One case is presented here in order to both map and articulate the affective dimensions of the motherhood-­Fitbit assemblage and the capacities it presents. At the time of interviews, Annette was a 35-year-old mother of a 10-month-old baby boy. She lived on the East Coast of the North Island in Aotearoa NZ, was married, and was on parental leave from a full-time job. Annette received a Fitbit for Christmas after asking her husband for one and had been self-­ tracking for approximately six months at the time of interview. Marianne met with Annette via Skype twice to chat about her self-tracking experiences. Through Annette’s reflections, we trace the affective forces that flow through maternal-digital-fitness assemblages to explore the implications of self-tracking for women’s embodied subjectivities and active, moving bodies.

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Affective Intimacies and Digital Practices of Care Prior to having her son, Annette described herself as moderately active, engaging in yoga once a week ‘for relaxation’ and walking regularly. In her 20s she attended a gym frequently and considered herself to be in the best shape of her life. After having her son, Annette expressed that she “missed feeling strong and fit and comfortable in [her] body”. Her primary motivation for wearing a Fitbit was the desire to become more active in order to improve her fitness and overall health, and to lose what she referred to as her “leftover baby weight”. She also noted that she felt some pressure to fit in with the “yummy mummies” in her community. After using the Fitbit for six months, Annette said she was more active than she’d been in years and that self-tracking helped her “return” to her body. “I had sort of stopped noticing how my body felt, I usually just felt tired,” Annette laughed, adding “but I really wanted to connect with my body again.” Motivated to reach her daily goal of 10,000 steps, Annette created new physical practices and daily routines for herself, walking for longer and more frequently, most often with her young son in the pram or baby carrier. Over time she noticed having more energy, and feeling increasingly “tuned” into her body, articulating new kinesthetic sensations such as “exhilaration” and a “sense of release” after walking or running. When asked to elaborate on what it meant to “tune” in to her body, Annette paused but tried to explain: I’m always checking my steps and thinking about how many steps I’m getting, so I’m just more aware of my body… Instead of feeling tired all the time, now I notice the ups and down more. When I don’t get my steps… I just feel antsy, and I also feel stressed about not getting my steps. But if I go for a run… I get that little runners’ high. I’m just more tuned in to those things now.

In this reflection we recognize the various forces at work within the maternal-self-tracking assemblage including digital data, bodily practices and sensations, and visceral, emotional responses. For Annette, making sense of digital data is a performative practice of attending to the body through which both datafied outputs and embodied sensory responses

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are actively involved. By engaging in this form of data sense making, bodily awareness is intensified, and new relations with the moving body are formed (Lupton, 2017b; Clark, under review). This generates a renewed intimacy with her body as Annette recognized her body as an important source of information that guides her physical practices and other forms of self-care. For example, getting out for a walk or run is not only a way to “get steps in” but is an act of responding to her bodily cues. Yet the conditions that make getting out for a walk desirable or possible are continuously shifting. Annette explained that some days she was too tired to walk, especially if she’d been up with the baby at night. In those situations, resting feels more important. Other times a walk or run is less possible if it interfered with her son’s schedule, or if the weather was bad and she was worried that he’d get wet or cold. In these examples, the self-tracking assemblage emerges as intricately entangled with practices of care. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 2017) and Michelle Murphy (2015) posit care as performed within socio-material assemblages of humans and nonhuman things. Murphy suggests matters of care are “the affective entanglements through which things come to matter” (p. 721). Annette’s reflections illustrate how her self-tracking practices, while undertaken in pursuit of ‘fit’ motherhood, are always entangled with her negotiations and performances of care: both self-care and maternal care. Within these negotiations, the corporeality of motherhood and maternal care were deeply underlined. Many of Annette’s stories referred, often casually, to the largely taken-for-granted experience of fatigue as part of embodied daily life and how it often inhibited her from engaging in physical activities and even social activity. Fatigue is an embodied consequence of the material performances of care required by parents and care providers to infants and children. Fullagar, O’Brien, and Pavlidis (2019) write on the affective arrangements of (maternal) care, noting: In becoming and being ‘a mother’ the visceral body responds. This revered identity of the mother comes with endless pressures of morality, purity, joy and selflessness. With these pressures flow a range of affects, anger, guilt, shame and in our data, most notably, exhaustion and utter fatigue. These affects flow through and between the human and non-human, creating

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particular patterns of behavior (habits) that move mothers towards or away from their vitality. (p. 129)

Annette experienced a similar diminishment of her ‘vitality’ as a new mother and turned to self-tracking as a practice of self-care and a way to reconnect with her body. More often than not, Annette’s physical activity practices involved the presence of her son, whether in the baby carrier or pram, an active agent in her digital practices of care. Yet despite these physical attachments, Annette described how self-tracking reconfigured her relationship with her own body which she expressed through the creation of new practices: The Fitbit kind of reminds me that I have my own body and my own life, this is something I’m doing for me… Sometimes I actually go for a walk or run without [my son], but even if it’s with him, it helps me tune into my body… it’s not just about losing weight or looking fit anymore, it’s about how I feel in my body.

Here, Annette is negotiating a new, digitally mediated intimacy or relationship with her body. Self-tracking becomes a personal practice of care that helps to create a boundary of sorts between her body and that of her baby that brings Annette a sense of pleasure. While self-tracking remains intricately connected with maternal care practices, it also is part of a new ‘tuning’ into her own body.

Rendering Visible the Unseen (Physical) Work of Motherhood The step count target programmed into the Fitbit is 10,000 steps. When the wearer reaches that goal, the device emits a vibration, providing a haptic expression of recognition of achievement or compliance. This can prompt any number of responses among users, including surprise at the physical sensation, and pleasure and pride at reaching this arbitrary goal. Annette described feeling proud when she reached this goal but elaborated on her response:

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When it buzzes it’s like a pat on the back, like I’ve achieved something. There are days when just getting through the day is a big thing, if I can get dinner on the table and the house isn’t a mess and the baby is still alive, then that’s an achievement. But no one really sees that. No one comes home and says ‘good job’…

Annette’s reflection underlines the devalued and deeply gendered division of childcare and domestic labour and points to the energetic resources required of women to perform this labour (Breen & Cooke, 2005; Craig & Powell, 2011). It also suggests this labour is largely unseen and unrecognized. Unlike physical activity, which is often performed and celebrated publicly, particularly within self-tracking cultures, domestic work and childcare often takes place in the private sphere. Therefore, Annette’s digital self-tracking data comes to matter in a specific way, prompting affective, emotional responses and illuminating the absence of other forms of meaningful recognition of this work. At the same time, self-tracking prompted new recognitions of the physicality of this labour. Annette shared, “One day I didn’t get a chance to go for a walk, and I realized I had still gotten 6,000 steps or something, just from chores and cleaning and looking after Sam. But it doesn’t really count as exercise.” Here Annette highlighted the perceived boundaries between socially recognizable and legitimized forms of exercise and physical activity and the unseen physicality of care. This prompts us to ask, what ‘counts’ as physical activity and how are these boundaries drawn? In a diffractive Fitbit experiment, Marianne and Holly (Clark & Thorpe,  2019) too noticed the often-invisible physical labour involved in childcare and domestic work, often being surprised at how many steps were achieved through everyday domestic routines. ‘Seeing’ this work quantified as digital data shifted its meaning for Marianne and Holly, prompting them to recognize in new ways the physical outputs involved in domestic care practices and the unequal way this work is often distributed. Importantly, this work also involves time and energy, leaving women less capacity for physical practices they may find more meaningful or pleasurable. The capacity of digital self-tracking data to render visible physiological bodily functions that are usually considered invisible has been noted in earlier self-tracking literature (Lupton, 2016; Ruckenstein, 2014).

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Self-­trackers enjoy seeing their bodily performances represented through quantified outputs and perceive this form of information to be more objective and legitimate, and therefore more valuable, than other sources (Nafus & Sherman, 2014). However, Annette points out the limitations to what such devices can see or render intelligible when it comes to the moving, maternal body. For example, she shared, It takes so much energy to carry a baby around, I’m always getting up and down off the ground without using my hands because I’m holding an 8kg baby. Do you know how hard that is? But the Fitbit doesn’t see that, it just says “you got x number of steps today.”

Herein Annette called attention to the physical exertions and material forces at work within the maternal body-self-tracking assemblage and noted how they are eclipsed by datafied outputs. In part this highlights a limited affordance of the technology itself, one that matters specifically and affectively, holding implications for how women’s moving bodies are understood and made sense of. The physical exertions overlooked by digital data also matter and contribute to Annette’s data-sense making practices (Lupton, 2017b, 2019d). Importantly, Annette’s critical engagements with her digital data were made intelligible through her moving body, through its exertions, relations, and responses. It was only by engaging with her digital data and embodied knowledges simultaneously that Annette was able to articulate this limitation of digital data and challenge its perceived capacity to produce objective bodily truths.

Re-Assembling Fit Motherhood So far, our example of the maternal-self-tracking assemblage has highlighted the affective agencies of embodied and sensory experiences, emotions, digital data, and broader gendered discourses related to care, motherhood, and fitness. However Deleuze and Guattari (1987) consider assemblages as more than a collection of heterogeneous entities. Instead, “Assemblages draw affects together and in so doing they act; they continuously create and transform, they are always oriented towards the

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new” (Parr, 2010, p. 18). Here, the ‘new’ can be an idea, thought, feeling, or behavior. For Annette, the maternal-self-tracking assemblage prompted new relationships and understandings of the body, new physical practices, and new ways of thinking about the divisions of domestic labour and broader definitions of fitness and fit motherhood. It also prompted her to recognize that the constraints she faced in becoming active or achieving ‘fit motherhood’ had to do with more than personal levels of motivation. As she put it, “sometimes it’s just not possible.” At times there was simply no time to exercise or get out and walk or run. Sometimes, often, care obligations were all consuming. Other times, her own physical, embodied state of fatigue meant that sleep or rest was likely a ‘healthier’ option than running or walking. Annette continuously negotiated the demands of childcare, embodied feedback, and the social impetus to reach her step count in order to perform ‘fit motherhood’ with and through the maternal-­self-tracking assemblage. As we move beyond mapping the lively components of this assemblage, we consider what has emerged through its becoming, and what might be at stake for women’s moving bodies within digital data practices. Manuel DeLanda (2006), who elaborates on Deleuzian assemblage theory, suggests assemblages always have the capacity to be reterritorialized or deterritorialized, where reterritorialization maintains the unity of the assemblage and “deterritorialization is expressed through innovations that destabilize the continuity of the assemblage” (p. 244). We think with this concept to consider the capacity of maternal-self-tracking assemblage to destabilize and disrupt the discursive-material conditions that produce inequalities in the gendered division of domestic work and care, and shape dominant understandings about what ‘counts’ as physical activity? We argue that at the micro level, Annette’s affective, embodied engagement with her digital data worked to destabilize the maternal-self-­tracking assemblage as new understandings of, and relationships with, her moving body emerged that exceeded the quantified understandings provided to her by her digital data. She also started to question the taken-for-granted knowledges that define ‘fit’ motherhood and recognize the physicality and energetic labour of care. Instead of being something that is performed publicly by “doing bootcamp in the park in my activewear,” Annette

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started to negotiate her own definition of Fit motherhood: “It’s so much more than just getting your steps… it’s about not being tired all the time… feeling good in your body and being able to push your baby up a huge hill in the pram… or napping when you should be exercising because you’re tired.” Here the definition of fit motherhood expanded to accommodate practices of care that respond to context and personal need and that exceed socially prescribed fitness practices and aesthetics. In so doing, the discursive formations that shape social ‘truths’ around motherhood were reconfigured, if ever so slightly. Through these disruptions, prompted by complex joining of material, digital, and affective forces, the maternal-self-tracking assemblage itself is deterritorialized, creating new possibilities for women’s maternal subjectivities and moving bodies. We return here to Annette’s declaration that sometimes “it’s just not possible.” We sense in this statement an energy, an insistence, and an intensity with the capacity to disrupt, both at the micro and macro levels. The underlying neoliberal logic upon which self-tracking rests assumes individuals can achieve 10,000 steps without regard for the contextual factors. It always locates the impetus within the individual. But Annette stressed, “sometimes it’s just not possible.” This suggests being physically active or achieving the idealized version of fit motherhood is not simply about individual efforts or overcoming barriers, despite the salient social narratives that suggest this is the case. What happens then? What happens if we take this claim seriously? We argue Annette’s statement holds potential to dramatically destabilize the greater maternal-fitness-self-­ tracking assemblage and provides new lines of flight for thinking about moving maternal bodies and self-tracking practices. Our data highlights how the possibilities for (maternal) bodies to act, perform care, engage in exercise, and form relationships with the human and nonhumans around them emerge from a specific set of socio-material conditions. We suggest these conditions often constrain, rather than enable, women’s moving bodies in contexts of care and motherhood. As we see in this case study, digital practices and digital data assemblages are both implicated in these constraints, but also have potential to prompt new affective flows and bodily noticings with their own capacities to do. We suggest we need new ways to harness the energetic capacity of these affective flows, which themselves are created through movement and material-discursive

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entanglements, to disrupt and destabilize the power arrangements that maintain these conditions in order to create new lines of flight for maternal, moving bodies.

 onclusion: Digital Assemblages C and Fit Femininities In this chapter we described the increasingly important role digital technologies are playing in our everyday fitness and leisure practices and their impact on women’s embodied experiences and meanings of movement. We outlined some of the dominant conceptual approaches taken by scholars interested in human-technology relations including critical Foucauldian perspectives, frameworks that emphasize the sensory dimensions of human engagements with digital data and devices, and new materialist perspectives. Through these multiple approaches we demonstrated the contingency of human-technology entanglements and their embeddedness within specific social, material, and political contexts. New materialist approaches provide a fruitful lens through which to examine human-technology relationships as they acknowledge the multiple human and nonhuman forces these relations encompass. Acknowledging the vital capacities of digital data, human bodies, objects, emotions, and discourse, new materialisms enable robust analyses that consider how these multiple forces come together to produce meaning within digital data practices. Given the emphasis on relationality within new materialist thought, examining digital data practices through this lens prompts us to consider the contexts in which human-technology relations unfold as well as their multiple, unpredictable effects. This is particularly relevant for creating new spaces in which we seek to understand women’s physically active bodies as agentic material-discursive entities that both shape and are shaped by the socio-material contexts in which they move. In the final part of this chapter we offered a case study to illustrate how new materialist approaches encourage new understandings of human and nonhuman (technology) relations. In particular, we adopted a new

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materialist reading of Deleuze and Guattari to trace the affective forces that flow through the maternal self-tracking assemblage and to think what these affects might do. By engaging with the reflections of one mother’s self-tracking experiences, we articulate how the maternal selftracking assemblage prompted heightened bodily awareness, new bodily practices, and affective engagements with both her body and the material-­ discursive conditions that produce certain social understandings and expectations of her active maternal body. Integral to Annette’s data sense making processes were the corporeal, sensory, and affective responses to digital data and the explicitly physical labour and intimacies of childcare. Her reflections brought into clearer focus the human and nonhuman forces at work in the digital self-tracking assemblage. As active bodies assemble with technologies they move in and between environments and spaces, they encounter topographies, discourse, weather, and gravitational forces. In the following chapter we turn to consider how the biological and cultural entangle in women’s movement practices, with a shift from women’s everyday fitness practices to sport.

Pedagogical Possibilities The following activity is designed to encourage and support students towards thinking differently about their relationships with sporting and/ or fitness technologies. 1. Begin by asking each student to choose one sport or fitness digital tracking device that they currently use, or have access to borrow (e.g., a Fitbit, Strava, Ripcurl surf watch, an app on their phone). Similar to the activity in Chap. 3, ask the students to document one week of living with this device. They should keep a journal with at least one entry per day that reflects on their engagements with data obtained from the device: what data ‘glows’ for them, when, and why? How does data make them feel? Does the device change their physical activity practices? Does it impact upon their motivation in positive or negative ways?

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2. At the end of the week, each student should be encouraged to pair up with another student using a similar device. For the following week the students should engage in regular dialogue about their reflections on the device (as material object) and how it is felt and lived by their body, as well as the data it produces, and their affective responses to different forms of data. At the end of the week, the students should present back to the class (or compile a written report) explaining how similar or different their experiences were when using the same (or a similar) digital technology? What might be some of the reasons for their different data-sense making? 3. Conclude this activity with a class discussion about the range of digital technologies and their affective assemblages and affordances. Questions to consider: How might such devices be understood differently within various socio-material conditions? How might gender, age, ethnicity, class, sexuality, health, physical (dis)ability, employment impact our sense-making of such digital technologies?

5 The Biocultural Possibilities of Sportswomen’s Health

Most feminist scholars of sport and physical culture implicitly understand the moving body as always having biological, physiological, anatomical, and hormonal dimensions. Some of us may have an educational foundation in kinesiology (or similarly interdisciplinary undergraduate degrees, such as physical education), and thus have early training in sports science, anatomy, biomechanics, and other biological and physiological ways of knowing sport and exercise. Others have different backgrounds, but recognize our own hormonal fluctuations during various times and phases (i.e., menstruation, pregnancy, miscarriage, menopause) and/or in response to particular life events (i.e., stress, illness, aging, trauma, migration, long-distance travel), as well as during or after exercise. Despite such embodied and academic knowledge, many of us have ignored the biological dimensions of women’s moving bodies in our research. There are good reasons for such silences. Biological explanations have long been used (often far too successfully) to support inequalities in sport and exercise based on race, gender, sexuality, class, and age (Vertinsky, 1990, 1994). Feminist historians and sociologists of sport have adamantly rejected pseudo-scientific essentialist biological explanations that have been used to support discriminatory © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Thorpe et al., Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness, New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7_5

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practices and exclusionary discourses (Vertinsky, 1990), with much of their work over the past three decades focusing on structural, cultural, and symbolic forces that influence the construction of gender in sport. For example, various feminist sport scholars have provided theoretically rigorous and empirically nuanced insights into the power of dominating discourses—medical, mediated, and educational—on women’s relationships with their bodies, and particularly body image concerns and feelings of dissatisfaction (e.g., Duncan, 1994; Dworkin & Wachs, 2009; Kennedy & Markula, 2011; McDermott, 2011; Maguire & Mansfield, 1998; Markula, 1995). A consequence of this discursive focus, however, is that there has been little space in contemporary feminist scholarship for women’s moving bodies as “simultaneously composed of genes, hormones, cells and organs—all of which influence health and behavior— and of culture and history” (Fausto-Sterling, 2005, p. 1495). There are some noteworthy exceptions including Shannon Jette, Patricia Vertinsky, and Cara Ng’s (2014) examination of how Chinese-Canadian women make meaning of western and eastern health knowledges during pregnancy and postpartum, and Cassandra Wells’ doctoral research on female hyperandrogenism and sex testing of female athletes (e.g., Wells, 2010) (also see Hargreaves & Vertinsky, 2007; Markula & Kennedy, 2011). Despite some important exceptions, for many sports feminists (including ourselves for many years), the biological dimensions of athletic women’s bodily and embodied experiences tend to be largely ignored or purposefully overlooked. Certainly, historically, antibiological approaches have been politically necessary to challenge essentialist (and often racist) assumptions about male and female bodies and forge new spaces for women in sport and physical activity. However, such approaches are now limiting in our attempts to develop more complex and nuanced understandings of women’s embodied and bodily sporting experiences. To paraphrase Fullagar (2008), we have lost important opportunities to “explore the complex relationship between mind and body as lived and discursive phenomenon: the embodiment of [movement] as a biological and social production” (p. 336). In this chapter we take our cue from the work of feminist new materialist scholars to explore possibilities for bringing biology back into conversations about the athletic female body

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in sport and physical culture in nonreductionist and nondeterminist terms.

L eaning into the ‘Biological Turn’ with Feminist New Materialisms Biological considerations can be found in the works of classical sociological scholars such as Marx, Parsons, and Elias (see Williams, Birke, & Bendelow., 2003), but for the large part, historically the social sciences have omitted biology from explanations of social life. As Williams et al. (2003) argue: “the biological has at best served as a foil for the sociological imagination, and at worst been dismissed or denounced altogether” (p. 2). As suggested above, there are good reasons for “past sociological distrust or skepticism regarding biology” (Williams, 2006, p.  14). Too often, “recourse to the biological” has “served dubious ends,” legitimizing genocide and inequality and limiting freedoms, particularly those of women, children, and other marginalized groups (Williams, 2006, p. 14). Some argue that the popularity of social constructionist explanations of the body, and particularly Foucauldian-inspired analyses of the discursive body, over the past two decades has further reinforced the social/biological divide, rendering “a biological and corporeal sense of the body ‘theoretically elusive’” (Kelly & Field, 1996, p. 34). However, since the 1980s and 1990s, there have been various scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz, David Howes, Brian Massumi, Elspeth Probyn, Chris Shilling, Nigel Thrift, and Bryan Turner calling for renewed attention to the “interaction between the social, the emotional, and the bodily physiology” (Newton, 2003, p. 35). In response to such calls, an array of sociologists of the body, and health and illness, have been rethinking (and continue to rethink) “the relationship between sociology and the biological sciences” (Bury, 1997, p.  199; also see Benton, 1991; Monaghan, 2003; Shilling, 1993; Williams, 1998), by “marrying” the biological and the social in a “truly embodied fashion” (Williams, 2006, p. 13). In so doing, material corporeal sociologists (as they became known in some circles) are making major contributions in linking health and illness with

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“wider structures of power and domination, civilization and control in society” (Williams, 1998, p. 131). Importantly, many Indigenous, Black, and Chicana scholars have long explored the complex relationships between race, power, culture, biology, and bodies that come to matter (Bost, 2008; Hames-Garcia, 2008). Furthermore, scholars in disabilities studies and queer theory have also spent many years examining the boundaries of bodies, or what Garland-­ Thomson (2012) calls the “transformation of flesh as it encounters the world” (p. 343; Crilley, 2016; Feely, 2016; Mitchell and Snyder, 2016). Building upon and extending such work, feminist new materialist scholars have been making important advancements in bringing the biological body (back) into social theory. Examples include Donna Haraway’s (1991) deliberations on the immune system and the biopolitics of postmodern bodies, Anne Fausto-Sterling’s (2000) critical reflections in Sexing the Body, Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) corporeal feminism, and Elizabeth Wilson’s (2004) feminist engagement with neurological theories. Each in their own distinct ways, such feminist scholars have helped us “think differently about biology, culture, sex, and gender” (Fausto-­ Sterling, 2003, p. 124). Of particular interest here, some feminist scholars are engaging with the scholarship of new materialist feminist theorists (e.g., Barad, 1998; Mol, 2002) and/or developmental systems theory (see Meynell, 2008) to produce fascinating investigations of sex hormones, and more recently pheromones, that directly challenge “the dualisms of culture/nature, sex/ gender, science/humanities” (Sieben, 2011, p.  264; also see Roberts, 2003). Authors such as Fausto-Sterling (2000), Oudshoorn (1994), and Roberts (2002, 2003, 2007) have offered lucid analyses that demonstrate the extent of the “entanglement of heteronormative discourses…with hormonal ‘realities’” (Sieben, 2011, p. 264) via an array of cases ranging from sex testing at the Olympic Games, to hormone-replacement therapies, to the effects of the increase of “environmental estrogens” on men’s and women’s sex hormones. It is important to note that, while some feminist scholars are embracing the possibilities of new materialisms for rethinking culture-nature and biology-social dualisms, others reject new materialisms for its “false accusations” of a biophobia evident in feminism (Ahmed, 2008). As

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noted above, many feminist scholars have long engaged with biological detail in theorizations of the gendered, racialized, queer, disabled body. An important distinction worth making here, however, is that new materialist approaches do not ignore such contributions, but are “proposing a particular conceptualization of what an engagement with the biological means” (Davis, 2009, p.  67). Some navigate these tensions of past-­ present-­future feminisms carefully. For example, Roy and Subramaniam (2016) are interested in examining the matter that lurks in the deep, dark shadows of the ‘old’ feminist critiques of science of earlier feminisms, the silhouettes of matter being brought forward in the feminist new materialisms, and the glints of attention to matter that have recently surfaced in postcolonial science studies (p. 24).

In this chapter we focus on this growing body of feminist new materialist scholarship that is seeking new ways to theorize “an entanglement and non-separability of the biological with/in sociality” (Davis, 2009, p. 67). We do so with an explicit recognition that such approaches build upon and extend the significant foundations of feminist scholars before them, as well as making important connections and lines of flight to other important critical, feminist, queer, disability, and postcolonial theorizing. Creatively navigating a path between Ahmed’s (2008) and Davis’ (2009) arguments about the place of biology in feminist theory and new materialisms, Willey (2016) turns to a “genealogy grounded in a queer, feminist, and antiracist vision of the vital body as a source of knowledge and resistance” (p.  554). In particular, she engages with a reading of Audre Lorde’s (1984) Uses of the Erotic to develop a theory of biopossibility, which she deploys to offer a queer feminist critical-materialist account of monogamy. For Willey (2016), a queer feminist critical-materialist approach should ask: How do we engage the molecular with queer feminist desires for new biocultural stories and forms? As we create new approaches to science’s proper objects, how do we ground them in queer and feminist critiques of the stability of those very objects—hormones (Fausto-Sterling, 2000), muscles

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(Giordano, 2013), chromosomes (Richardson, 2012), and brains (Jordan-­ Young, 2010), for example? How do we passionately challenge a view of biology as flat and predictable (Davis, 2009) without locating our salvation in framing that romanticizes nature’s agency (Herzig, 2004), contingency (Blencowe, 2011), self-organization (Cooper, 2008) or plasticity (Pitts-­ Taylor, 2010)? (p. 555)

Continuing, she argues that such an approach should “begin by querying the contexts that inform the intelligibility of our understandings of nature, deterministic or otherwise” (Willey, 2016, p. 555). She elaborates this theory of biopossibility by examining the biology of the erotic to “decanter assumptions about sexuality and human nature that shape the field of gene-brain-behavior research” (p. 553). As ‘projects of refiguration,’ the work of such feminist new materialists is helping to ‘rearrange or re-organise’ our understandings of the relationship between nature and culture as dynamic, and “the materiality of the body as an organism rather than its materiality as a subject” (Frost, 2014, p. 307). In this chapter we consider the potential in feminist new materialist approaches to reconceptualize neurobiological matter as “dynamically situated in and entangled” with women’s lived experiences of sport and physical culture. In so doing, we embrace what Alaimo (2008) refers to as the ‘queering of biology’ (p. 241; also see Willey, 2016). For too long, biology (like nature) has “been drafted to serve as the armory for racist, sexist, and heterosexist norms,” such that it is “crucial that feminists invoke a counter-biology to aid our struggles” (Alaimo, 2008, p. 241). Within the current wave of feminist (and queer, anti-racist, postcolonial) approaches that are “taking matter seriously” (Alaimo, 2008, p.  243), important questions are being asked as to how the embrace of materialisms and ontology not only challenges long-standing and problematic binaries of sex/gender, nature/culture, and science/feminism, but also shift understandings of power, politics, agency, and resistance (Pitts-­ Taylor, 2016). It is impossible to do justice to the breadth and depth of the important feminist scholarship that has encouraged, and continues to encourage, new ways of understanding the body. Below we offer insights from three feminist scholars—Lynda Birke, Samantha Frost, and Elizabeth Wilson—whose works have advanced understandings of the

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complex relationship between the biological and cultural, as well as a rethinking of feminist politics.

Lynda Birke: Feminism with ‘Blood and Guts’ In Feminism and the Biological Body feminist biologist Lynda Birke (1999) argued that we need to “begin to develop a view of the body which attempts to put biological processes into their social context, yet which retains organismic agency and integrity” (p. 173). She recognizes this as a somewhat abstract and “difficult intellectual task” (Birke, 1999, p. 173) but offers us a potentially fruitful way forward via her adaptation of Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) psychoanalytic interpretation of the Möbius strip. According to Birke (1999), the Möbius—a continuous figure-eight strip joined so that outside becomes inside—might also be used to help us rethink the relationship between the inner, physiological body, and the outer, social body; “they are coterminous, not separable” (Birke, 1999, p.  174). For Birke (1999), engaging with the biological body also has important political implications. She argues that, while feminists “must certainly reject” the kinds of biology that have been used as “an excuse for discriminatory practices, and exclusionary discourses… rejecting biological processes altogether by ignoring or omitting the biological body does not help,” but rather serves “indirectly to reinforce biological determinism” and “marginalise the embodied experience of those whose voices are not heard in science” (p. 175). Almost two decades later, Samantha Frost (2016) continues this conversation in her book Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human.

Samantha Frost: Biocultural Creatures Frost’s conceptualization of humans as biocultural creatures emerges from her concerns with the inability or unwillingness of social and political theorists to engage seriously with the biological body. She argues that, despite a few notable exceptions, theorists tend to be:

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more comfortable with general or theoretically abstracted notions of embodiment as manifest in the notions of corporeality, vitality, liveliness, and generative becoming than we are with notions of living bodies persisting with and because of biological functions and processes (Frost, 2016, p. 23).

Responding to such concerns, her book is an explicit effort to think theoretically about “humans as alive, as living bodies, as biocultural creatures” (p. 24). Her use of the term ‘biocultural’ as a descriptor for humans is a strategic effort to acknowledge that which “has been most vehemently disavowed—our biological, organismic, living animality” (p. 4). Frost’s (2016) understanding of biology also challenges us to rethink dominant understandings of biology, or what she problematizes as thinking of living bodies as “fictive ‘uberbiological’ matter—something that persists unaffected by and in spite of environmental insult” (p. 5). Instead, Frost (2016) offers a theory of biology as always cultured. She uses the term ‘culture’ as a verb (rather than a noun), as in to culture, to cultivate. In so doing, her concept of the biocultural pushes against the “unwitting tendency to presume the ‘uberbiological’ and instead try to capture and elucidate how creatures become what they distinctively are through the habitats that culture them” (p. 5). In other words, she offers the idea of biocultural creatures to help explain and to figure how the social, symbolic, and material dimensions of everyday life are “transformed into the biology of the body” (Landecker, 2011, p.  178). Importantly, Frost’s (2016) concept of the biocultural is offered as a counter to deterministic, fixed, reductionist understandings of biology (as ‘uberbiological’). For her, biology is always in dialogue with the environments, habitats, and cultures that we are apart. In seeking to capture the “openness of living creatures to the material and social environments that culture them and enable them to grow” (Frost, 2018, p. 904), she repeatedly refers to the porosity of the body. Extending the commonplace scientific insight that the membranes of each and every cell in a living creature are permeable, Frost encourages a rethinking of the dynamic relationship between bodies and environments: “there is a continuous movement of substances across the porous boundaries of cells, across the porous boundaries of bodies—and it is this

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movement and traffic that underpins the processes of living and of subject formation” (Frost, 2018, p. 905). In his review of Frost’s Biocultural Creatures, Melonas (2018) highlights the political implications of her theory of porosity: The biocultural means that political responses that presume an absence or insignificance of the body are insufficient because harm is experienced by embodied biological creatures, embodiment understood here to include not only the disciplinary regimes that form as assemblages on the body, but how those normalizing processes are literally instantiated in the body (p. 543).

Continuing, he explains how Biocultural Creatures encourages new understandings of bodies in relationship with their environment: “We aren’t fixed, stable bodies interacting with strenuous or supportive environments; we are rather the world we navigate, breathing it in, digesting it, vomiting it up” (p. 544). Elsewhere we have critically engaged with Frost’s work on biocultural creatures to elucidate the multiple and diverse ways that sporting habitats entangle with sportswomen’s biological bodies (Thorpe, Clark, & Brice, 2019). Similar to Melonas (2018), we see the political importance of Frost’s work. For us, it meant exploring the complex relationships between high-performance sporting cultures and the health and wellbeing of athletes, and in so doing, challenging the dominance of physiological ways of knowing high-performance sporting bodies (Beamish & Ritchie, 2006; Maguire, 2011).

 lizabeth Wilson, Gut Feminism, and Biology E as ‘Strange Matter’ In her book, Gut Feminism, Elizabeth Wilson (2015) builds upon and extends the burgeoning work in feminist science studies and new materialisms that have highlighted biology as “a site of important political and conceptual argumentation for feminism” (p. 2). Through her discussions of the gut and depression, she unravels the complex and political history between feminist theory and biology. She reveals the strategic dimensions

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to feminism’s long-standing antibiologism, claiming that “the rejection of biology has made us who we are, it is spliced into the DNA of feminist theory” (p. 30). The antibiologism is so deeply engrained in feminist theorizing, praxis, and politics, that there are very real risks for feminist scholars engaging seriously with biology: Because antibiologism has done such important authorising work for feminist theory, any intervention that takes a nonparanoid approach to biological and pharmaceutical claims is likely to break long-standing, dearly held feminist convictions (p. 4).

We might even go so far to say that “biology remains something of a thorny conceptual and political issue” (p. 2) in feminist sport sociology, as in the broader field of feminist theory. Wilson (2015) boldly takes up such risks in her examination of the “tangle of antibiologism and critical sophistication that underwrites so much feminist argumentation” (p. 4). In her efforts to trace the roots of the antibiologism in feminist theory, Wilson (2015) examines Gayle Rubin’s influential work on gender and sexuality as “one route through which biology became the underbelly of feminist theory: how it became both a dank, disreputable mode of explanation and a site of political vulnerability” (p. 24). A particular concern for Wilson (2015) is how Rubin’s sex/gender theory falsely presented biology as “passive substrate (‘raw material’) that culture animates” (p.  31), rather than “strange matter, proficient at the kinds of action (regressions, perversions, strangulations, condensations, displacements) usually attributed to nonbiological systems” (p.  59; emphasis added). Wilson (2015) is adamant that biology is “not the flat (sovereign, authoritative, juridical) substrate seen in many feminist and neuro-humanities arguments” (p. 59), but rather can be “as perverse and wayward as any social, textual, cultural, affective, economic, historical, or philosophical arrangement” (p. 27). Importantly, however, she does not view such renderings of biology as accidental—simple misunderstandings—rather she has a stronger claim to make: Feminist theory has presumed a kind of biology—a biology that is largely static and analytically useless—as one way of securing its critical

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s­ophistication … It is not simply that feminist theory has often misread biology… these misreadings and repudiations have been very profitable: they have helped build our theories and affirm our politics (p. 30).

In a highly affective and affecting way, Wilson (2015) pushes feminism to look inward and ask some challenging questions: “Why have we so readily joined with conventional biologism to think of biology as predetermined matter? What conceptual payoff (what secondary gains) have we received for this?” (p. 27). Focusing specifically on the pharmaceutical treatment of depression, Wilson (2015) engages critically with biological data to explore the “nature-culture entanglement” (p.  27) and reveal anatomy as enacting “the very kinds of malleability, heterogeneity, friction, and unpredictability that feminist theories relish” (p. 45). She refers to this method as Gut Feminism, offering it as a distinctly feminist approach that is “able to think innovatively and organically at the same time” (p. 17). For Wilson (2015), the critical engagement with biology is a political act. In bringing biology and feminist theory together, she hopes that “each is a little undone in the encounter” (p. 172). We see considerable potential in the early work of Birke, and more contemporary contributions from Frost, Wilson, and other feminist new materialists, for encouraging a rethinking of the relationship between feminist theory and biology in the sociology of sport. How might such approaches invigorate reimaginings of the biocultural complexities of women’s sporting and physical cultural bodies in pleasure, pain, performance, health, and illness? In the remainder of this chapter we offer one of many possible examples, taking up Wilson’s Gut Feminism to explore a complex health condition affecting female athletes and exercising women.

 ut Feminism and Elite Sportswomen: G The Case of LEA and RED-S Over the past two decades, sport scientists have identified athletic women as at risk of a unique health condition previously known as the Female Athlete Triad (Gibbs, Williams, & De Souza, 2013; Nattiv et al., 2007)

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and recently renamed (not without controversy) Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) (Mountjoy et al., 2014; Marcason, 2016). A complex health issue, RED-S has acute and chronic implications for injury rates, psychological wellbeing, and the health of many key systems throughout the body, including skeletal, reproductive, cardiovascular, immunological, and gastro-intestinal systems. Exacerbated by low energy availability (LEA) caused by accidental or purposeful under-fuelling relative to the energy being expended, RED-S can lead to hormonal changes that impact almost all bodily systems (De Souza et  al., 2010; Slater, McLay-Cooke, Brown, & Black, 2016). Diagnosis is difficult due to the complexities of the condition, yet amenorrhea (chronic loss of menstruation) and menstrual disturbances are widely acknowledged as key criteria. A recent study revealed that 45% of recreational exercising women in New Zealand are at risk of LEA (Slater, McLay-Cooke, Brown, & Black, 2016), and sport-specific research reveals even higher prevalence (70–100%) in lean (e.g., swimming), aesthetic (e.g., ballet), and endurance (e.g., marathon) sports (Logue et al., 2018; Mountjoy et al., 2018). Most of the growing scholarly and practitioner interest in RED-S focuses on physiology, and in so doing, neatly (and artificially) separates the biological from the social and psychological dimensions of women’s experiences. However, for many sportswomen, hormonal changes and biology are inextricable from the social and psychological dimensions of disordered eating practices and/or highly disciplined exercise regimes that are bound up with contemporary gendered discourses of health, beauty, and success (e.g., Bordo, 2004; Byrne & McLean, 2002; Kennedy & Markula, 2011; Krane et al., 2001). Furthermore, despite many sports and medical scientific studies featuring tables comparing the prevalence of RED-S among women in different sports, few (if any) have considered the ways particular sporting cultures entangle with women’s experiences of this condition. At the same time that sport scientists are calling for heightened consideration of the physiological risks facing active women, many feminist sport sociologists continue to ignore the biological dimensions of women’s moving bodies. As previously suggested, our tendency towards social constructionism has limited our capacity to develop more nuanced understandings of women’s embodied sporting experiences (see

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Markula, 2018), including health and performance issues such as RED-S and LEA. In the remainder of this chapter we draw upon our recent research in which we conducted two phases of interviews with 12 elite endurance sportswomen involved in triathlon and Ironman events, to reveal a culture of ‘under-fuelling’ (purposefully not meeting the nutritional needs of the athletic body) and body image issues not unlike many other high-­ performance sports (e.g., Chapman, 1997; Hanold, 2010; Heywood, 2011; Krane et al., 2001). Adopting a feminist new materialist approach, however, we explore meanings of leanness, and the ‘ideal’ sporting body, as dynamically produced through socio-material-biological processes (see Thorpe & Clark, 2019). Furthermore, with interviewees reflecting on various forms of physiological data (i.e., blood tests, DEXA body scans), the project highlights the athletes’ varying levels of engagement with their biological bodies relating particularly to changes in hormones, body composition, and bone health resulting from LEA and RED-S. As well as illustrating some of the ways that the unique sporting culture intra-act with women’s bodies and biological functioning, this chapter also reveals how, for some women, their responses to biodata result in behavioural change that evokes further biological ramifications. In so doing, we highlight biology as more dynamic, non-consilient, and less deterministic than many sport feminists have presumed (Wilson, 2015). In the remainder of this chapter we offer three key themes emerging from our interviews with endurance sportswomen, and particularly their engagement with biological data relating to RED-S (Thorpe & Clark, 2019). These themes include the ways their sporting cultures entangle with their biological bodies, how they come to know the biological body through their engagement with biodata, and how they act upon the biological data, thus revealing the biological sporting body as dynamic, unruly, and agentic. First though, it is important to offer some brief contextual insights into the unique sporting cultures that informed our participants understandings of their biological bodies, and RED-S specifically.

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 ontext: Sporting Culture and the ‘Ideal’ C Performing Body Most of the endurance athletes (competing seriously in triathlon and Ironman events) identified a high-performance sporting culture in which lean and toned bodies are equated with fast, efficient, and athletically successful bodies. This emphasis on an extremely lean, toned body is prominent in endurance, weight-class, and aesthetic sporting cultures and has been linked to extreme dieting and other disordered eating behaviours among athletes (De Bruin et al., 2007; Smolak, Murnen, & Ruble, 2000; Sundgot-Borgen & Torstveit, 2004). This lean body ideal is also closely linked to the aesthetics of desirable femininity, and athlete’s engagement in stringent dietary and training regimes ensure compliance with these beauty norms. But, as various scholars have explained, these norms and practices are often left unchecked when pursued in the name of performance (Chapman, 1997; Cox & Thompson, 2000). In our study, all participants were very lean, with the sport scientists reporting the following averages: weight 60±7kgs, height 168±7cms, and body-fat 19.1±6%. During interviews, the participants all expressed a desire to achieve a lean toned body and this was strongly aligned with the overarching belief that the leaner one is, the more successful one will be in racing and training, as well as the perception of this body shape as generally attractive and desirable. For example, Lara, an experienced triathlete explained, “I think that skinny people are going to have to be fast. It’s just like you look lean, cut; so if that’s a result of your training, you should be fast.” Celeste, who has also been racing competitively for many years added, “I want to be lean because we know we race faster when we’re lighter.” When asked, many women said it was difficult to identify a single external source of pressure to achieve this bodily ideal, but many described the pressure as internal. For example, Eleanor said of the pressure she felt to be lean, “It’s just my own perspective…I need to drop weight to perform well.” And Taylor, an emerging athlete focusing on cycling, elaborated, “I started to become an athlete and realised that in order to get stronger and faster you need to shift a bit of weight. But it wasn’t a

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pressurized thing. It was just something I acknowledged to make myself better.” Our participants’ stories suggest that dominant systems of knowledge that shape understandings of performance, body size, shape, and appearance are circulated and engaged within the high-performance endurance sporting culture in complex ways. The salient understanding that leanness is equated with performance (and beauty) is deeply implicated in how athletes make sense of and often evaluate their own bodies. These understandings then manifest in specific embodied (material) practices. Yet leanness was not merely a culturally inscribed concept. Experiences of leanness and the bodily performances involved in becoming lean were produced through socio-cultural understandings of the lean body as desirable within the context of high-performance endurance sport and biological/physiological feedback that is negotiated in this context. As Taylor put it, “I do race better when I’m lighter.” Therefore, adopting a new materialist approach, we begin to grasp how the ‘ideal’ body image of the ‘lean’ high-performing endurance athlete exceeds discursive understandings; rather it is produced through a dynamic intra-action of socio-cultural and biological processes. In other words, these cultural norms do not exist outside of the body and then impress upon it. Rather, the biological body lives these norms out— absorbing and responding to them. Building upon the important work of other feminist scholars who are exploring the dynamism of the affective, gendered body (Coffey, 2016, 2019,  2020; Retallack, Ringrose, & Lawrence, 2016; Ringrose & Harvey, 2015), in the following sections we reveal how meanings of leanness in the high-performance sport environment intra-act within complex and dynamic cultural-material-biological entanglements.

Sporting Cultures and Biological Bodies Dominant ideas about the aesthetics of the high-performing endurance body (e.g., extremely lean and toned) informed the physical training and dietary practices undertaken by the women to achieve this aesthetic. In turn these practices shaped and altered the biological body. For example,

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all participants shared examples of their highly disciplinary dietary and training regimes driven by the desire to be lean. However, athletes also noted the biological consequences (e.g., LEA) of the extreme practices required to become leaner and lighter. For example, women observed the physical implications of stringent dietary and training regimes and shared stories of disrupted menstrual cycles, illness, and bone fractures, all potential implications and consequences of LEA and RED-S. Lara noted, “My periods were always irregular through my teenager years…then they stopped when I was running, my body fat just got too low.” Joan shared a similar experience, “I went for two years without a period and I put that down to getting too skinny too fast and training hard.” Compromised bone health was also of concern, with Kate explaining, “I’ve had a lot of bone related injuries… Last year I was swimming and broke my hand… my husband said ‘nobody breaks their hand swimming’, so it did make me wonder.” These women’s experiences demonstrate some of the physiological implications of the training and dietary practices often normalized in high-performance endurance sporting cultures. Many noted how, despite physical indicators that they may not be fuelling adequately for their training, this physiological feedback was in tension with the desire and perceived need for leanness. Leah provides a striking example of how the relationship between biological, cultural, and emotional forces can play out: For some reason, I have noticed [the desire to lose more weight] going on in my head and I’m aware of it and knowing it’s really really bad, but the leaner you get the less you want to eat. I know it’s wrong, but when you put a bit of weight on that seems to go away.

In this example, we see how boundaries between the performing body and both the physiological and cultural demands of endurance sport become blurred, rendering the cultural and biological inseparable. There exists a complex interplay of cultural and biological agencies that produce specific physiological, cognitive, and affective experiences. Although the desire to be lean is articulated as part of the normalized high-performance sporting culture, the consequences, manifestations, and physical

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practices resulting from this desire were deeply corporeal and continuously intra-act with the biological body. However, this is not a fixed, immutable biology; biology is not simply a “passive substrate… that culture animates” (Wilson, 2015, p.  31), nor is it a determining force. Instead the biological body is in flux and entangled in a dynamic relationship with the broader sporting and physical culture that is internalized by sportswomen in different ways. Put simply, the athletes’ understandings and experiences of leanness, LEA, and RED-S are inseparable from the biological and cultural conditions in which they train and perform.

 nowing the Biological Body: Sportswomen’s K Engagement with Biodata As high-performance athletes, our participants were highly motivated to gain knowledge about their physiological bodies in order to maximize performance and paid careful attention to their diet, fluctuations in weight, energy, and training performances. Digital technologies that track bodily performance and outputs played a prominent role in their self-monitoring regimes and, for some, were frequently used outside of training to track a range of physiological processes from sleep to caloric intake to menstrual cycles. Women expressed satisfaction at seeing their progress and physical outputs quantified and represented in a tangible manner. Indeed, this notion of “seeing” the body through quantified metrics resonates with findings from studies examining the experiences of individuals who wear digital fitness monitors (Clark, 2020; Ruckenstein, 2014; see Chap. 4). However, participants also acknowledged that numbers and digital data provided only a partial picture and many described the importance of training by ‘feel’ (Elle, Lara, Kate, Taylor, Jane). This is in contrast with research done with recreational self-trackers and exercisers that suggest quantified information about the body is perceived as more ‘legitimate’ information than embodied forms of knowledge (Lupton, 2016). For these athletes, knowledge and information provided by their bodies (i.e., training by ‘feel’) was extremely important.

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As well as using digital technologies for quantifying training and performance, four of the women tracked their menstrual cycle using apps such as Clue and My Calendar, and others tracked it carefully using pen-­ and-­paper methods. These participants described how tracking their cycle heightened awareness of, and provided explanations for, specific physiological experiences and dips and peaks in their training outputs. In turn this knowledge enabled them to alter their training schedule to account for hormonal phases and also explained variations in performance and training that helped lessen anxious emotional responses. In Nicole’s case, she started Depo-Provera (a form of hormonal birth control) in part to regulate her cycle and now uses My Calendar to track her cycle. She explains, “It’s still not super regular but I track it so I have some idea what to expect around race times.” Similarly, Kate started using the Clue app to monitor her cycle, “because I’ve been getting real chronic headaches right before my period and …it was only recently that I started to figure they came before my period… now I’m getting some statistics for when I see a doctor to figure out what I should do about it.” These examples highlight how reproductive and tracking technologies become entangled with the biological body and scientific knowledges to prompt specific actions. The menstrual cycle, and women’s efforts to track, understand, and in some cases alter it, provides a fascinating example of the biocultural entanglement. We consider how the physiological demands of training for endurance sport (which are in part culturally produced) and associated dietary practices (for example [in]adequate fuelling) impact the hormonal functioning of the biological body and can hinder or support menstrual functioning. At the same time, the biological functioning and menstrual status of the body shapes and impacts upon performance; at the biological level, energy levels dip and peak differently throughout the menstrual cycle, which has implications not only for how women train but how they feel when they train. Menstruation, or even the knowledge or anticipation of menstruating during competition, can prompt and evoke a range of emotional responses (i.e., anxiety, relief ). Therefore, as the biological and cultural aspects of menstruation and high-performance sport come together, it becomes impossible to demarcate the biological from the cultural. As Wilson (2015) compellingly

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articulates: the “relative weight of biological or cultural factors cannot be calculated” and “biology is not a synonym for determinism and sociality is not a synonym for transformation” (p.  9). Instead, our participants’ stories suggest that women understand their own biologies as somewhat malleable, and not as unyielding or determining forces. By tracking their menstrual cycles while also seeking and gaining knowledge about how hormonal cycles impact training and vice versa, and gaining an understanding of how these relationships may be altered and in some cases taking steps to do so, the sportswomen sought to understand and manipulate their hormonal cycles. Such actions further entangle with the functioning of their muscles, bones, and cardiovascular systems, through training practices and nutritional habits, and in some cases adopting various forms of hormonal birth control. In this section we highlighted the keen orientation to bodily information shared by the endurance sportswomen and the active role they take in obtaining, making sense of, and translating this information into their daily lives as athletes and women. They also reveal the multiple sources of technoscientific information athletes must navigate and negotiate with the increasing availability of biodata in their lives. Yet these data are always configured through and contingent upon the biological body as well as technological, sporting, and scientific knowledges. The cultural, discursive, and biological entangle and intra-act in indeterminate ways, rendering the female athlete as both object and subject within these complex biocultural processes. As such we argue that technology, with “biology and culture are not separate, agonistic forces,” instead they come together to form unpredictable, indeterminate and “complex alliances” (Wilson, 2015, p. 27).

The Biological Body as Dynamic, Unruly, and Agentic A central argument to Wilson’s (2015) theory of Gut Feminism is that “anatomy [and biology] is volatile enough to generate multifaceted and paradoxical destinies” (p. 45). In challenging longstanding feminist antibiologisms based on limited understandings of biology as fixed and determinate, she reveals biology as “strange matter,” dynamic, indeterminate,

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and agentic. Certainly, the hormonal changes resulting from chronic LEA intra-act with women’s bodies in various ways—the bones, muscle, fat, blood, heart, gut, and reproductive systems are all interconnected and affected differently. Yet, the women in our project were not victims to their biological bodies. This was particularly evident in the various ways the sportswomen made meaning of, and responded to, biological data (resulting from the broader study and their own self-tracking technologies). Their responses to technoscientific and biodata ranged from apathy, to seeking medical advice, to significant behavioural change in dialogue with their coach and support from families, to resistance. While not all athletes were able to change their biological functioning and reduce the risks of LEA/RED-S as promptly as they might have liked, in many instances changes in diet and training did lead to significant hormonal changes, thus revealing the ‘plasticity’ of the biological sporting body. The endurance sportswomen were keenly oriented to, and interested in, the biological functions of their bodies, most notably those related to performance, injury, and reproduction/fertility. Consequently they were extremely invested in studying and understanding the results from the suite of tests undertaken for the broader project. Despite being highly attuned to their bodies and related athletic outputs, these tests provided a ‘new’ way of knowing and understanding their bodies. As Elle explained, the information provided had the potential to surprise, “because suddenly you are being measured from the inside. Like everything seems all right from the outside, but suddenly you’re really going to find out.” Interestingly, this quote highlights the very inside/outside binary that Wilson (2015) is seeking to disrupt. Several women were surprised at their results, particularly their low energy deficient status (the majority of the athletes were in low energy states). For example, in her follow-up interview, Leah, who had previously expressed a desire to lose weight, said, “I thought my intake was more than enough, because as I said, in general I have trouble keeping my weight at a satisfactory level.” Another athlete commented: “I was a little bit surprised that I wasn’t eating potentially as much as I should be. I eat way more than my husband and I feel like I’m always, always eating, and then to be still in calorie deficit was like, Oh!” Taylor was among a number of athletes who falsely associated energy deficiency with low weight or

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weight loss, and was surprised at her energy deficient status, “in my head, if I was that deficient then I would be like really skinny …but clearly it’s not all about bodyweight.” Such comments illustrate how what is going on within the internal biological workings of the body—the functioning of blood, hormones, and bones—can be different from, or eclipsed by, the appearance of the external body. As Taylor continued to reflect, she notes, “You can look healthy on the outside and look really fit, and then you’re actually just on the cusp of either doing some damage or breaking yourself.” When equipped with this information, some participants were quick to research and identify strategies for addressing deficiencies. Taylor, who was energy deficient, experienced amenorrhea, and had fairly low bone density scores, did seek out expert advice. She then created a food diary and identified ways to increase calories, cut back on high intensity training, and started to take supplements to help increase her oestrogen levels. Motivated to address the results, Taylor said, “If I’m not strong enough, if my skeleton’s not strong enough and I’m just going to keep having these weak points, then it is going to stop me doing the stuff that I love.” As a result of such concerns, Taylor says she has not “made drastic changes,” but did “go on iron supplements after my doctor received the results, and I’ve tried to eat more protein after training and get a bit more calories in.” Another athlete noted that her “iron was lower” than ideal and that she would “probably like my bone health to be a little bit better.” As a result, she attempted to modify her biological functioning with mineral supplementation and training changes: “I’ve started taking a calcium supplement but I’ve also started including a lot more plyometric and strength work. And rather than just adding that into training, I’ve swapped it out” (Elle). As these examples reveal, athletes were not paralyzed by medical discourses that tend to emphasize the high risks and most extreme consequences of LEA, and instead are navigating their own paths through the biodata and medical knowledges. In addition to bone health, athletes identified menstrual functioning and fertility as a concern. They were keenly aware that low weight, low body fat, and the chronic insufficient energetic requirements to cover their training left them susceptible to fertility complications. For example, in addition to concerns for her bone health, Taylor revealed fears for

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future fertility resulting from hormonal changes associated with chronic LEA: “thinking long-term, you can’t help but think about fertility and when it comes to [wanting to have children], what’s going to happen?” Interestingly, some aspects of biological functioning were perceived as more malleable than others. For example, Kate explained that earlier in her life she needed to alter her training and diet in order to gain weight so she could conceive children. When examining her results she said: [Energy deficiency] was one of the things that stood out to me, purely because for me, just looking at those results, that would be the one that you can immediately do something about. It’s like I can do that out of my own kitchen if you like, I don’t necessarily need to go and seek treatment from somebody else for it.

In contrast, bone health was perceived as more difficult to address and as less ‘reversible’ than amenorrhea/menstrual disruption. Even though bone functioning was perceived as a more chronic concern and seemed less malleable than the menstrual cycle, fears of stress fractures and osteoporosis inspired four of the athletes to take supplements and alter training (i.e., add plyometrics and jumping, decrease volume). For these athletes, their energy status and the biological workings of their body were not immutable; instead they were highly motivated to learn how they might shape and alter it. Importantly, although motivated to make changes, some emphasized that it is not always easy to know how to make these changes or what the implications of such changes might be. In acknowledging that she needed to increase her energy intake, Kate reflected: I’m not sure how to address it without going OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder] because I do have a compulsive personality and I do my training down to a T and I do whatever I’m meant to do. I could probably go that way with food and I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to do it. I think it will probably lead to issues if I start looking at calories.

Interestingly, this comment highlights the athlete’s awareness of her psychological tendencies informing her concerns about how (not) to respond

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to such biodata, and her resistance to close physiological monitoring. Taylor also noted that action might not always translate into biological change: I don’t think my periods are just going to turn the corner; as much Maca powder as I’m taking or trying other stuff, I don’t think they’re just going to come back quickly. But now I’m more aware about energy availability and just loosening the reins a little on what I eat.

While some aspects of the biological body may be perceived as more difficult to change than others, many athletes actively engaged with their biodata, such that they could act upon and alter their biological status. Such athlete understandings of the dynamism of the biological body might also be read in contrast to longstanding feminist assumptions of biology as fixed and determinate.

 ummary: Biological Encounters with Feminist S Sport Studies This chapter provided an overview of the important work being done by a growing number of feminist new materialists in reimagining the body as biocultural entanglement. As well as mapping broad trends, we offered three different approaches to bringing feminist theory and the biological body into dynamic tension, including Birke’s (1999) Feminism and the Biological Body, Frost’s (2016) Biocultural Creatures, and Wilson’s (2015) Gut Feminism. In so doing, we identify the urgent need to address the antibiologism in the sociology of sport such that we can not only advance more multidimensional understandings of the bio-sociality of women’s moving bodies, but also to find new ways to challenge the sciences to rethink their approaches to understanding, diagnosing, and treating complex health phenomena. In the second part of this chapter we took inspiration from Wilson’s (2015) Gut Feminism to examine endurance sportswomen’s experiences of RED-S.  By engaging with feminist new materialisms in such ways, both social and biological ways of knowing women’s sporting bodies are

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“a little undone in the encounter” (Wilson, 2015, p. 172). Participants’ stories demonstrated the complex ways the high-performance endurance sport culture entangle with the biological body, not only shaping dietary and training practices, but also becoming implicated in the experience of menstrual irregularities, injuries, and illnesses. For many of these female athletes, concerns over body weight and performance and the dominant belief that a leaner body is equated with greater performance prompted careful dietary monitoring. For some, this manifested in LEA/RED-S and associated biological changes. Despite the all pervasiveness of leanness as the body ideal among the endurance athletes in this study, adopting a feminist new materialist approach to the gendered body revealed how this body image is produced through socio-material (and biological) processes (Coffey, 2016, 2019, 2020; Retallack, Ringrose, & Lawrence, 2016; Ringrose & Harvey, 2015). Importantly, such processes are dynamic and always in intra-action—the biological body morphs and reacts to these cultural norms and, in some cases, acts to challenge assumptions about particular (unrealistic and/or unhealthy) body ideals. In sum, feminist new materialist theory has implications not only for understanding the psycho-socio-physiological implications of hormonal changes among sportswomen, but also how we might go about future feminist research on biocultural moving bodies. We hope the concepts and examples presented in this chapter help to (re)vitalize a feminist scholarship that works towards a sufficiently elaborate and untidy overture to Kirby’s (2017) pointed ponderings: “How should we, indeed, how can we, comprehend the goop and spill of corporeal interiority, the bone, muscle and sinewy connections, the colons, tracts, membranous pouches and bags of provisional containment, the greens, reds, yellows and browns that pulse and ooze just under our skin?” (p.  19). Taking inspiration from Birke, Frost, Wilson, and other feminist new materialists, we see the potential in scholarship that revisits our assumptions and reconsiders our imaginings of the biological, and explores new approaches to better account for the plasticity (and political potential) of the biological sporting body. In the following chapter we discuss research approaches that further embrace the ontological challenges of new materialisms and experiment with transdisciplinarity to explore the dynamic socio-­material entanglements of sporting bodies. In so doing, we also see how the

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boundaries in knowing the sporting body are reproduced in subtle, and yet powerful, ways that produce female athlete health as a highly westernized and scientized phenomena.

Pedagogical Possibilities In this chapter we used the example of sportswomen’s experiences of the health conditions of Low Energy Availability (LEA) and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) to illustrate our new materialist-inspired efforts to rethink the dynamic relationships between the biological and cultural. Here we offer a teaching activity to help students explore the complexities of the biocultural moving body. The aim of this activity is to encourage students to think critically about common and scientific knowledges of health conditions, and to explore alternative approaches for bringing biology back into conversations about the sporting and moving body in nonreductionist and nondeterminist terms: 1. Choose a health condition that is directly/indirectly connected to sport and/or physical activity. The chosen health condition might occur during training or competition (e.g., ACL, concussion, broken bone), caused by excessive training (e.g., overuse injuries), or (supposedly) relieved through sport or physical activity (e.g., anxiety, posttraumatic stress, heart disease, diabetes, sleeping disorder). Ask the students to note down what they already know about this condition and the sources of this knowledge, as well as any personal experiences they may have had with it. 2. Ask the students to source and read a selection of scientific journal articles focused on this condition. What does this literature help them know about this condition, and what is missing? 3. From this scientific literature, have the students identify a key biological or physiological agent (i.e., a particular hormone, blood, bone, muscle, enzyme, tendon) that plays a key role in producing/reducing this condition. Ask them to explain what this biological agent ‘does’ in producing this condition? What are some of the broader social, cultural, political, economic forces that might (de)activate this agent in

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particular ways, shaping it to become something we do (or do not) know? 4. Once the students have a solid understanding of the functionality of this biological or physiological agent, encourage them to explore alternative ways of narrating this health condition. There are no right or wrong answers here, so encourage them to step into the unknown, to be as creative as they wish. Students might explore visual modes of representation (i.e., art) or alternative writing styles (i.e., poetry, story) that experiment with giving this biological or physiological agent ‘voice’. What might blood, bones, ligaments, hormones, enzymes say if they could tell the story of this condition through their own ‘voice’? Who are the friends/foes they ‘meet’ along the way? What might these intra-actions, connections, relationships, or assemblages look, sound, smell, feel like?

6 Apparatus and the Boundaries of Transdisciplinary Research

Philosophers of science, social scientists, and feminists have long been concerned with the politics of knowledge production and the power involved in producing, policing, and regulating disciplinary boundaries. Extending initiatives taken by various scholars before him (i.e., Toumin, 1972; Shapere, 1984; Whitely, 1985; Bechtel, 1986), Fuller (1991) focuses on “disciplinary boundaries”—their construction, maintenance, and deconstruction—to highlight the “fineness of the line[s]” between disciplines and how attempting to cross over disciplinary boundaries can result in “terms of awkwardness, if not downright silence” (p. 306), raising questions about what, how, and who defines these perimeters. Feminist scholars have posed similar questions but have asked them differently, focusing specifically on how feminist knowledge is positioned and valued within universities in relation to particular disciplines (e.g., science) and the academy, more broadly. In contrast to Fuller (1991) who was interested more in the philosophical meta-boundaries between disciplines, feminist scholars have tended to focus on the enactment of disciplinary boundaries within the everyday spaces of academia with a concern as to how they play out in and through lived, affective, and embodied experiences (see, for example, Pereira, 2017). This chapter leans toward © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Thorpe et al., Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness, New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7_6

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such feminist understandings of disciplinary boundary constructions as lived experience, but considers the potential of a Baradian new materialist approach, specifically the concept of apparatus, to understand the politics, practices, and potential in transdisciplinary knowledge production in sport studies. Over the past decade, a number of critical sport and physical cultural scholars have raised questions about the positioning of sociology within the broader multidisciplinary field of kinesiology. In a resonant work, Andrews (2008) identified the need for sport sociologists to not only question the dominance of sport science and quantitative approaches to studying the moving body, but also to intervene into such conversations. He warned that sport sociology (within our institutions and discipline more broadly) may become even further marginalized if we refuse to engage with our scientist colleagues. In his own words, “either we develop truly comprehensive and integrative approaches to the stuff of human movement (incorporating anything from the genomic to the societal levels) or we end up using kinesiology as a euphemism for a collection of tangentially related, scientific endeavors” (p. 59). But in his later work with Silk and Francombe, the group examine the deeply entrenched power relations involved in dominant ways of knowing the moving body, and how the sciences have come to, and maintain, their hegemonic positioning: The self-evident epistemological hierarchy—what we can term the epistemological violence, that privileges specific “scientific” ways of knowing— has structurally and intellectually constrained the potential and relevance of the social science of sport in terms of realizing its aims of developing a truly integrative and interdisciplinary approach to the study of physical activity and thereby of society. (Silk, Francombe, & Andrews, 2014, p. 1272)

Working across such disciplinary divides is much more challenging and problematic than it initially appears. Such tensions have been noted by Markula (2019) who acknowledges the possibilities that new materialist approaches offer for working across disciplinary boundaries. According to Markula (2019), studying the moving body “allows a direct and constructive incorporation of nature science into sport sociological

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examinations of everyday materiality” (p.  3). Despite considering the potential for more cross-disciplinary engagement through new materialisms, she concludes with a warning that “we should not, in our newly found enthusiasm for things ‘science,’ uncritically embrace positivism,” and asks whether it is even possible to engage with science “without calling for extensive changes in its positivist onto-epistemology” (p.  3). Markula (2019) remains highly doubtful that our sport scientist colleagues “perceive a need or an opportunity to challenge positivism as the dominant way of knowing accurately about the world” (p.  3). For Markula (2019), it seems the new materialist possibilities in the sciences lay solely in the critical and selective engagement of their knowledge for our purposes. In this chapter we engage with the Baradian concept of apparatus to rethink the politics and possibilities of transdisciplinary research in sport studies, and particularly for understanding female athlete health. In so doing, we reveal how a Baradian-inspired approach to transdisciplinarity encourages us to not only explore ways of knowing the moving body differently by working across disciplines, but more importantly to pay close attention to the processes, politics, and practices in such research. Thinking with the concept of apparatus encourages scholars to examine how disciplinary boundaries are both (re)constructed and challenged when working with academics from other disciplines. To put this concept to work, we offer an example of a transdisciplinary research project focused on sportswomen’s experiences of low energy availability (LEA). We embarked on this research alongside our sport physiologist and nutritionist colleagues, as well as others in the so-called “hard sciences” (sports doctors, endocrinologists, psychologists). Within this case we show how highly scientized, quantitative ways of knowing women’s bodies dominated, and despite our various attempts to challenge such boundaries, it was not always clear how to do so. But, as this chapter illustrates, feminist new materialisms (and Barad in this context) offer conceptual tools to help us acknowledge the boundaries in our own work, which can encourage research practices that work to trouble dominant apparatus and invisible disciplinary boundaries.

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F eminist New Materialisms, Transdisciplinarity, and Apparatus As discussed in the previous chapter, feminist new materialists have made considerable advances in reconceptualizing biological matter as “dynamically situated in and entangled” with lived experiences (Pitts-Taylor, 2016, p. 6; also Thorpe and Clark, 2019; Barad, 2007; Wilson, 2015). Yet the onto-epistemological question of how feminist scholars should engage with such bio-cultural knowledges persists. As Pitts-Taylor (2016), editor of Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism, writes, “materialism now pervades many realms, such that the question is no longer whether feminists should take it up, but how they are doing so” (p. 10). To date, much of the important feminist new materialist work has focused on the intricacies of theoretical and speculative philosophy, with much less work engaging theoretical concepts deeply with the empirical. According to Frost (2016), “finding out how to think about the ‘bio’ in ‘biocultural’ is tricky” for a number of reasons (p. 5). While disciplinary and subdisciplinary overspecialization is certainly part of the challenge (Goodman & Leatherman, 1998), she also suggests that “our conceptual habits and our philosophical vocabulary and grammar” continue to align our thinking with the persistence of “some notion of a pure, unadulterated, uncultivated dimension of a living body” (Frost, 2016, p. 5). Many feminist new materialist scholars working to explore the biocultural complexities of bodies are critically engaging with literature from across the social and biological sciences. In so doing, important questions are being raised as to how to deal with biomedical data in ways that are productive for feminist theory. As Wilson (2015) argues “feminism’s relations to biological data have tended to be skeptical or indifferent, rather than speculative, engaged, fascinated, surprised, enthusiastic, amused, or astonished” (p. 45). But for feminist theory to “continue to make trouble” it will need “to form intimate and unruly alliances with biological data” (p. 35). Similarly, Frost (2016) recognizes the importance of engaging with biological data, but warns we must remain highly sceptical and critical in our engagement: “it would seem naive, foolhardy, or even somehow complicit, to make a resource of science research without at the

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same time constantly calling it into question” (p. 15). So, for feminist new materialist scholars engaging with science, it must not be an uncomplicated embrace of science, but rather a critical dialogue between the biological sciences and social research in order to “discover new modes or perspectives for thinking, to become bewildered only to perceive a novel pattern or unexpected set of connections” (Frost, 2016, p. 19). Although feminist scholars are increasingly engaging critically with biological data, most of their arguments (Wilson and Frost included) remain based on their own individual readings of scientific and medical research. As various scholars have argued, such individual cross-­ disciplinary engagement is limited by the researchers’ own disciplinary knowledges, and as such there is the risk of (strategically or accidentally) decontextualizing concepts or misinterpreting results. Few, if any, feminist scholars are engaging with biological data produced within their own projects, or working with (feminist) scientists to further their understandings of biological process and functioning. Undoubtedly, this is a daunting and time-consuming task. Nevertheless, we wonder what is possible when we take seriously Wilson’s (2015) challenge to imagine what “conceptual and methodological innovations become possible when [sport] feminist theory is not so instinctively antibiological?” (p.  1). Herein we offer Barad’s writings on transdisciplinarity and the research apparatus as a possible way through this onto-epistemological impasse within feminist new materialisms.

Transdisciplinarity: The Possibilities and Pitfalls Various critical sport scholars have adopted interdisciplinary approaches to examine the biological and/or psychological dimensions of particular sporting experiences. For example, sport historian Douglas Booth (2009) draws upon physiological and socio-psychological research to explain the affective experience of “stoke” in surfing and other so-called extreme sports. Sociologist Lee Monaghan (2003) adopts an interdisciplinary ethno-scientific approach to offer a fascinating analysis of the social significance of biology in the relationship between bodybuilding, steroids, hormones, moods, and behavioural effects. However, in contrast to this

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interdisciplinary research tactic, in which “an issue is approached from a range of disciplinary perspectives and integrated to provide a systematic outcome” (Lawrence & Despres, 2004, p. 400), transdisciplinarity refers to a dialogue between scholars from the social and physical sciences “in the interests of better addressing substantive interests that are of shared concern” (Evans & Davies, 2011, p. 265). Put simply, transdisciplinarity calls for the cultivation of a specific “research attitude” in which “members of a research team arrive with different disciplinary backgrounds and often different agendas” yet are “sufficiently informed about one another’s perspectives and motivations to be able to work together as a collective” (Davis & Sumara, 2008, cited in Evans & Davies, 2011, p. 265). In contrast to interdisciplinary models that retain distinct disciplinary boundaries but seek to selectively integrate them, transdisciplinary research is defined as “research efforts conducted by investigators from different disciplines working jointly to create new conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and translational innovations that integrate and move beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a common problem” (Harvard Transdisciplinary Research in Epigenetics and Cancer Center, cited in Heywood, 2017, p.  43). Despite growing calls for transdisciplinary research to help address some of society’s most pressing issues, including sporting topics (i.e., the concussion crisis, testosterone testing in women’s sport), few actually do this work. Indeed, there are many challenges in doing this work, ranging from finding appropriate colleagues to work with (those who are willing and brave enough to step outside their disciplinary silos), to granting agencies, ethics committees, and journals, many of which continue to subtly (or explicitly) reinforce disciplinary boundaries. In the face of such challenges, it is exciting to see feminist scholars imagining creative approaches to transdisciplinarity, some of which draw upon new materialist ethico-onto-epistemologies (Taylor, Ulmer, & Hughes, 2020). In the field of sport and physical cultural studies, innovative feminist scholar Leslie Heywood (2017) has led the call for more transdisciplinary research. She argues that, while many sport sociologists hold onto assumptions about scientists as deeply entrenched in the positivist paradigm, unreflexive of their assumptions and unwilling to consider other ways of knowing, in fact many scientists “have shifted in a different

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direction in terms of their truth claims” (p.  48). We concur with Heywood’s (2017) argument that more integrative scientific models that explore the interaction effects between nature and nurture offer “profound transdisciplinary possibilities for the analysis of physical movement” (p. 48). Leading the way with such innovations, Heywood (2011, 2015, Heywood, Garcia and Wilson, 2010) has made important contributions in her explorations of affective neuroscience and moving bodies. Others exploring the potential of transdisciplinarity in critical sport studies include Jette, Vertinsky, and Ng’s (2014) work on biomedical models of pregnancy and movement, John Evans’ (2014) work on transdisciplinary models of sport and health, and Holly’s (Thorpe, 2014, 2016) focus on transdisciplinarity and women’s embodiment. To date, none of these projects has been explicitly informed by feminist new materialist ways of knowing and doing transdisciplinary research. Despite some acknowledgements of the alignment between transdisciplinarity and new materialist onto-epistemologies, few feminist new materialists themselves embark on transdisciplinary projects, instead tending to engage in multi- and inter-disciplinary work that sees them reaching across disciplinary boundaries while ultimately retaining a disciplinary frame. There are, of course, many “political and epistemological difficulties of transcending disciplinary boundaries” (Evans & Davies, 2011, p. 265; also see Magill-Evans et al., 2002; Austin et al., 2008). As Markula (2019) reminds us, crossing the boundaries of kinesiology often requires us to engage with the sciences on their own terms. We certainly acknowledge the challenges of working across the disciplines, particularly with those in the sport sciences who are often so firmly located in the positivistic paradigm they cannot comprehend or recognize the value in other ways of knowing the moving body. Yet, rather than avoiding such paradigmatic tensions, we explore the potential in feminist new materialist theory to help identify and understand such boundaries, thus yielding strategies to work productively with colleagues from across the disciplines. As various others have identified, some of the greatest challenges of transdisciplinary research include the ontological and epistemological differences across disciplines, power differences between researchers of various positions and between disciplines, and deeply entrenched

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variation in social practices, norms, and expectations within and across different disciplines. While various researchers have offered practical solutions to help navigate such challenges (Choi & Pak, 2006; Magill-­ Evans, Hodge, & Darrah, 2002; Smith, 2007; Syme, 2008), in this chapter we employ and actively engage a theoretical approach to explore this uncertain territory. In particular, we turn to Barad whose theory of agential realism offers some important insights into how we might reimagine the processes of working across the disciplines. Engaging with Barad’s concept of apparatus calls for closer attention to the specificities of everyday practices and politics within transdisciplinary projects, and thus provides strategies for becoming more aware of the ‘invisible walls’ or ‘boundaries’ within such knowledge projects. Drawing our attention to the processes of transdisciplinary research rather than the products, Barad’s theoretical framework holds some valuable insights for developing strategies for more effectively working across the disciplines. Although Barad’s concept of apparatus may not offer all the answers to overcome the many challenges of transdisciplinary research, it does call for different questions of transdisciplinarity as ethico-onto-epistemological practices, processes, and politics of knowledge production.

The Research Apparatus A leading figure in new materialist theorizing, Karen Barad is a feminist physicist whose theory of agential realism offers new ways of conceptualizing the material-discursive complexities of phenomena. Working at the intersection of quantum physics, science studies, the philosophy of physics, feminist theory, and poststructural theory, agential realism offers a unique framework for exploring the complex relationships between humans and nonhuman matter. Consisting of several key concepts (i.e., entanglement, intra-action, diffraction, apparatus), her theory of agential realism “provides a posthumanist performative account of technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices” (Barad, 2007, p.  32). Within agential realism, Barad (2007) introduces the concept of the apparatus to explain “specific material configurings of the world through which determinations of boundaries, properties and meanings are differently enacted”

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(p. 335). She draws upon physicist Niels Bohr’s concept of the apparatus to highlight how the measuring apparatus plays an important and active role in the construction of knowledge. The apparatus can be seen as “macroscopic material arrangements through which particular concepts are given definition, to the exclusion of others, and through which particular phenomena with particular determinate physical properties are produced” (Barad, 2007, p. 142). Put simply, apparatuses are “not passive observing instruments; on the contrary, they are productive of (and part of ) phenomena” (Barad, 2007, p. 142). Importantly, Bohr did not explore the “crucial ontological dimensions of his insights” rather focusing on their “epistemological import” (Barad, 2007, p. 138). Elaborating Bohr’s apparatus, Barad (2007) explored the ontological possibilities of this concept to offer a “shift from apparatuses as static prefab laboratory setups to an understanding of apparatuses as material-discursive practice through which the very distinction between the social and the scientific, nature and culture, is constituted” (p. 141). Barad was dissatisfied with Bohr’s oversight of an important question around the boundaries of the apparatus itself; where it began, what human and nonhuman bodies it encompassed, what communities and knowledges were included and excluded. This prompted Barad to ask: Is the outside boundary of the apparatus coincident with the visual terminus of the instrumentation? What if an infrared interface (i.e., a wireless connection) exists between the measuring instrument and a computer that collects the data? Does the apparatus include the computer? Is the printer attached to the computer part of the apparatus? Is the paper that is fed into the printer? Is the person who feeds in the paper? How about the person who reads the marks on the paper? Or the scientists and technicians who design, build, and run the experiment? How about the community of scientists who judge the significance of the experiment and indicate their support or lack of support for future funding? What precisely constitutes the limits of the apparatus that gives meaning to certain concepts at the exclusion of others? (p. 143)

In other words, apparatuses are performative constellations of practices, bodies, and systems of meaning that constitute the boundaries of our

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research and knowledge production endeavours. The boundaries of the research apparatus cannot always be known before, and possibly even during, a research project. A Baradian approach encourages us to ask difficult questions about the boundaries of research, the answers to which will be specific to each project. Various scholars have taken up Barad’s understanding of apparatus to rethink the research process and the focus on the human and nonhuman intra-actions that work to produce meaning (while excluding other ways of knowing). For example, Prophet and Pritchard (2015) engage with the apparatus of science within Artificial Life research. This approach helped them recognize that in the context of AI research, it is “the arrangement of nonhuman and human material-discursive forces (such as formal models, algorithms, microchips, computational textures, floats, objects, single-cell creatures, GPS technologies, materials) through which particular concepts are given definition and through which particular physical properties are produced” (p. 339). Another example is Kaufmann (2017) who uses a form of artistic inquiry to contemplate meaning and the measuring apparatus in qualitative research. In her own words: Meaning is not representations; it is an emergence of the measuring apparatus. Thus, not only is there no meaning outside of how we measure, we, as agentic in the process of measurement, are responsible for the meanings we emerge. The meanings and bodies that emerge through our qualitative measuring apparatuses are an issue of life. (p. 397)

For Irni (2010), adopting a Baradian view towards her transdisciplinary research on sex, age, and gendering practices in the workplace helped draw her attention to the many feminist tensions, contradictions and performativities that arose within the research apparatus. The concept of the apparatus encourages scholars to rethink how research is conducted, as well as the various intra-acting elements of the process of knowledge production. Thinking more relationally provides an opportunity for scholars to do research differently and provides a pathway for transdisciplinary research that is consistent with the ethico-onto-epistemology of new materialisms.

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Transdisciplinarity: A Baradian Approach Tucked into the corners of her comprehensive work, Barad (2007) offers keys for rethinking the processes and politics of transdisciplinary research. In fact, transdisciplinarity is central to her diffractive methodology, which she describes as an attempt to “provide a transdisciplinary approach that remains rigorously attentive to important details of specialized arguments within a given field, in an effort to foster constructive engagements across (and a reworking of ) disciplinary boundaries” (p. 25). Continuing, Barad (2007) explains that her diffractive methodology aims to provide “important theoretical tools” to help “move conversations in science studies, feminist studies, and other (inter)disciplinary studies beyond the mere acknowledgement that both material and discursive, and natural and cultural, factors play a role in knowledge production by examining how these factors work together, and how conceptions of materialist, social practice, nature, and discourse must change to accommodate their mutual involvement” (p.  25). For Barad, transdisciplinarity is not the ‘integration’ of knowledge from different disciplines, and thus cannot simply involve “draw[ing] from an array of disciplines” (p. 93). Rather, from a Baradian perspective, transdisciplinarity entails “thinking insights from scientific and social theories through one another” (p.  92). Put slightly differently, a Baradian approach to transdisciplinarity asks us to “place the understandings that are generated from different (inter)disciplinary practices in conversation with one another” (p. 92). This means that research frames and disciplinary boundaries are exposed through processes of diffraction (see Chap. 2) with ideas, concepts, and practices reflecting back upon one another until the boundaries are troubled. Such approaches require “respectful engagements with different disciplinary practices, not coarse-grained portrayals that make caricatures of another discipline from some position outside it” (p. 93). Continuing, she calls for the importance of remaining “rigorously attentive to important details of specialized arguments within a given field without uncritically endorsing or unconditionally prioritising one (inter)disciplinary approach over another” (Barad, 2007, p. 93).

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Barad (2007) sees the potential in innovative approaches to working across the disciplines, but acknowledges and encourages us to pay close attention to the power relations and political processes involved in such work. She calls for deep inquiry into “the histories of the organization of knowledges and their function in the formation of subjectivities” (p. 93). It is only through such approaches that transdisciplinary projects might contribute to “a critical rethinking of science and the social in their relationality” (Barad, 2003, p. 93; emphasis added). Put simply, a Baradian approach to transdisciplinarity is distinct in that it encourages deep enquiry and rigorous attention to the “fine details” and everyday practices of boundary marking within the project. Such a focus on the processes, practices and politics of knowledge production is rarely seen in transdisciplinary research focused primarily on shedding new light on a topic of shared concern. In the remainder of this chapter we take up Barad’s concept of apparatus and writings on transdisciplinarity to rethink the processes, possibilities, and politics of transdisciplinary research in sporting contexts. In so doing, we hope this example illustrates how new materialist approaches to transdisciplinarity may offer alternative ways for working with our scientist colleagues that not only produce new knowledge, but help us acknowledge the boundaries constructed through our everyday practices such that we might work to find new strategies to trouble the edges of our disciplines. As we reveal, this journey included its own series of “transdisciplinary quagmires” (Irni, 2010). Yet, the Baradian-inspired approach encouraged us to embrace these boundaries and tensions as opportunities to know the research apparatus differently, which in some cases, prompted new research practices.

 ethinking Transdisciplinary Research in Sport: R A Case Study Here we use a case study to illustrate how Barad’s concept of apparatus encouraged a rethinking of transdisciplinary research, prompting us to pay attention to the various intra-actions and practices (between fields,

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methods, and equipment) that reproduce disciplinary boundaries, which ultimately allowed for more productive transdisciplinary work. In the remainder of this section we highlight three key ways that Barad’s concept of apparatus helped us know the processes, practices, and politics of transdisciplinarity differently: (1) reading different fields through each other; (2) intra-actions and the everyday performativity of disciplinary boundaries; and (3) locating and troubling the boundaries of the apparatus (also see Thorpe, Clark, Brice & Sims, 2020).

Reading Disciplines Through Each Other In 2018 Holly began a co-led project with feminist sport scientist colleague Dr Stacy Sims, with both Marianne and Julie as key members of the broader team. Taking inspiration from feminist new materialisms, the transdisciplinary project aimed to understand the biocultural complexities of elite sportswomen’s health, with a particular focus on LEA and RED-S. Adopting a transdisciplinary framework inspired a mixed-­ method design to understand sportswomen’s experiences of this complex health condition. More specifically, the project engaged quantitative and qualitative research data from: (i) a survey gathering initial demographic, training, and nutritional information; (ii) physiological measures, including resting metabolic rate (RMR) to establish current energy availability status, a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scan to assess body composition (particularly per cent body fat, fat mass, lean body mass and bone health), baseline blood work to measure key hormonal changes related to RED-S (estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, iron status, cortisol, C-reactive protein, hepcidin, and thyroid function); and (iii) semi-structured interviews. The same methodology was repeated across two different sports (endurance, rugby), with the first phase including 12 elite, non-professional endurance female athletes (competing in triathlon and/or Ironman events), and the second phase including 18 members of a national rugby sevens team. A team of sports physiologists and nutritionists (including a senior researcher and postgraduate students with the support of a laboratory technician) led the quantitative methods, with a sports doctor also part of

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the research team. In the early stages of the project the team worked primarily in their respective disciplinary silos: the scientists led the collation and analysis of the physiological data, and we completed the interviews and a thematic analysis of the qualitative data. Although we often worked alongside one another, sharing research spaces and places—e.g., the interviews took place in the room next to where the RMR and blood tests were conducted—we encountered many “invisible walls” within the transdisciplinary research apparatus. In their work on transdisciplinary medical teams, Liberti, Gorli, and Scaratti (2016) explain that the “invisible” disciplinary boundaries “affect both intra- and inter-professional relationships” particularly between doctors and nurses differently located within hospital hierarchical power relations (p. 31). Although the relationships within our research team were always highly professional and amicable, there were quiet tensions simmering. Despite the “invisible walls” and research uncertainties within our transdisciplinary project, engaging with Barad’s concept of apparatus helped us pay attention to the fine details—the everyday practices and intra-actions—that made these disciplinary boundaries (walls) more visible. Recognizing the various ways boundaries were being (re)constructed within the project helped us devise an array of strategies in an effort to breach the divide. For example, a sport science doctoral student charged with carrying out the RMRs was invited to sit in on three of the interviews to better understand the process involved. While this is a small gesture, the student had no previous exposure to qualitative interview scenarios as processes of knowledge production. By being physically present during the interviews, the boundaries that had previously designated and assigned specific tasks and spaces to the sport sciences and social sciences were subtly disrupted. Through a series of other  small acts (i.e., reading data sets together, sitting in on different data collation techniques, travelling together and discussing different aspects of the data gathering process, sharing literature across the disciplines and asking questions that emerged when reading scholarship outside our field, co-­ supervising PhD students, co-writing grant applications and reports, co-­ presenting at national and international conferences), we found that such boundaries were not completely impenetrable—we saw increasing signs of the porosity within the research apparatus. As the project progressed,

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the research team continued to engage in semi-regular meetings, gradually finding ways to speak across the disciplines and developing strategies to help bring the quantitative and qualitative materials into critical dialogue. Importantly, in our efforts at working across the disciplines, the aim was not to “unify, reconcile, or integrate” data sets, but rather to engage in a “mutual rough-and-tumble” that “unsettles” both scientific and feminist ways of knowing the moving body (Wilson, 2015, p. 172), and ultimately helps reveal the boundary work involved to producing LEA and RED-S as phenomena. A first step towards such “unsettling” was through a conscious effort to engage the disciplines in regular dialogue, paying attention to the language used and assumptions embodied, and designing “small acts” to think the disciplines through each other. Such actions made a difference to the research process, in terms of the affective relations among team members, the willingness to learn other ways of knowing, and to consider alternative approaches to conducting, analysing and disseminating research on female athlete health in the present and future. Indeed, the impact of such actions and relations cannot be defined solely within this particular project. For example, recognizing the value in qualitative methods, the sport science PhD student (Katie Schofield) ended up embarking on a mixed-method project of her own that incorporates interviews with elite track cyclists, and she continues to actively learn about feminist research ethics alongside various physiological measures.

Intra-actions and the Everyday Performativity of Disciplinary Boundaries A Baradian approach to the research apparatus encourages an acknowledgement of the human and nonhuman intra-actions that work to reproduce boundaries and dominant ways of knowing particular phenomena. In the transdisciplinary research apparatus of our project, the human and nonhuman were multiple. The concept of apparatus was particularly helpful in exploring how the intra-actions between humans and nonhumans worked to produce particular ways of knowing RED-S, while excluding others. Some of the human agents in the project included senior researchers working alongside early career researchers (post-docs,

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PhD students, research assistants), the athletes themselves, coaches and leaders in sports organizations (not present at the site of “data gathering” but critical in gaining approval and access for the project to take place), members of the ethics committee (again, not present at the site of data gathering but played a key role in re/constructing project boundaries), the funders (internal research committee members), the transcriptionist, the technicians (DEXA operator), the phlebotomists, conference attendees and reviewers, etc. All of the above played more and less significant roles in shaping the project and our practices within it. In terms of the nonhuman within this research apparatus, we acknowledge the computers that recorded and disseminated our initial proposals, communicated news of (un)successful grant applications, the almost daily exchange of emails between research team members in arranging the multi-phased data gathering, the rooms that interviews were conducted in, Dictaphones recording dialogue, clocks ticking on walls, the beds the athletes laid upon while their energy stores were measured, the tubes that captured the oxygen or carried the blood, the machines that analysed the hormones, lipids, and other bodily substrates, the food that athletes consumed desperately after fasting in preparation for the RMR (i.e., protein shakes that prompted one athlete to burp loudly during an interview, as well as the energy bars and water provided by the interviewers), the sweat dripping down an athlete’s arm and pooling on the table during an interview conducted immediately following a workout (fitting data gathering in around the athletes busy schedules was challenging), and the formulas used (debated and questioned) to calculate nutritional needs, energy availability, iron, and hormonal stores. This list is long and incomplete, but it is included here to highlight the human and nonhuman agents in this project as diverse, heterogeneous, organic and inorganic. Each of these (and other) human and nonhuman objects have the capacity to impact the project in mundane and/or significant ways, some known and many more unknown to the research team. There are many examples of the ways intra-actions between human and nonhuman participants materially shaped our project. Here we offer the ‘burp’ (as noted above) as a particularly memorable example of a material-discursive intra-activity that prompted new considerations of the research apparatus. It was the protein shake carried into the interview

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room and gulped down by a hungry athlete post workout that caused her to burp loudly in the middle of the interview. The unapologetic burp, reverberating in the room and captured on the Dictaphone, surprised the researcher in its explosive challenge to dominant discourses of femininity, and dismantling of (any sense of ) hierarchy between researcher and participant. Whereas interviews were designed to capture athlete voice, the burp was an unexpected recording of a biological response to nutrition and training (key themes in the interviews) entangled with power and discourse. This performative material-­discursive event disrupted our assumptions about the capacities of scientific and social science measuring devices, and alerted us to the many ways intra-actions between human (i.e., athlete, interviewer) and nonhuman (i.e., protein shake, Dictaphone) participants can materially impact the project and emergent knowledges. What Barad (2007) makes clear is that intra-activity of the human and nonhuman are important because they inform practices that work to construct boundaries around what can (or cannot) be known. So, paying attention to the practices, performances, and intra-actions between humans, and to a lesser extent between humans and nonhumans, in this project did alert us to the subtle ways in which disciplinary boundaries where reinforced, and particularly how scientific ways of know LEA were maintained, and occasionally challenged. For example, we recorded public comments from scientist colleagues while introducing us to the conference stage, referring to us as the “story tellers” and admitting they “have no idea what they [the sociologists] really do,” followed by overly enthusiastic laughter from the audience (perhaps highlighting others’ discomfort with our presence and new, ‘foreign,’ even strange knowledge). Although this comment was made in humour and not intended to hurt, it was a symbolic distancing from (highly subjective and thus suspicious) qualitative research approaches. In another example, participation in a national multidisciplinary working group focused on female athlete health led to tense ideological challenges and subtle, but frequent, forms of marginalization—ranging from casual comments to limited space allocated in sport science journal articles for ‘the socio-cultural stuff.’ Entering meetings, we witnessed some of our more clinically oriented colleagues and collaborators

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opting for seating far from the lone sociologist in the room. This example highlights how boundaries enacted in ‘formal’ research settings are reproduced and performed in other less formal spaces that are nevertheless constitutive of these boundaries as they are within the greater space of academia. Importantly, moving bodies are creating the boundaries in this case, not words, text, or discourse. Such practices are subtle and likely not noticed by others, but taking inspiration from Barad, we paid attention to the materiality of the everyday intra-actions between humans (i.e., clinicians, scientists, sociologists) and nonhumans (i.e., seating, documents, words) and how these intra-actions played an active part across a range of research and non-research spaces. This approach helped us stay alert to the everyday practices that worked to reinforce disciplinary boundaries. The fine details in the small performative acts of disciplinary boundary reinforcement may seem insignificant—a harmless joke, a comment made under the breath, a seat chosen over another—but they reflect the “epistemological violence” that continues to privilege scientific ways of knowing women’s health in sport and the marginalizing of other (more subjective, embodied and cultural) ways of knowing. Such acts are tacit, deeply embodied, and likely subconscious efforts to maintain the scientific and medical boundaries around knowing LEA and RED-S. Another, perhaps more generous, way to interpret such intra-actions is as examples of the “difficulties raised for understanding” when transdisciplinary team members bring with them concepts, language and knowledges that have “materialised in such different practices of science” (such as analysing interviews or reading hormone levels in blood samples) (Irni, 2010, p.  133). Importantly, however, such acts do something, they affect the project and the people involved in a range of ways. With feelings hurt, some may feel marginalized within the project, prompting them to limit the time and energy they invest. Others may feel confused as their ways of knowing are unsettled, prompting a stronger positioning in the familiar. But, instead of being disappointed or repelled by the deeply entrenched, embodied and affective nature of such differences, we took inspiration from these challenges, recognizing that such “transdisciplinary quagmires are part of the feminist negotiations of materiality” (Irni, 2010, p. 94). As part of the larger apparatus of this project, Holly created spaces to reveal, experience and feel these “transdisciplinary quagmires” through the organization of three national multi-disciplinary female athlete health

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symposiums held in 2015, 2017 and 2019. Bringing together sports doctors, physiologists, psychologists, endocrinologists, sociologists, coaches, athletes, teachers, and parents, she was purposefully troubling disciplinary boundaries. Each event attracted over 200 attendees and featured a series of panels with speakers from across the disciplines, thus putting the disciplinary tensions, silences, and gaps front and centre. In so doing, Holly was motivated as much by offering the community with more multidimensional and holistic education about female athlete health, as she was by inciting disciplinary tensions. In a sense, these events where a “litmus test” of sorts to help make visible (at least to the research team) dominant ways of knowing RED-S and the possibilities for teasing the edges of such disciplinary boundaries. During such events there were a plethora of opportunities to explore these tensions with some attendees and speakers making courageous efforts to move across disciplinary boundaries, and others so entrenched in their silos that alternative ways of knowing seemed impossible to fathom. Each symposium highlighted the challenges of disciplinary language—both across disciplines and between researchers, practitioners, and the public—with subtle everyday and embodied practices (i.e., speech-acts, body language, and embodied intra-actions) reinforcing and challenging boundaries. We witnessed the scoffing at researchers sharing athlete voices as “data”; we noted the particular groupings around the lunch tables; and observed the authoritative bodies of the scientists and medical specialists (many in dress jackets, hair perfectly coiffed, confident voices, private school accents) intermingling with the (often excessively) lean bodies of athletes (some shy, eyes averted, others overly eager for the answers to their “problems”). Our observations and lived experiences of the uncomfortable negotiations and intra-actions across disciplines and knowledges (scientific, clinical, lived) were all part of the feminist negotiations of materiality of LEA and RED-S as phenomena, and this research apparatus in particular. Although such events (i.e., conferences, symposiums, working group meetings) might not be considered part of the formal “research apparatus,” the relationships, understandings, and insights offered in and through these moments informed the transdisciplinary project in many unexpected ways. For example, some members of the “research team”

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made initial contact at the first symposium, then proceeding to co-share our research findings at subsequent events (i.e., national symposiums and international conferences). Throughout each of these processes, we were taking into consideration the learnings from the project, as well as past events. A Baradian approach encouraged us to rethink the spacetimematterings of the research apparatus, and illuminated the ways disciplinary boundaries are (re)produced and troubled well beyond the laboratory or interviewing room.

L ocating and Troubling the Boundaries of the Apparatus In her discussion of the boundaries of the research apparatus, Barad (2007) offers the Stern-Gerlach experiment—one of the pivotal experiments that brought quantum mechanics into being—as an example of “gender-and-science-in-the-making” (p. 167). In this case, it was physicist Otto Stern’s desire for (cheap) cigars that unexpectedly contributed to a significant discovery in space quantization. In this experiment, the poor-quality cigars smoked by Stern resulted in sulphurous breath, which “turned silver into easily visible silver sulphide, and thus allowed the scientists to see their results, the silver atom beam on a plate held by Stern in his hands” (Irni, 2010, p. 100). As Barad (2007) explains, the cigar in this experiment is a “condensation,” a “nodal point” of the “workings of other apparatuses, including class, nationalism, economics and gender, all of which are part of this Stern-Gerlach apparatus” (p. 167). This example highlights the ambiguity of research apparatuses and the challenges of fully accounting for them (Irni, 2010): As the example of Otto Stern’s cheap cigar makes quite poignant, taking for granted that the outside boundary of the apparatus ends at some “obvious” (visual) terminus, or that the boundary circumscribes only that set of items we learn to list under “equipment”… makes one susceptible to illusions made of preconceptions, including “the obvious” and “the visible” (Barad, 2007, p. 165).

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The cigar example inspired us to rethink the boundaries of our research apparatus and questioning of our preconceptions as to what human and nonhuman agent/s might impact our results, findings, and meaning making processes. In the remainder of this section we offer an example from our two-­ phased transdisciplinary project that highlights how the dominance of scientific ways of knowing the moving body shaped the research apparatus, almost eclipsing alternative culturally specific ways of knowing female athlete health. During interviews with the Māori and Samoan rugby sevens’ players, it was the athlete voices that became a “nodal point,” prompting us to revisit our own preconceptions as white researchers entangled in a transdisciplinary project steeped in western ways of knowing. In so doing, this example highlights how we came to know the research process itself as part of the apparatus that produces LEA and RED-S as western health phenomena, and our efforts to expand the boundaries within the project and to create space for alternative ways of knowing women’s experiences of menstruation in high-performance sport.

Athlete Voice: A “Nodal Point” in the Sport Science Apparatus Sport science studies (including sport physiology, sport psychology, and sport medicine) are relatively new fields of inquiry (McDonald, 2013), yet they remain highly male dominated in both who conducts the research and who the subjects are of such studies (Costello, Bieuzen, & Bleaky, 2014). Furthermore, it is well known that many sample groups for sport science studies consist of white, male college students, not only because of the ease and accessibility for scientists, but also because such projects are often underpinned by a framework of patriarchal and racialized research design. The sport science apparatus remains highly westernized and patriarchal, thus limiting other ways of knowing sporting, moving, performing bodies. Within this apparatus, the dominant approach to studying LEA, RED-S and menstruation (and amenorrhea) is from a clinical, medical perspective that is void of the social and cultural connections to menstruation (Dusek, 2001; Mountjoy et al., 2014).

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During our transdisciplinary project on LEA and RED-S among the New Zealand women’s rugby sevens team (with a high proportion of Māori and Samoan players), we became critically (and uncomfortably) aware that the project and interviews themselves had been conducted within a particular apparatus that continued to privilege western ways of knowing this health condition (see Thorpe, Brice, & Rolleston, 2020). We had focused so entirely on trying to create space for women’s voices and lived experiences within the male-dominated terrain of sports science, that we had failed to notice that our broader apparatus continued to operate within highly westernized knowledge systems. Despite such framings, culturally significant themes emerged in response to a small number of questions that offered an opportunity for athletes to bring culturally specific ways of knowing nutrition, health, and menstruation into the dialogue. Here we offer a brief example to illustrate the significance of such comments for highlighting the boundaries of our research apparatus and inspiring new strategies to challenge the highly westernized sport science apparatus. While there are differences across Māori culture, it is generally understood that during a woman’s period she is considered tapu (sacred, restricted) and, therefore, must follow various protocols (August, 2005). For example, during their periods Māori women are restricted from entering important spiritual sites such as the urupa (cemetery), the ocean, and other food gathering sites. However, some Indigenous scholars have adopted kaupapa Māori and mana wāhine approaches to challenge the colonial histories of menstruation in Māori culture. In particular, Ngahuia Murphy (2011) examined the stories, ceremonies, and practices regarding menstruation in the pre-colonial Māori world to make a powerful case for menstruation as “a potent site of decolonisation, cultural reclamation, and resistance toward the perpetuation of colonial hegemony” (p. iii; also see August, 2005). Rarely are such cultural ways of knowing menstruation acknowledged within medical, scientific research and practices, including sport science. During interviews, some of the Māori participants revealed distinctive cultural understandings of the menstruating body which they navigated within a highly scientized high-performance sporting environment. For example, Rui noted, “There is an understanding there… I’ve seen girls

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not get in [ice water baths] and do the recovery and everyone is just like ‘Oh yeah, all good, you’ve got your mate’ [period], sort of thing” (emphasis added). Continuing, she adds: “There are times we would use the ocean for recovery; again, there have been girls in the past that haven’t entered the water. It’s not talked about, but it’s just normal… all good.” In such comments we observe a sense of shared knowledge and understanding around cultural traditions and menstruation within the team, but the women rarely speak about menstruation with one another or with the broader support team, and certainly not with the white (typically male) sport scientists and support staff that continue to study their recovery processes. Rather, there seems to be culturally learned, embodied understandings among the women (particularly the Māori athletes) when a fellow player has “her mate” and thus does not enter the water for recovery. Such examples also highlight how the cultural meanings given to menstruation materialize the gendered sporting body in particular ways (e.g., avoiding the use of therapies such as cold water baths or getting in the ocean). Furthermore, such examples offered insights into the subtle ways that players negotiate the medicalization of their bodies with cultural ideology. Put slightly differently, the highly westernized and scientized boundaries constructed around high-performance sport are not impermeable, and Indigenous sportswomen are finding their own—individual and collective—ways to negotiate dominant ways of knowing the body (as highly scientized, medicalized, westernized). In this way, the voices of the Māori athletes were the “sulphurous breath” in this project, an unexpected intra-action that rendered intelligible new understandings of the research apparatus. These athletes had been involved in numerous scientific studies prior to our own, and yet none of these previous studies had revealed the unique cultural knowledges of the athletes as impacting upon their results in any way. This is because within the physical sciences something taken for granted such as the apparatus (and its supposed role in ‘discovering’—rather than ‘constituting’—reality) is typically conceived of as objectively bounded and stable. Even in some of the most reflexive social science research, the apparatus plays a role in framing what we can(not) know. In our transdisciplinary project, we approached the study with the new materialist

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feminist acknowledgement that the research apparatus is unstable and limitless, its edges drawn politically rather than objectively, and its action one of co-creating reality rather than just measuring it. As well as an openness to recognizing the boundaries within our apparatus, we also worked to create space for the athletes’ voices (and this is often a complex negotiation when dealing with elite athletes on tight training regimes, and for whom ‘interviews’ seemed an unconventional scientific method). In such a design, however, it was their voices that exceeded the familiar boundaries of the research apparatus thus triggering our rethinking of apparatus and the ways these boundaries have been produced by western ways of knowing (and producing) women’s sporting bodies. This ‘nodal point’ was also an important reminder of Barad’s understanding of researching phenomena in which we (as researchers) are always entangled. LEA as phenomena is a “specific intra-action of an ‘object’ and the ‘measuring agencies’ and thus, the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them” (Barad, 2007, p.  128). Various intra-actions of LEA would have been unnoticed were it not for the “nodal point” and the continued realization that we are never outside the apparatus. Researching phenomena thus becomes “a methodological practice of continuously questioning the effects of the way we research, on the knowledges we produce” (Barad, 2007, p. 381). With such knowledge also comes a responsibility to do research differently. Recognizing such limits, we sought to trouble these boundaries by cultivating a cross-cultural collaboration with Māori health researcher Dr Anna Rolleston, who proceeded to challenge us on our assumptions, pushing us to rethink particular lines of questioning, and providing critical cultural knowledge as we collectively made meaning of the rich, nuanced, and powerful insights so generously shared by the players. In so doing, we also drew upon the foundational work of Harding (1994, 2011) and feminist postcolonial science scholars (Harding, 2006, 2008; Schnabel, 2014), in dialogue with feminist Indigenous scholars of Aotearoa New Zealand (Palmer & Masters, 2010; Simmonds, 2011; Smith, 1999/2012), to acknowledge the limits of the sport science apparatus, and to understand how Māori (and Samoan) wāhine athletes navigate cultural ways of knowing within dominant, western-science

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apparatus of health, sport, and the biological body (see Thorpe, Brice, & Rolleston, 2020). Through this Baradian-inspired approach to transdisciplinarity, we came to understand how our research process itself was part of the apparatus that (re)produces LEA as a western phenomenon, and to revise our practices through a cross-cultural collaboration. Whereas the transdisciplinary collaboration prompted us to read the disciplines through each other, this cross-cultural partnership enabled us to begin the process of learning to read western and Indigenous knowledges together as well. Importantly, it was only with such knowledge that we could begin to recognize the need for ongoing configurations that continue to open up the possibilities of knowing elite female athlete health differently. Indeed, future research on female athlete health would do well to ensure Indigenous collaborators are present from the beginning of such projects. As Kim TallBear (2018), a Dakota social scientist working in the bio-­ sciences, claims “there are some really important—not new voices—but new-to-having-a-real-voice-in-the-academy voices that have important insights to offer” (p.  5). This is certainly the case in sport science and research on female athlete health, and further opportunities should be created to read Indigenous and western knowledges of women’s moving bodies through each other.

The Transdisciplinary Research Apparatus Revisited Although some remain highly sceptical that our scientist colleagues are capable of questioning the dominance of positivism, this transdisciplinary project offers a more hopeful interpretation of the possibilities of new materialist engagement of the intra-actions of the sciences and social sciences. Indeed, the concept of apparatus drew our attention to the intra-actions between humans and nonhumans throughout the process, and the boundaries that were being produced and challenged through everyday power relations and dynamics. As previously noted, disciplinary boundaries were (re)constructed in subtle ways, but over a period of two years, some of our sport scientist colleagues became more familiar with our methods, language, and lines of questioning. For example, over the

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course of this project we witnessed some of our sport scientist colleagues increasingly referring to the importance of the “sport culture,” with some even taking up terms such as “power” and “discourse.” Some also came to advocate (publicly in some cases) the value of sociological approaches, as well as the need to continue the hard work of crossing disciplinary borders. For example, Stacy Sims, our leading science collaborator, reflected on her experiences within the transdisciplinary project: I was excited to start this project because I was so tired of the siloed approach to female athlete performance and health. As a physiologist, I can see the numbers and biology of what is happening across injury/illness/ adaptation/performance, and anecdotally I know there is an internal story that drives certain behaviors and attitudes towards food, training, performance, and motivation. However, in the sports science/medical field, no one really steps outside their expertise to find the holistic picture. Finally being able to work with a sociologist who also has a passion and drive to complete the picture gave this project depth and nuances that it would not have had if it were just driven by the typical sports science/medical team. For me, being exposed, from a true research sense, to language nuances, cultural considerations, and insight into the drive of each athlete was so important. I now talk about it at every presentation/lecture, and on my social media/online courses to really illustrate how important the socio-­ cultural is to understand the context of the athlete.

Stacy has become an important ally in challenging the status quo within sport science, regularly advocating for, and creating, opportunities for the sociologists to join (science dominated) discussions about female athlete health. Through our regular team meetings with the sport scientists and nutritionists, and the highly valuable cross-cultural collaboration, we made some important progress in our relationships with our sport scientist colleagues that had a direct impact on their practices. For example, our discussion of the finding that Māori and Samoan players were making meaning of menstruation (and nutrition) in culturally distinctive ways led to considerable change in the practices by the team nutritionist. In his own words:

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From the first 18 months of our data collection we were at the perfect time with a new season approaching to start changing the language and create a strong cultural theme around nutrition. From the feedback from the social components of this study we learnt of how powerful the girls’ connection was to our cultural themes. With the support of the coaches we have been able to introduce our nutrition / energy theme as part of our overall theming for the team. We are now connecting it back to this central cultural theme that the girls connect and identify with.

Without prompting, he took the socio-cultural findings to the rugby sevens’ leadership team where he was encouraged to design a culturally specific program using the metaphor of the waka—Māori canoe—to explain LEA and the importance of individual wāhine fuelling their own bodies efficiently to be able to contribute to the power, strength, and journey of the waka (or team). Witnessing the team nutritionist present this approach at the 2019 National Sports Medicine conference, and acknowledging the important contribution of our socio-cultural research in helping design this approach, was possibly one of the highlights of this project to date. These are small, but important, examples of the potential of a Baradian approach to transdisciplinarity that focuses as much on the research activities as on the intra-actions between humans and nonhumans, and on the boundaries being constructed and negotiated through such practices and relations. In particular, the waka metaphor was the result of the diffractive processes of reading different disciplines, as well as westernized and Indigenous knowledges, through each other. Not dissimilar from the Stern-Gerlach experiment, it was the “sulphurous breath”—an unexpected intra-action within the research apparatus—that prompted us to identify and renegotiate the boundaries within the project, and question the dominance of western ways of knowing the female athlete health phenomena. Such questioning has led to new practices, with the embrace of Indigenous knowledge among the support team working to further support a culturally diverse team that continues to dominate on the global stage.

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F inal Thoughts: Rethinking Disciplinary Boundaries with New Materialisms In this chapter we worked with Barad’s agential realism and her concept of the apparatus to explore the opportunities for conducting new materialist inspired transdisciplinary research. We provided a case study from our research on RED-S to showcase our own challenges, opportunities, and some of the successes we experienced working with scholars from other disciplines. Our transdisciplinary project started with a commitment to step together into the unknown, to embrace the uncertainties, and to find and work through the points of tension. It was particularly our engagement with Barad’s theory of agential realism and her concept of the apparatus that drew our attention to the intra-actions between humans and nonhumans throughout the process, and the boundaries that were being produced and challenged through everyday relations. Perhaps most importantly, this framework also revealed what the sport science apparatus (of which we are an inextricable part) does to women’s sporting bodies, and particularly non-western women’s bodies. This western apparatus reproduces LEA as scientific phenomena, silencing women’s cultural understandings of menstruation and, in doing so, ignoring the very real materialization of culture in sporting practices. In contrast to common understandings of transdisciplinary research as the ‘integration’ of disciplinary knowledges, a Baradian approach to transdisciplinarity encourages new noticings of the ways boundaries are reproduced and challenged in the processes of doing research. As illustrated with our example, a Baradian approach to transdisciplinary research on female athlete health prompted us to recognize the research apparatus as unstable and limitless, its edges drawn politically rather than objectively. More than drawing our attention to our own disciplinary assumptions and positionality within the project, a Baradian approach to transdisciplinarity helped us acknowledge the power differences between the sciences and social sciences in high-performance sport research environments, as well as the complex relations between matter and culture, and human and nonhuman objects, in LEA as health phenomena.

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In this way, a Baradian approach to transdisciplinarity is also an important stepping stone towards response-ability (Barad, 2007)—an “ability to respond and therefore a responsibility to act, together even if through fluid, fleeting, and constantly revised moments in motion” (Berbary, 2020, p. 3). Engaging with Barad’s agential realism encourages feminist scholars to pay close attention to the multiple and diverse ways that boundaries are constructed (through language and actions) at various stages in a research process, and across different spaces and places (i.e., ethics applications, team meetings, conferences), as well as the small acts of mutual understanding and respect that can lead to new opportunities to challenge dominant disciplinary ways of knowing. Perhaps, it is only with such understanding and commitment that we can begin to fully imagine Barad’s ontological notion of phenomena, and the challenges and opportunities of futurist health, sport and physical cultural research that goes beyond disciplines. In sum, a Baradian approach to transdisciplinarity is far from a naïve embrace of the sciences, but rather a carefully considered investigation of the possibilities and challenges of working across disciplines. In this chapter we identified (at least) three key ways that Barad’s concept of apparatus encouraged us to rethink transdisciplinary research: (1) reading different fields through each other; (2) intra-actions and the everyday performativity of disciplinary boundaries; and (3) locating and troubling the boundaries of the apparatus. The Baradian-inspired approach to transdisciplinary research helped us find new ways to “see” the boundaries in our own research apparatus and in the phenomena we study, and to develop strategies to trouble such boundaries. Inspired by Barad’s concept of apparatus, we have each become more aware of our own disciplinary assumptions, the blind-spots in our projects, and the value in new materialist informed “transdisciplinary approaches to understanding, working with, and intervening in, moving bodies” (Heywood, 2017, p. 49). We hope this chapter highlights the many possibilities in feminist new materialisms for encouraging new ways of working across disciplines that remind us to pay attention to the fine details; the intra-actions of human and nonhuman objects; and the practices, performativities, and politics of boundary construction. New materialist approaches to

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transdisciplinary research offer new opportunities for rethinking, challenging, and expanding the boundaries of our work.

Pedagogical Possibilities In this group activity students are given the opportunity to explore, understand, and empathize with the challenges of working across disciplines. They are also offered opportunities to reflect on the processes and politics that occur when different disciplinary knowledge are brought into dialogue: 1. Students are asked (or arranged) into groups of three to five. The group should brainstorm and choose a sport, exercise, or health-­ related topic that they will all work on over the coming weeks. These could be similar topics to those offered in Chap. 5 (i.e., diabetes, concussion, ACL injury, disordered eating, exercise addiction, substance abuse), or something different. 2. Within each group, students should randomly assign each member one of the following disciplinary approaches: psychology, physiology, sociology, medicine and/or another scientific discipline that specializes in their chosen topic. Each student then spends one to two weeks immersing themselves in the discipline-specific knowledge on this topic, and writing up 800–1000 words on the key approaches and findings from this literature. Through this activity, they should become familiar with the dominant language, key concepts, and key contributors, and thus become a ‘representative’ for this disciplinary way of knowing this topic. They might opt to watch video talks of disciplinary experts talking on this topic, to help them ‘embody’ discipline-­ specific ways of knowing. 3. The group then comes back together and spends time sharing what they have learned about this topic from their disciplinary perspectives. They are then asked to try to work together to design new transdisciplinary ways of researching and/or supporting a­thletes/patients/clients suffering from this condition. They may represent this ‘new’ transdisciplinary approach either via a case study, or a new ‘model’ for

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working differently. Ask them to consider: Where would they try to ‘publish’ their model/approach? Who would be interested in this new approach, and who might find it confronting/challenging? Who might resist such new ways of knowing this condition? 4. Finally, ask the students to individually write a short reflective piece on some of the challenges and tensions they experienced within the group as they worked on bringing the different knowledge sets together. What disciplinary ways of knowing dominated the dialogue? What strategies and practices did they (and the group) develop to overcome these tensions, and to work together across disciplinary boundaries? How did they create opportunities to challenge disciplinary boundaries? What did they learn (i.e., about themselves, disciplines, the topic) from this process?

7 Feminist Ethics, the Environment, and Vital Respondings

With a global pandemic, the expansive bushfires in Australia, the polar ice caps melting at exponential rates, the Amazon rainforests being destroyed every day, and a range of other catastrophic events occurring almost simultaneously, it should come as no surprise that human relationships with the environment are among the most pressing issues facing society today. Climate change has resulted in a series of dangerous and long-lasting consequences impacting all human and nonhuman life on planet earth. Scientists claim that we have entered the Sixth Greatest Extinction described as a “biological annihilation” of wildlife (Carrington, 2017), with billions of populations of animals becoming extinct at a quicker rate than ever before. Over 97% of peer-reviewed journal articles on climate change argue that such changes are occurring primarily because of human activity, and particularly our increased use of fossil fuels, deforestation, and agriculture (Causes of Climate, no date). Recognizing the urgency of this situation, social scientists are increasingly questioning the role of western-based human-centred ideologies and how the anthropocentric attitude of many (not all) cultures has contributed to our current condition (Fox & Alldred, 2016b; Walker, 2005). Within this anthropocentric lens, human desires and needs have for too long been placed at the highest level © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Thorpe et al., Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness, New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7_7

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of importance, with the environment seen as “conceptually subordinate to society” (Walker, 2005, p. 80). Prioritizing humans over multispecies and more-than-human understandings has played a major role in producing the dire situation facing life on planet earth. In response to environmental threats and rising critique of anthropocentric views, various scholars are increasingly calling for research approaches that recognize the vital and entangled interconnections between humans, nonhumans, and the environment. Of course, these are arguments that have been posed by Indigenous scholars for decades (if not centuries), and more recently by ecofeminists and environmental humanities scholars. Building upon and extending such work, new materialist approaches not only emphasize relationality, but also see matter (and the environment) as agentic. Posthumanist approaches towards the environment reject “fantasies of human mastery,” instead affirming the “entanglement of humans with nonhuman animals, vegetables, and minerals” (Tompkins, 2016, p. 2). Some argue that such understandings may contribute to revised environmental ethics and justice frameworks, and “aid in the expansion of care and concern beyond the human” (Tompkins, 2016, p.  2). For some, such concerns have led to new methodological approaches that seek to give voice to (or con-verse with) nonhuman subjects within research projects. For example, in imagining the possibilities of morethan-human participatory methods, Bastian (2017) argues that “issues like climate change, biodiversity loss and increasing rates of extinction” require us to critically and urgently explore “whether the injunctions of Western anthropocentrism might have unnecessarily restricted how participation is imagined,” and to seek new theories and methods that “enable researchers to ask ‘what matters’ to nonhumans” (p. 19). In this chapter, we explore the potential of using new materialisms to think about the environment from a non-anthropocentric view. We begin by exploring some of the parallels and divergences of new materialist approaches to the environment with important contributions from Indigenous knowledges, environmental humanities, and feminist theory. This is followed by a review of research focused on sport and the environment. The second half of the chapter then explores the challenges of representation in new materialist scholarship. Here we provide an overview

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of the important work being done by feminist and environmental new materialists in exploring ethical issues of representing nonhumans and advancing creative representational styles. We then offer two examples from our own new materialist-inspired collaborative writing experiment during the Australian bushfires and the global COVID-19 pandemic. In each case, our modes of ‘poetic inquiry’ enabled vital respondings to the entangled relationalities of moving bodies with the environment in times of crisis, and highlight the value in more-than-­human research-creation practices for reenvisioning feminist ethics.

 he Environment, New Materialisms, T and Feminist Theory Over recent decades, scholars working in (post)colonial settings have increasingly been calling for more-than-human and posthuman approaches to help shift the gaze beyond Anglo-European ways of knowing the world, including the complex and vital relationships between human and nonhuman agents and the environment. For some, new materialisms articulate with onto-epistemologies that “stand in opposition to mainstream Euro-Western philosophy and scholarship (specifically humanism and nature/culture dualism)” (Newman, Thorpe, & Andrews, 2020b, p. 14; also see Sundberg, 2014; Todd, 2016; Tompkins, 2016). Acknowledging that Indigenous communities, environmental humanities scholars, and feminist theorists have each advanced complex understandings of the relationships between humans and the natural environment, we begin this section with a brief overview of these important contributions explaining how new materialisms mirror and, in some cases, extend such lines of thought.

Indigenous Ways of Knowing Scholars have noted the similarities between new materialisms with some First Nation and Indigenous knowledge traditions (Tompkins, 2016, see also Sundberg, 2014; Todd, 2016). Indeed, some of the “new” in new

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materialisms is in fact well established in Indigenous knowledges across the globe, particularly regarding human relationships with the environment (Bignall, Hemming, & Rigney, 2016; Newman, Thorpe, & Andrews 2020b; Rosiek & Snyder, 2018; Rosiek, Snyder, & Pratt, 2020; Roy & Subramaniam, 2016; Pringle, 2020). There are many notable parallels: both Indigenous and new materialist and more-than-human approaches value the vitalism of nonhuman matter, privilege ecocentrism over anthropocentrism, and have worked to “challenge dualistic understandings of nature society relationships” (Thomas, 2015, p. 975). For those of us embarking on new materialisms, we must begin with a deep consideration of the Indigenous knowledges and anticolonial world views that came long before (Todd, 2016). While some reject new materialisms for its lack of acknowledgement of “vitalist Indigenous cosmologies,” others see opportunities for more-­ than-­human theorists “to work in solidarity with Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous people to support and extend political spaces for relational ethics with nonhumans” (Thomas, 2015, p. 976). For example, working in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, Thomas (2015) advocates Indigenous more-than-human (MTH) approaches that examine the “considerable synergies” between more-than-human theorists’ and Indigenous understandings of nonhuman agency and kinship. She examines how Ngāi Tahu (a Māori tribe) advocated for the Hurunui River as lively and agentic, thus successfully expanding their catchment to include the river. In her observations of this process, she concludes that “there are generative possibilities for MTH theorists to work alongside Indigenous communities and carve political space for more people to advocate for a relational ethics” (Thomas, 2015, p. 974). In a different context, Kim TallBear (2018), a Dakota social scientist working in the biosciences, brings together feminist, queer, and Indigenous approaches to understanding technoscience and the environment. In so doing, however, she acknowledges that bringing such worldviews together and working across disciplines requires deep consideration into what is similar and different, as well as whose voices are being prioritized in such entanglements: “The academy is now being infiltrated by non-Indigenous voices articulating the idea that life/not life is too binary and restrictive. This indicates greater scope at this moment in history for

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bringing Indigenous voices to the conversational table” (p. 5). We strongly concur, and recognize that new materialist and more-than-human theory not only needs to acknowledge the pre-colonial genealogies of some of its key tenets, but also to work to ensure Indigenous and queer voices are amplified in such discussions.

Environmental Humanities In contrast to pre-colonial Indigenous ways of knowing the environment, the field of environmental humanities is a more recent development emerging in the past decade as more scholars are recognizing the human influence on environmental degradation (increasing carbon dioxide levels, biodiversity loss, ocean acidity) and the desperate need to develop policies, ideas, and values to reduce environmental harm (Sörlin, 2012). The impact of the human on the environment has some scholars arguing for the “need to re-frame global environmental change issues fundamentally as social and human challenges, rather than just environmental issues” (Jäger et al., 2011, p. 5). Very broadly, environmental humanities are defined as a multidisciplinary field and a collection of “multifaceted scholarly approaches that understand environmental challenges as inextricable from social, cultural, and human factors” (Neimanis, Åsberg, & Hedrén, 2015, p.  70). Scholars working within the environmental humanities stem from philosophy, literature, anthropology, geography, feminist, eco-cultural studies, and many more humanities-based disciplines (Alaimo, 2010b; Heise, 2017; Neimanis, 2017; Yusoff & Jennifer, 2011). Of central concern for environmental humanities scholars is the belief that ideologies, values, and meanings, both shape and are shaped by the environment (Neimanis et al., 2015). The work in this field increasingly echoes and overlaps with new materialist theory. For example, in a paper mapping the developments and innovations in environmental humanities, Bergthaller et al. (2014) advocate new materialist and material feminist approaches to bodies, things, animality, and agency:

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New materialists enrich the environmental justice framework by questioning the tendency to gloss over the agency of matter in our everyday lives. While the ethical and political consequences of acknowledging the agency of things (Styrofoam cups, birch trees, coal dust) remain to be spelled out (and are unlikely to be comforting), such a view clearly posits new forms of analysis and enables new ways of narrating environmental history, especially the history of environmental injustice (p. 271).

The recent Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities also includes a series of works on posthumanism and multispecies communities (Heise, Christensen, & Niemann, 2017). Similarly, environmental education researchers are increasingly exploring the potential of new materialist and posthuman approaches. For example, writing with her undergraduate social science class, Verlie identifies the value in Barad’s concept of intra-action for encouraging both teachers and students to develop “less anthropocentric and more relationally attuned climate change ‘response-abilities’” (Verlie & CCR 15, 2018, p. 1). Offering a series of empirical examples resulting from her efforts to decentre the human from climate pedagogies, the authors show that ‘climate intra-­actions’ can “enable us to attend to how human and more-than-human identities change through engagement with climate change; how our human capacities to affect climate emerge through acting-with more-­than-­human entanglements; and thus how unanticipated, different actions can emerge in climate change education” (p. 1). With the development of posthumanist strands of thought in the humanities and social sciences over the last few decades, the environmental humanities continue to be “defined by productive conceptual tension between humans’ agency as a species and the inequalities that shape and constrain the agencies of different kinds of humans, on one hand, and between human and nonhuman forms of agency, on the other” (Heise, 2017, p. 6). Within the environmental humanities, feminists have played an important role in navigating these tensions by pursuing new lines of questioning, modes of analysis and representation styles, and ethical and

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political considerations for more just and sustainable futures (Sandilands, 2017).

F eminist Theory and the Environment: Debates and Divergences For decades, ecofeminists and environmental feminists have insisted that feminism needs to take seriously the materiality of the more-than-human world. Ecofeminists recognize the strong connections and systems of domination and oppression between women, humanity, and the environment. They stress the need to reorient away from primarily humanist systems of domination over the environment, and to see the ways in which this domineering ontology translates into other factions of social life (Phillips & Rumens, 2016). Recently, feminist environmental scholars have turned to exploring extreme events (i.e., droughts, bush fires) and “questionable human practices” as “environmentally legible symptoms of bigger and deeper socio-political structures and ongoing processes: colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, amongst them” (Hamilton & Neimanis, 2020, p. 386). In their special issue focused on the project of feminist environmental humanities, Hamilton and Neimanis (2020) make a case that feminists are well positioned to address the challenges facing the environment, particularly with our foundation in understandings of inequality, justice, and difference. For them, feminist environmental humanities research must begin with “the inextricability of these propositions, both nature and culture and feminism and environmental humanities,” and be attentive to the “intersectional materialisations of power and privilege” that are central to “understanding current species privilege and environmental exploitation” (p. 387). Similarly, Cielemęcka and Åsberg (2019) and contributors to their special issue on toxic embodiment and feminist environmental humanities examine “variously situated bodies, land- and waterscapes and their naturalcultural interactions with toxicity” (p. 101). The collection is focused on exploring the “ways toxic embodiment disturbs or aligns with multiple boundaries of sexes, generations, races, geographies, nationstates, and species” (p. 103).

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Contemporary approaches to feminist environmental humanities are also increasingly located at the intersection of feminist and Indigenous knowledges. For example, at an Australian feminist festival held in 2019, Aboriginal scholar of the Goenpul tribe (part of the Quandamooka nation on Stradbroke Island in Queensland) and activist for Indigenous rights, Aileen Moreton-Robinson reiterated the importance of using Indigenous ways of knowing: “We will not survive while we continually think we are worth more than every other living thing. Lots of different cultures have relationships with non-human others. The Earth is not an inert thing. Once you have a concept of that, everything is alive” (Gorman & Delaney, 2019). She concluded by urging audiences to draw from Indigenous ways of knowing as they live with nature. Among feminists and Indigenous scholars alike, there seems to be a growing recognition that “nature can no longer be imagined as a pliable resource for industrial production or social construction,” but rather “nature is agentic… it acts and those actions have consequences for both the human and nonhuman world” (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008b, p. 4). It is here that new materialisms offer a valuable contribution to such pressing discussions, debates, ethical actions, and political activism.

 ew Materialisms, Feminist Theory, N and the Environment Today, a growing number of new materialist scholars are providing theoretical tools and ideas for how to think about the environment through a posthumanist lens. In so doing, they are building upon a long lineage of Indigenous ways of knowing, environmental humanities, and ecofeminism (Alaimo, 2016; Bennett, 2010b; Casselot, 2016; Gough & Whitehouse, 2018; Mickey & Vakoch, 2018; Schmidt, 2013; Sonu & Snaza, 2015). While there are a host of influential theorists within new materialisms, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Stacy Alaimo  have been particularly instrumental in advancing our thinking about human-­ environment relations. Feminist biologist and social theorist Donna Haraway has been arguing for different conceptualizations of the nature/

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culture relationship since the 1980s. Noting that humans too often reinforce the binary between nature and culture where nature becomes the “Other”, she writes that we need to “find another relationship to nature besides reification, possession, appropriation and nostalgia” (Haraway, 1992, p. 65). Throughout Haraway’s work she emphasizes the need to transgress boundaries between nature/culture, human/‘Other’ and recognize that humans and the environment are “inextricably coterminous in all bodies” (Fox & Alldred, 2019, p. 2). Haraway’s early work has been highly influential not only for the development of new materialist theory, but also rethinking human relationships with the environment. Feminist philosopher, Rosi Braidotti (2013) builds upon Haraway to develop a posthumanist approach to environmentalism that seeks to deconstruct “species supremacy” (p.  51). In so doing, she “inflicts a blow to any notion of human nature, anthropos and bios, as categorically distinct from the life of animals and non-humans” (p.  51). Braidotti’s posthumanism rests on a sense of “inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of self-centered individualism” (Fullagar, 2017, p.  39). Within posthumanism, there is the recognition of the “affirmative bond that locates the subject in all flow of relations with multiple others” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 39). Decentring individual experience and humanism creates space to recognize nonhuman matter and understand it as “lively, intelligent and self-organizing, not opposed to culture but continuous with it” (Fox & Alldred, 2018a, p. 8). Braidotti’s posthumanist approach has been crucial to scholars looking for ways to account for humanity that do not privilege humanist ways of knowing or reinforce anthropocentric views. Inspired by the writings of new materialist and posthuman theorists such as Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, there have been a handful of scholars who have written explicitly about the potential of using new materialisms for reimagining ways of knowing and thinking about the environment (Bauman, 2015; Casselot, 2016; Gough & Whitehouse, 2018). Arguably one of the most prominent scholars working at the crossroads of materialism, environmentalism, and feminism, is American environmental humanities professor, Stacy Alaimo (1994, 2010a, 2016,

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2019). Working from a primarily theoretical standpoint, her work echoes other scholars with an emphasis on the need to explore “the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world, and at the same time, acknowledging that material agency necessitates more capacious epistemologies” (Alaimo, 2010a, p. 2). While writing about the interconnection between humans, feminism, and the environment, she has also addressed the colonialist and imperialist notions embedded within some feminist environmental humanities (Alaimo, 2019). In discussions and discourses around the impact of the “human” on climate change, Alaimo (2019) identifies the need to rethink “Who is the human here?” (p. 3). She is rightly concerned that using a generic “we” or “humanity,” homogenizes the human race and fails to account for the ways in which economic disparities, colonialism, privilege, and  nationality play a role in the destruction of the planet and ignores the very unequal effects climate change will have on different people. The questioning of “humanity” coupled with an emphasis on the vitality and agentic capacities of nature have direct implications for how we conceive of environmental ethics and justice. Building upon the work of Catriona Sandilands (1999) and other feminist environmental philosophers, Alaimo (2008) argues that understanding the “ongoing interactions of the body and its environment” (Gatens, 1996, p. 57) demands ethical knowledge practices that “emerge from the multiple entanglements of inter- and intra-connected being/ doing/knowings” (p. 26). Others also see the potential in new materialist theory, more-than-­ human, and multispecies approaches for revisioning environmental justice. Responding to the devastation of the recent Australian bushfires, Celermajer and colleagues (2020) engage in a critical dialogue to consider “the puzzle of who or what, within this ‘multispecies world’—animals, microorganisms, forests, rivers, soils, and more—ought to fall within the ambit of justice” (p. 4). Spurred by feminist, antiracist, and anticolonial critiques of humanism, the group explores a series of ethical and philosophical questions as to the very (im)possibilities of a multispecies justice. In so doing, they acknowledge that “who has personhood, and even who is alive” are understood in many different ways within different human groups and within different life-worlds, and while “we (in

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the full multispecies interpellation of this pronoun) are both all in this together and we are all in this together in very different ways” (Celermajer et al., 2020, p. 26; Braidotti, 2019b; Neimanis, 2017). With an emphasis on relationality and connection, agency and assemblages, and difference, new materialist theory can contribute to ways of knowing that de-­ privilege the human, creating space for nonhuman matter and multispecies, and thus alternative political and ethical orientations.

Sport, the Environment, and New Materialisms Similar to other fields, scholars working within sport and physical cultural studies have explored the overlap between moving bodies and the environment using an array of theoretical and methodological approaches (Bunds & Casper, 2018; Karamichas, 2013; Lenskyj, 1998; McCullough & Kellison, 2017; Rolando, Caprio, Rinaldi, & Ellena, 2006; Schaffner, 2009; Wheeler & Nauright, 2006). More recently, scholars have begun using new materialist ontological principles to explore the intra-actions between sport and the environment (Evers, 2019a; King, 2020; McDonald & Sterling, 2020; Millington & Wilson, 2017; Tuana, 2008). In this section, we briefly review some of the most common approaches to study the relationship between sport and environment, before exploring how some are turning to new materialisms to build upon and extend this body of literature (see Thorpe, Brice, & Clark, 2020). There is not enough space in this chapter to acknowledge the large body of work that has examined the relationship between sport and the environment. However, one popular area of research has been on the destructive impact of mega-sporting events (and event structures) on the environment. Scholars have looked at the ways events destroy ecosystems by examining the harmful impact of increased tourism (i.e., more waste and transportation needs), the increased carbon footprint of events, and other long-lasting environmental impacts (Ahmed & Pretorius, 2010; Collins, Jones, & Munday, 2009; Hayes & Karamichas, 2012; Karamichas, 2013; Lesjø & Gulbrandsen, 2017). Other scholars come to the topic from a sports policy perspective, examining the ways sporting organizations and departments have developed (and often failed) to

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implement environmental sustainability policies (Casper & Pfahl, 2015; Collins & Flynn, 2008; Trendafilova, Babiak, & Heinze, 2013). In a different vein, various researchers have discussed the close relationship outdoor, lifestyle, and action sport participants have with the natural environment and how it can lead to heightened ‘ecological sensibilities’ (Olive, 2016) or ‘ecocentricity’ (Brymer & Gray, 2010; see also Booth, 2020a; Humberstone, 2011; Stoddart, 2012;  Wheaton 2020). Some are extending such research by prioritising Indigenous relationships with oceans, mountains, and other natural environments, and critiquing the longstanding and ongoing damage caused by settler colonialism and contemporary western-derived recreation and tourism practices (Laurendeau, 2020; Olive, 2019; Waiti & Awatere, 2019; Wheaton, Waiti, Cosgriff & Burrows, 2019). Although sport scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance of studying the impact of sports (i.e., recreational participation, mass events, mega events) on the environment, they typically maintain a binary between nature and culture, with the environment seen primarily as a backdrop of human activity. With the growth of environmental humanities and more-than-human theories, however, some sport scholars are exploring more relational understandings of humans and nature as inextricably connected. Offering a refreshing extension from literature exploring the connection between the environment and mega-events, McDonald and Sterling (2020) use new materialisms to rethink the ideas around athletes, the environment, and the “troubled” waterways (beaches, lagoons, bays) of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic games in Brazil. During the 2016 games, there was a great amount of news coverage about the polluted waterways of Brazil and the impact this would have on athletes, tourists, and the games, more broadly. While acknowledging this important coverage, McDonald and Sterling (2020) argue that it comes from a purely anthropocentric viewpoint. They instead focus on the  intra-actions  of water with both humans and nonhumans (marine life, pollutants, bacteria). Taking inspiration from feminist new materialist scholarship, they explore the polluted waters of the games as “an ongoing, interconnected, ethical, and onto-epistemological process,” within which “human bodies are entangled with multiple non- and more-than human bodies”

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(p.  296–297). In a similar vein to McDonald and Sterling (2020), Millington and Wilson (2017) discuss the development of the Trump Golf Course in Scotland with a focus on sand dunes. Challenging the anthropocentrism of sporting practices and much critical sport scholarship, they ask readers to consider sand dunes as active players alongside people such as Donald Trump and sporting organizations. Other scholars have also focused on nonhuman matter as a way to think differently about the impact of sporting participation and consumption practices on and with animals (King, 2020; Atkinson, 2014). In so doing, some sport scholars are engaging with inter- and multi-­ species approaches to explore human-animal relationships in sport, including horses (e.g., Dashper, 2017; Linghede, 2019) and canines (e.g., Merchant, 2020). Adopting a different approach, King (2020) conducts a new materialist, posthumanist exploration into the environmental impact of the increased animal protein powder consumption by fitness enthusiasts. Beginning with an understanding of animal protein as a “dynamic and lively material-discursive subject” (p. 202), King (2020) became increasingly interested in what it “does to humans and other life forms as it circulates in and through diffuse assemblage of bodies and environments” (p.  202). Therefore, she traced the development and entanglements of protein powder showcasing the harmful environmental impact of this increasingly popular fitness practice. In proposing a multispecies analysis of (non)human actors in contemporary dietary and exercise-­based regimes, she offers a highly original and important account of the “complex and dispersed forms and trajectories of more-than-­ human physical culture” (King, 2020, p. 204; also see King and Weedon, 2020a, 2020b). In his chapter in the same anthology, Booth (2020b) explores the potential in new materialist approaches for understanding beaches. He argues that social constructionist approaches are typically silent about the ways in which we understand and interact with the material dimensions of beaches—sand, ocean, surf, weather, climate, geomorphology, geology. He begins by posing the question as to whether an “interactionist ontology that underscores the entanglement of corporeal and geomatter [can] give new meaning to physical cultures such as surfbathing and

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surfing?” (p. 261). He then proceeds to use the case study of Bondi Beach, one of Australia’s best-known playgrounds, to reconceptualize the material realities of the beach. He concludes by arguing that such thinking may foster a new, more productive politics of physical and cultural pursuits in environmentally vulnerable spaces. For Booth, such optimism and new ethics of care are timely and much needed as “concoctions of corporeal and manufactured waste, including heavy metals and pesticides, and biomatter such as bacteria and viruses” (p. 261) increasingly flow into bays and harbours around the world, polluting human and nonhuman bodies and destroying ecosystems. Similar to Booth (2020), cultural studies scholar, Evers (2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2019d) has written about the connection between surfing, the environment, and new materialisms. Along with writing for various academic journals and surfing media, Evers embraces creative experimental methods and performance art to think through the various connections and assemblages between the environment and leisure activities, particularly surfing and pollution. In an effort to disseminate such ideas more widely, Evers and colleagues have developed a project titled Polluted Leisure (see www.pollutedleisure.com) with an aim to explore “how we can better understand and respond to assemblages of pollution and leisure?” (n.p.). Through films, art exhibitions, journal articles, book chapters, and online blogs, Evers argues that we need to take a posthumanist, material-social approach to recognize how humans intra-act with morethan-human worlds—pollution, capitalism, and environmental crises. In line with other new materialist scholars, Evers confronts the climate crisis in a manner that emphasizes the dynamism of nonhuman matter (waterways) and a need to move away from anthropocentric ways of understanding the world. However, unlike many other sport scholars, he teases at the boundaries of presentation using innovative methodologies (i.e., wet ethnography) and creative performative dissemination styles (i.e., art exhibitions). Taking inspiration from this long line of environmental thinking and activism, and looking towards more creative approaches to “represent” ways of knowing, in the remainder of the chapter we offer examples from our own new materialist-inspired performative collaborative writing experiment.

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 ew Materialisms, Representation, N and Ethics: Moving Bodies and Environmental Entanglements In the remainder of this chapter we explore creative, ‘postpresentational’ performative writing styles to think about  our human and nonhuman environmental entanglements and ideas around bodily boundaries in times of environmental crisis. In the final months of writing this book, we experienced the Australian bush fires of early 2020, closely followed by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Somewhat inevitably given our deep immersion in new materialisms, our individual and collective ways of knowing and experiencing these events were shaped by the theories and concepts we had been reading, writing, and living with for many months prior. But like any social theory, engaging with new materialisms did not explicitly or immediately yield clear answers or solutions as to how to make meaning of these complex and deeply unsettling events, or how to respond. Like millions of others living through these times, we experienced many encounters of frustration, struggle, anxiety, and fear (Braidotti, 2020). Given the deep entanglement between the personal and professional, we wondered what thinking with new materialisms might offer at this time, how it might enable new ways of responding to the world around us. Thus, we found ourselves exploring the creative possibilities of postqualitative-inspired ‘poetic inquiry’ to support our meaning making (Lupton, 2019b, 2020; St. Pierre 2011, 2015). In particular, we took seriously new materialist critiques of representation and MacLure’s (2013a) call for approaches that involve creative “research practices capable of engaging the materiality of language itself ” (p. 658). We begin by signposting important questions, tensions, and developments in feminist new materialist approaches to representation, including those focused on bodies and health, as well as those exploring the (im)possibilities of representing nature.

New Materialisms and the Ethics of Representation New materialist scholars are increasingly considering the challenges of representation that go beyond text, language, and the human. In so

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doing, many are experimenting with different ways to represent their research that accounts for the materiality of the phenomenon under investigation (MacLure, 2013a, 2013b; Dierckx, Hannes, & Zaman 2020; Fullagar, 2020; Hickey-Moody, Palmer, and Sayers, 2016; McKnight, 2016; also see Chap. 2). One approach has been the use of poetry and creative writing that disrupts traditional linguist representational patterns and “bring[s] into view the non-human and human entanglement of agency” (Fullagar, 2020, p. 181). We appreciate the creative efforts of feminist and new materialist scholars who are embracing performative writing styles to offer alternative representations of their research ‘findings.’ For example, drawing upon the work of St. Pierre (2011) and Jackson and Mazzei (2013), Fullagar (2020) “pursued the analytic possibilities informed by postqualitative inquiry” (p. 180) in her research on the materiality of movement in women’s accounts of recovery from depression. After organizing data from interviews with 80 Australian women about their experiences of depression, she then turned to a new materialist-inspired “postpresentational approach” using poetry that “attends to the forces of affect, as they are entangled with recognized emotions, to identify what they ‘do’ through particular intra-active relations of embodied movement” (p. 180). Focusing on the narrative of one participant (Anna), she adopted a “critical-creative analytic” that helped her pay attention to the complex relations of embodied movement within this participant’s experiences of depression, anxiety, and her process of recovery. In a second account, she then works through a different analytic device “diffracted through a new materialist emphasis to displace the speaking ‘I’ as a way of opening up questions about distributed agency and embodied transformations” (p. 183). In so doing, she makes visible the “human and nonhuman relations, the visceral responses and normative modes of feminine subjectivity that are entangled with different affects” (p. 183). Similarly, Lupton (2020) uses materials generated in a story completion project to “create poetic representations” of understandings of health. Combining the arts-­ based methods of story completion and poetic inquiry, Lupton (2020) identifies “the affordances, affective forces and relational connections in the human-nonhuman assemblages” (p. 1). Fullagar (2020) and Lupton (2019b, 2020) are among a growing number of feminist scholars

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engaging with new materialist theory who are using poetry (and other creative arts-based methods) to represent previously gathered data. In so doing, they are building upon and extending a long lineage of scholars exploring the potential in creative arts and alternative representational styles for new ways of knowing, including the innovative use of poetry for representing sporting and moving bodies (see, for example, Popovic, 2012). In a different vein, Heddon (2017) utilizes a performative writing style in an effort to pay closer attention to the importance of listening to both humans and nonhumans (animals, insects, plants, and elements). Engaging with participatory forms of theatre-making, she proposed “a form of coauthorship and collaboration that focuses on what can be made with others, through openness and acceptance,” thus prompting the questions: “How might we avoid ‘compelling the other to talk’? How might we avoid hearing only what we already know?” (p. 13). Returning again and again to a ‘failed conversation’ in a forest clearing, she recognizes the challenges (if not impossibility) of giving voice to nonhuman subjects and to nature. In the words of feminist environmental philosopher Catriona Sandilands (1999), “human language about nonhuman nature can never be complete, only by acknowledging its limits is the space opened for otherworldy conversations” (p. 185; cited in Heddon, 2017, p. 205). In her effort to open up such “otherworldy conversations,” Heddon (2017) then proceeds to (conceptually) bring a range of environmental and feminist philosophers (i.e., Val Plumwood, Donna Haraway, Catriona Sandilands) into the forest clearing, to reach the conclusion that “we need to be much better at listening to others—human and nonhuman—to different forms of speech, including the con-verse, a versing with” (p. 206). Also exploring the ethics of voice and representing nature  in  her brilliant work Bodies of Water, Neimanis (2017) develops a posthuman feminist phenomenology that “understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it” (backpage). While we cannot do justice to her work here, we acknowledge it as an important contribution to “ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the posthuman critical moment” (backpage). In a chapter building upon this work, Neimanis (2018) joins new materialist environmental scholars who are embracing creative writing and representational styles, or what she refers to as “representation without representationalism” (p. 181). Such approaches are not without debate,

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however, with questions about the possibility (and ethics) of ever trying to represent, or give ‘voice’, to nature (Neimanis, 2018). The task of representing other-than-­human beings is hotly contested: even if we pass the hurdles involved in deciding which beings ought to be represented, by whom, with how much weight and how, we face further challenges. These include: apprehending what their interests are and interpreting their communications without assimilating them into our own forms of understanding and being – which would undermine the possibility of accurate representation, and commit the further injustice of misrecognition and domination (Celermajer et al., 2020, p. 7; also see Gray and Curry, 2020).

These are questions that have been similarly raised by Alaimo, Sandilands, Haraway and Barad in terms of the ethics of representing matter and nonhuman subjects, and there are no easy answers. Whereas some new materialist scholars call for modes of representation that go beyond language and writing, others are revisiting the process of writing as a means of attending to, and con-versing and becoming with, other human and nonhuman bodies. In dialogue with new materialist-­ inspired questions around representation, Neimanis (2018) begins by asking the following critical questions: Is there a way to hold on to representation, but as a posthuman representation without representationalism? That is, a representation that recognizes the political necessity of this endeavour, but in a way that rejects a privileging of either ‘things’ or ‘words’, that refuses the ontological split between ‘reality’ and ‘re-presentation’, and even more importantly, leaves behind the nature/culture divide altogether?

Through her close examination of the creative works of Irland (2011) and other water and ice artist-scholars, Neimanis (2018) recognizes the complexities of representing nature, and concludes that we need to rethink some of our previous assumptions of what ‘representation’ might look, sound, and feel like. Speaking directly to the challenges of representation within new materialisms, Neimanis (2018) calls for a reimagining of writing as an ethical practice and entangled process of becoming with the world. In the final pages of this book, we take up these new materialist

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challenges of representation and understandings of ethics in our attempts to creatively write through our entangled relations with the environment. In this way, our collaborative modes of poetic inquiry become an ethical practice of coming together and becoming through relationality.

 ollaborative Creative Writing: C Body-Environment Entanglements Many environmental scholars, activists, and artists have long embraced creative writing and performative arts-based methods to engage and affect readers. In so doing, their words, stories, narratives, poetry, dance, and other artistic and creative performances are political in their potential to engage readers to feel and do more (e.g., Chen, MacLeod & Neimanis, 2013; Gabrys, 2018; Meyers, 2017; see Chap. 2). In our collaborative writing experiment, we find much inspiration in the creative approaches developed by environmental artists, as well as feminist new materialists focused on health and the body (i.e., Fullagar, 2020; Lupton, 2019b, 2020), and the environment (i.e., Heddon, 2017; Neimanis, 2017, 2018), for listening to (or con-versing with) the multiplicities of human and nonhuman agents in our material-discursive entanglements. In the remainder of this chapter, we share two examples of our experimental collaborative writing, drawing encouragement from those exploring alternative writing styles both within and outside of new materialisms. Importantly, our process was never about creating beautiful poetry, representing nature, or offering alternative accounts of themes emerging from an empirical data set (Fullagar, 2020; Jeffrey, 2020; Lupton, 2019b, 2020). Rather we set out with an openness to engage in a collaborative theoretically informed digital exchange during the Australian bushfires using whatever forms of expression were prompted in response to the rapidly unfolding and stressful conditions. As circumstances continued to change unexpectedly and quickly, we continued this practice during COVID-19 as a way to share our new materialist-informed noticings of the various human and nonhuman intra-actions occurring across spacetimemattering, and, as a practice of care. We explored the multiple and varied ways that the physical, social, cultural, and political environment “got under

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our skin” (Ahmed, 2010, p.  216), or more specifically, into our lungs, bloodstream, corporeal and moving bodies. Our process of writing together followed Heddon’s (2017) suggestions for a poetry of more than two, an “improvisational dance of unsettledness, uncertainty, provisionality and creativity, arising from the taking turns and turning-with-turning-with” one another (p. 206). We also took inspiration from Fullagar’s (2020) feminist new materialist “orientation of listening through the body as a multiplicity rather than privileging a notion of individuated agency, meaning, or corporeality that emerges through binary thinking” (p.  180). In our collaborative approach, this meant the material-discursive formations through which our individual bodies and lived experiences of environmental and health crises were “co-­ implicated in the [co]production of meaning” (Fullagar, 2020, p. 180, emphasis added). Our voices blurred and became intertwined within our “embodied reading-writing”—writing alone and together—from different places in the world and locations in the crisis. We crafted the following pieces with the hope that they will ‘show rather than tell’ some of our new materialist-inspired noticings of bodies—human and more-than-­ human—as always entangled with the environment during times of environmental and health crisis. Our writing in part emerges from a diffractive reading of new materialist scholarship, as well as media releases, scientific reports, public commentaries, hundreds of social media posts and comments, and always with and through our own embodied experiences of our (im)mobile bodies.

Writing-Feeling Together: Part 1 The Australian bushfires of late 2019 and early 2020 had a devastating effect on communities across Australia, killing and injuring many from both flames and smoke pollution. The fires destroyed almost 10,000 buildings (homes and outbuildings), burned more than 10 million hectares (100,000 square km or 24.7 million acres) of bushland, and killed over a billion individual animals (Celermajer et al., 2020). Colloquially known as the “Black Summer,” images of the fires were reported in newspapers and social media across the world. The imagery that garnered the

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most attention was the extreme loss of flora and fauna, charred landscapes and animal carcasses, shocking domestic and international viewers alike. The smoke from the fires travelled widely, filling the skies across many parts of Australia and some parts of Aotearoa New Zealand. Living across two countries at the time, we could write-feel the vitalities of ash as it moved with the wind, over oceans, blanketing communities (ours and others), blocking the sun, and prompting great uncertainty about the future of the planet and our roles and responsibilities in this environmental and ecological crisis (Chao, 2020). Such reflections also raised new questions about moving bodies, inhaling and exhaling the charred environment while walking, running, or biking for transport, work, exercise, or leisure. While often considered ‘healthy’ activities, these movements matter differently in these particular socio-material moments. During this time we engaged deeply with feminist and Indigenous critiques, while also reading scientific studies of the intra-actions of the complex chemical makeup of ash (and particulate matter, PM) in throats, lungs, and eyes. We felt the effects in our own bodies. Throughout these noticings and respondings, we paid attention to the many nonhuman objects that intra-acted with human bodies in ways previously not considered; masks rubbing on faces while walking to work, the daily data on newly downloaded air pollution apps, wind and weather patterns carrying poisonous pollutants, the ashy-irritation in throats and eyes felt so differently depending on exposure, sensitivities, and health conditions. Writing-feeling this environmental and health crisis together back-and-­ forth across the Tasman ocean, was a “feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene” (Gibson-Graham, 2011, p. 1) in that we were writing to find new ways of listening, wondering, enquiring, and collectively caring, “becoming-with, instead of writing against” the environment (Heddon, 2017, p. 195).

Under Red Skies Guilt, breath, and sepia-toned atmospheres What have we done? What have I done? What happens now?

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It is mid-afternoon and we are on holiday, but what kind of holiday is this when the future seems so bleak It is the peak of the summer heat and we are inside Doors and windows closed Sweat gathers and runs down their small tanned limbs The sky filled with cloud and smoke, an eerie red tinge to the dull light The birds and the farm animals confused, not sure what to do I too am unsure how to make sense of this new reality It has been a privilege, I suppose, to not know what a P2 mask is To not have understood the specificities of the type and size of particulate with which the human body can effectively cope. Or how to limit the entry of these particles into our throats our lungs our futures Particles from so very far away carried by the wind and currents fill our air My heart arches for the loss being experienced by our Australian neighbors But I realize it is our loss too And as the ash dulls our skies, I worry for my scarred lungs… reminded of the chronic disease with every scratchy breath Now, unzipping my backpack, I fish my P2 mask out and fit it carefully over my face. (I made sure to study the instructions closely last night) I continue walking home from work. I am worried about my baby As I walk I try not to breathe too deeply, short breaths, light headed Men at the construction site see me go by. I wonder how they feel about working. Food delivery workers pedal past on their e-bikes. The gig economy doesn’t stop gigging, even when bodies, lungs, and lives are in peril The newly downloaded App tells me the risk is low, and yet I choose not to go for my daily run, to draw the particles deeper into the bloodstream I tell the children they can’t go to the beach this afternoon. They moan for a few minutes, and then run off to play with their Pokemón cards, their sweet naivety only possible for so long. These are difficult conversations to have with a five year old.

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Inhalation Exhalation Damp breath creating Condensation with nowhere to go I am left to feel the scratch in my throat, agitation in my eyes, and pulling on each inhale The PM2.5 particles are higher than usual here today, but they are at dangerous levels in some parts of Australia I imagine their terror The images of flora and fauna burned and charred, thousands of residents fleeing or stuck on beaches, in communities Twitter explodes with anger at governments, politicians, and calls for a return to Indigenous knowledges and practices I live here now in this new country Their history is not mine, but I am implicated, we all are So far from the scene, who am I to feel this pain? And yet, my lungs scratch and bleed with the ash and debris of their lost lands Past-present-future felt in my own body, trapped inside, terrified for the future that awaits my children, their children, our children. And in the dialogue, across the seas, we share A humbling acknowledgement that we have been complicit in this destruction And in the diminishment of knowledges and practices that might have allowed ‘us’ to better care for the land We want to hope, but the available narratives feel empty What can we do now but to feel this through the body—the heart, the lungs, with each breath Futures need to be imagined and created a new, starting in the everyday Time to lean in and feel it all Breathing deep, death and hope.

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Writing-Feeling Together: Part 2 The conditions of COVID-19 ushered in an unexpected continuance of crisis. We extended our collaborative writing practice as the ash settled and a new less-visible threat emerged, carried by moving bodies and transferred via human and nonhuman objects in the immediate environment. Writing-feeling together was part of an imperfect but vital effort to make sense of a dramatically altered world and to think what possible or appropriate responses might be. As we were writing back-and-forward, the context was changing quickly and the pace of our writing seemed to respond to these temporal developments. In the second piece presented below, we explore these spacetimematterings as a ‘bad flu’ became Coronavirus, became COVID-19, became global pandemic, became months of isolation, becoming again, differently across the world. Over these days, weeks, months, time seemed to blur, but the internet continued to churn, unleashing new information at an impossible pace and dripping with affect—fear, anger, frustration, despair, and eventually, hope (Braidotti, 2020). Domestic and international policies were moving just as fast, and scientific studies communicated by both mainstream and social media seemed to offer a whirlwind of contradictory evidence. Not dissimilar to Fullagar and Pavlidis (2020), we turned to feminist new materialisms to help us “attune to what is happening, what remains unspoken and to pay attention to ‘the little things’ that may be lost in a big crisis” (n.p.). As feminist scholars of the moving body, we paid particular attention to discussions of bodily secretions (i.e., sweat) and aerosol particles (i.e., breath) connecting, intra-acting, with the environment (i.e., air, wind, water). We also reflected on the new understandings of bodily boundaries prompted in pandemic times (Thorpe, Brice & Clark, 2021). Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, the risks of the moving body have been widely discussed and debated. Running and cycling bodies were said to pose additional risk as aerosols were more widely dispersed (Scanlan, 2020; Thoelen, 2020). In our own communities—in our homes too—we witnessed much debate and contestation over policies (unevenly) restricting outdoor recreation. As we wrote back-and-forward, we came to new noticings, vital respondings, and ethical considerations of bodily boundaries in times of pandemic where the body—any and every body—was a site of possible contagion.

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Vital Respondings in Pandemic Times Masks, breath, and uncertain futures So many parallels and continuities From just months ago But it is different now They say The virus persists Alive On surfaces and in the air And this time, Masks may not help The danger too diffuse The body too porous The virus too determined          

A tickle in my throat, a stuffy nose A sense of panic begins to creep Scanning the Internet, symptoms don’t match A sigh of relief, but doubts linger Much is uncertain right now

  Instructing my regular class warm-up   My body hypervisible at the front of the studio   Within minutes a need to wipe my nose   I feel their eyes, burning, wondering   “Does she have it?”   I anticipate their accusations   “You were abroad?”   Ashamed and nervous, am I doing the right thing?  Ethics   Old and new   Reconfigured and re-thought   In times of pandemic      Data dominates, filling our screens      New scientific language, the discourse of the day     A virus spreading     Near and far      Fear mounts, scratching at every thought

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     I breathe deeply and exhale      Seeking to still the anxious tremor that haunts my chest      Not knowing what lingers in the air      Or what I may ingest     Intimacy as contagion     These are wild times        Labeled ‘high risk’, we were early responders        After days with the children home        Out of school, our limbs twitching       Walking down the beach path        Mid-week, low risk, the sand is bare        Glad for the space to run, to play, without worry        Catching a glimpse of a couple walking towards us       Accents in the breeze        Pre thought, moving closer to my children        Edging us to the side of the path       Creating space between bodies        Holding my breath while children chatter        As they pass, I breathe again        But my nostrils fill with perfume       Not mine        The trail of others bodies, new noticings         Muscles craving movement          Pulling on my shoes, running for the trees         In the cool shade of the forest         Away from the phone         The computer          The screens that relegate with regular alerts, news         And public announcements         Leaping over tree roots and breathing deeply         Fresh forest air           Borders closed now           Families displaced, separated by           the power of the state           Time seems to warp, speeding up, stretching           Bewildering our bodies, our hearts

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          People dying, getting sick, filling wards           Communities unraveling and           coming together in new ways           For how long will this last?             But for now             In this moment             Many of us enclosed in our homes             Privileged, ‘safe’ within our bubble             Others, fighting differently             We collectively know             Everything has changed               Weeks in isolation               Agitations and tensions building               Queer intimacies                Familiar spaces and people, made strange               Digital workouts, not quite the same               Children climbing walls, literally                Knocking on the door, pushing boundaries                 Collectively, flattening the curve                  Medical experts, politicians, scientists                 Yielding new powers                  Hard to believe, but into data we lean                  Back to ‘normal’ soon, perhaps, they tease                 But doubts linger                  The potential of contagion persists                  Yet hope builds that this will change                 Everything

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                 Lifestyles reconsidered, structural changes                  Valuing all human and nonhuman lives                 Equally                  How do we contribute to this re-imagining?

F inal Thoughts: New Materialisms and Feminist Respondings for Vital Futures Feminist new materialist understandings of the environment draw upon and extend decades of important scholarship by Indigenous scholars, environmental humanities, and ecofeminists. While there are many parallels, we suggest that feminist new materialisms make at least two valuable offerings to these important and timely fields of scholarship. Firstly, in acknowledging the agency of the more-than-human world, feminist new materialisms encourages us to rethink environmental ethics (Alaimo, 2008). Secondly, new materialist and postqualitative experiments in creative writing and performative representational approaches may facilitate new modes of listening to (or con-versing with) the multiplicities of human and nonhuman agents in our material-discursive entanglements (Heddon, 2017; Neimanis, 2017, 2018). Such experimental and creative writing (or representational) practices with our human and nonhuman collaborators may enable new ways of understanding (and imagining) entangled relations of moving bodies and the environment of past-present-future. Our collaborative poetic inquiry was triggered by new and urgent concerns as to how we might know recent tragic and troubling events differently. As feminists desiring a better world for all human and nonhuman species, we recognized the immediate need for new ways of responding. From the initial germination of this collaborative project, our ‘creative-­research’ writing practices helped us make meaning of new human and nonhuman relations during environmental-health crises. In

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so doing, our feminist new materialist-inspired collaborative writing experiment prompted vital respondings to our always entangled becoming with the environment and other human and nonhuman agents. Working outside of the confines of the familiar, linear modes of writing, we found alternative spaces for new thoughts and affects that contributed to the messy, entangled, continuously unfolding processes of meaning making. In this way, our theoretically informed writing practices prompted new understandings of feminist ethics. Our collaborative writing experiment brought to the fore the Baradian understanding of ethics and responseability in which we are all (humans and nonhumans) already responsible “to the others with whom or which we are entangled” (Neimanis, 2018, p. 393). In this way, our writing practices were the beginning of a process of becoming worldly with (Haraway, 2008). As we move towards more relational ways of knowing, new materialist ethics of becoming-with other humans, nonhumans, and the environment are ignited. As feminist scholars of moving bodies living and writing in times of environmental crisis and pandemic, such conceptualistions of ethics seem more urgent than ever. * * * In the final days of writing this book our screens are once again filled with mask-wearing bodies, moving in the streets. But this time, they are joining together to protest racial inequities and injustices, and the deeply entrenched systemic exploitation that is being further amplified in times of environmental and health crises. We notice now more than ever the ways human health, environmental health, and social justice are entangled. The year of 2020 has been a time of remarkable global challenge, and the systems of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism are being questioned to new extents. We are in a new Zeitgeist—the feeling of the times is changing quickly with populations around the world increasingly relating and connecting through their discontent with systems of oppression that prioritize profit over human, environmental, and nonhuman health and wellbeing. The time for new knowledges and interventions is now. New materialist theories and feminist relational and affirmative ethics

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have encouraged us to explore new ways of knowing our positionalities, relationships, and responsibilities. We take seriously the call of Braidotti (2019b) for “affirmative ethics” that invigorate our “desire to become otherwise and the desire for other ways of living and dying” (p. 181). As feminist scholars of moving bodies, we continue to explore the theoretical, methodological, and embodied possibilities of re-imagined activisms, and the ethical imperative “to get going” (Braidotti, 2019b, p. 181). We recognize we have more work to do to put feminist new materialist knowledge into action in our everyday lives as scholars, teachers, mentors, and community members, and we remain committed to this practice. This book offers readers a set of tools that we hope they will take up in their own projects to continue the imperative work of creating more just and equitable futures for humans and nonhumans alike.

Pedagogical Possibilities New materialisms, more-than-human, and postqualitative modes of inquiry offer unlimited creative opportunities to encourage and prompt students to rethink their relationships with the environment. Below we offer some examples that could be modified for a range of different contexts. Each of these activities should provide opportunities to discuss the challenges and opportunities of representing nature and the ethical considerations in doing so: 1. Ask your students to write a poem (or any creative writing style) that reveals their relationship with a sporting, fitness, or health ‘environment’ that they participate in. This could be a built (e.g., a gym, stadium, skatepark, walking paths) or natural (e.g., beach, mountain, river) environment. Encourage them to write-feel some of the different humans and nonhumans that contribute to their entangled experiences in/with this environment. The students should experiment with how/when they write with ‘I’ in this piece. 2. Ask your students to write about the same environment, but this time in the ‘voice’ of a nonhuman agent in this environment. This could be

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the water in the river, the dirt on a running trail, the sand on a beach, the snow on a mountain, the grass on a golf course, or a tree at their favourite stadium or skatepark. The options are endless and students should be encouraged to brainstorm a range of possibilities before choosing the one to focus on in their creative writing piece. In so doing, they should consider the cultural significance of this nonhuman agent. For example, is it an object with great meaning attached to it either in the past or in the present, or is it rarely noticed by humans in this environment? Also, to consider: what ‘message’ this nonhuman agent might want to communicate and why? Encourage students to experiment with the ‘voice’ of this nonhuman agent, and try to reassure them that there is no ‘right’ style of representation here; it is about experimenting with the materiality of language. 3. In a third experiment of creatively representing the sporting, fitness, or health environment, you might encourage each student to collaborate with a fellow student, co-writing about their bodily entanglements with other human and nonhuman agents within a particular environment. 4. Another option is to encourage students to explore visual arts methods (e.g., photography, sculpture, collage) to represent the human and nonhuman intra-actions within a sporting, fitness, or health environment. Again, encourage them to consider what the ‘political’ or ‘ethical’ message in this creative piece might be and whose ‘message’ this is.

8 Epilogue: Feminist New Materialisms and Lively Collaborations

This book is the result of our longstanding and ongoing efforts to engage with feminist and new materialist theory and postqualitative methodologies to more carefully and collaboratively orient our focus to the materiality of bodily processes, intra-actions and relationships. Together, the seven chapters reveal the potential in feminist new materialisms for offering new understandings of the complex entanglements of moving bodies with objects, technologies, biologies, environments, and knowledge practices. Rather than offering a tidy summary of the ‘key findings’ from our project, we want to conclude with some reflections on the feminist, collective, embodied, and material thinking practices that this process of collaborative writing yielded. Drawing on feminist new materialist theory, our experiences of co-authoring this book were an entangled feminist academic process where “individuals emerge through and part of their entangled intra-relating” (Barad, 2007, p. ix) with co-­authors, supervisors, mentors, colleagues, friends, and family members. Such practices allowed us to further imagine and cultivate expansive new spaces in which we shared, supported, mentored, leaned on, moved, and wrote together in the active processes of feminist academic becoming(s). Following Silk, Francombe, and Andrews’ (2014) insistence that “the body should be the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Thorpe et al., Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness, New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7_8

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focal point for the entire spectrum of our academic endeavors” (p. 1276), the bodily and embodied processes were ever present within our collaboration. Thinking, working, and moving together as three feminist academics across a range of career stages (professor, PhD candidate, and postdoctoral research fellow), we put the theoretical concepts and practices of new materialisms and new empiricisms to work in ways that helped us acknowledge and reconfigure the meanings of these differences and allowed a deep feminist ethos to flourish. From the initial germination of the idea for this book, we knew that the collaborative dimensions of this project were going to be as important (if not more so) than the product of the book itself. Indeed, the process of “being-acting-feeling together” (MacLellan & Talpalaru, 2012) helped push us towards the unknown and reorient each other when we found ourselves slipping back to familiar ways of knowing and doing research. As Lenz-Taguchi and Palmer (2013) remind us, at times we need “others in order to displace and unhinge” our own understandings (p. 639), and working together and with new materialist theory helped encourage and support an openness (and thus vulnerabilities) to other ways of knowing the moving body. Indeed, there is a growing awareness of the power of collaboration as feminist praxis (e.g., Olive & Thorpe, 2017; Thorpe, Barbour, & Bruce, 2011), and our approach to writing this book took much inspiration from these works. According to Breeze and Taylor (2020): As universities ‘push us to work harder, sell ourselves better, and engage in competition rather than collaboration’… collaboration across career stages becomes an important empirical case for understanding how feminist academics work to take up space in higher education. (p. 413)

As three academic women working within the neoliberal university context, the collaborative movement-based thought experiments that continued throughout the writing of this book might be considered a micro-political act against disembodied, individualized research processes, and towards “feminist research as a continuous accomplishment in which becoming-feminist is enacted” (Handforth & Taylor, 2016, p. 627). In so doing, it could be said that the process of working on this

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book together was as “an experimental feminist praxis of doing collaborative writing [and thinking] differently” (Handforth & Taylor, 2016, p. 627), important both at the time of this particular thought experiment and well beyond. During this collaborative, active, and embodied process, unpredictable entanglements emerged, yielding closer, richer collaborations, and increased confidence with which to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of research not guided by clear-cut parameters. Furthermore, a responsive, emergent feminist ethic grew through which we continued to negotiate and imagine new possibilities and boundaries of feminist academia. Taking inspiration from Barad’s concept of apparatus, these entanglements alerted us to, and challenged us to rethink, the boundaries of this project. As feminist collaborators working together on this book, we made a commitment to respect one another as feminist scholars, equal collaborators, journeying with new materialist theory. We sought to prioritize our relationships, and health and wellbeing, over the expectations of neoliberal institutions (and publishing deadlines). However, this process was not always straightforward or comfortable. Working within an academic system and its familiar boundaries and rules, we noticed our own positionalities within this system and how it shaped our practices, responses, and conditions of possibility. We bumped up against the boundaries and hierarchies that shape our knowledge and practices, and were called upon to navigate them in new ways. Through ongoing collaboration and creative and embodied methods in dialogue with new materialist theory, we revealed our vulnerabilities and increased our intimacies with one another as feminist collaborators. Over the 18  months of writing this book, we went deeper in our engagement with new materialist theory, expanding our individual and collective horizons of understanding in relation both to sporting bodies and knowledge production practices. We wrote within and across multiple time zones, personal and family health events, environmental crisis, and a global pandemic. Such conditions challenged us individually and collectively, and called upon us to (repeatedly) come back to the feminist ethics of collaboration in the context of the neoliberal university. The final product is the result of these entangled processes and intra-actions. While the academic boundaries we noticed and negotiated may not be

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undone through the writing of one book, our feminist collaborative processes offered possibilities for imagining how we might do things differently and provided the support and courage for trying to do so. In sum, the process of working on this book has been an iterative, intensive, exhilarating, and, at times, affectively challenging journey. We use the word journey here, but we emphasize that this was not a linear process with a clear beginning, middle, and end, or with a coherent trajectory. In fact, it was anything but linear, and we now realize there is no way it could have been. Rather, the writing of this book was a rhizomatic thinking and creation process characterized by collective and shared support, dialogue, extensive reading, physical movement practices, and continuous questioning. It was also a profoundly material process. Indeed, the materiality of work, of care, of crisis, of knowing, have come to bear in dramatic ways at various stages of working on this book. So too have the intimacies involved in collaborative work, what digital technologies have made possible, the re-examining and noticing of mobility, time, space, bodies, and difference, and what all of these things do. Through the feminist collaborative process of working on this book, we have come to understand that knowledge and the conditions in which knowledge is produced are never fixed or still, but always shifting and changing and continually becoming. Boundaries may come to be sedimented through repetition, but they are not immovable. We believe this is where the optimism of new materialisms lies, in the understanding that conditions and boundaries can be continuously shifted. But we also understand the ethical imperative and responsibility that we as contributors to knowledge, as feminist scholars, collaborators, and teachers, as humans in the world, must accept in understanding how we are always implicated in the inclusions and exclusions that result from what Barad (2007) calls ‘agential cuts’. It is an act of vulnerability to our reader that we share these insights into our feminist journey of stumbling, sweating, striving, and living with new materialisms. But we do so in the hope that such reflections prompt others to embrace the openness and unpredictability of feminist new materialist collaboration. Working together with new materialisms has been a process of becoming, offering rich opportunities for generative thinking at the intersections of movement–theory–method. The possibilities of feminist new materialisms are amplified when lived, felt, and activated with other human and nonhuman ­collaborators.

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Index

A

Actor Network Theory (ANT), 23, 62, 68, 69, 71–72, 75, 76, 85, 88, 89 Affect, 14, 19, 34, 46–48, 68, 70, 73, 87, 92, 100, 102–106, 108, 110, 113, 117, 158, 162, 182, 192, 195, 200, 205 Affect theory, 4, 11, 24 Affordances, 24, 37, 42, 46, 93, 97, 103, 105, 113, 118, 192 Agency, 6–8, 16, 23, 30, 42, 62, 64, 65, 73, 74, 76, 85–89, 100, 102, 104, 113, 124, 125, 134, 150, 168, 180–182, 186, 187, 192, 196, 204 Ahmed, Sara, 16, 33, 122, 123 AI research, 154 Alaimo, Stacy, 6, 9, 10, 54, 124, 181, 184–186, 194, 204

Alldred, Pamela, 6, 8, 14, 34, 38, 41, 42, 50, 71, 103, 104, 177, 185 Amenorrhea, 130, 139, 140, 165 Anthropocentric/anthropocentrism, 2, 16, 43, 73, 88, 177, 178, 180, 182, 185, 188–190 Apparatus boundaries of, 25, 39, 51, 55, 145–175 research, 24, 25, 39, 50, 51, 55, 147, 149, 152–154, 156, 158–160, 163–173 troubling the boundaries, 157, 164–165, 173 Western, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172 Arts-based methods, 44–47, 192, 193, 195 Asberg, Celia, 57, 72, 181, 183

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. Thorpe et al., Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness, New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56581-7

261

262 Index

Assemblage, 12, 24, 30, 34, 42, 44, 45, 52, 53, 73, 74, 79, 91–118, 127, 144, 187, 189, 190 Australian bushfires, 25, 179, 186, 195, 196 Autoethnography, 23, 40, 43–44 B

Barad, Karen agency, 76, 86 agential cuts, 54 agential realism, 12, 41, 56, 68, 74–77, 80, 86, 88, 152, 172, 173 apparatus, 24, 25, 39, 50, 55, 86, 147, 149, 152–154, 158, 164, 168, 172, 173 difference, 12, 13, 36, 56 diffraction, 12, 36, 55–57, 152 diffractive methodology, 36, 155 entanglement, 12, 54, 75, 100, 152 ethico-onto-epistemology, 15 intra-action, 12, 74–76, 152, 161, 162, 168 spacetimemattering, 13 Becoming, 2, 8, 10, 13, 15, 18–22, 54, 55, 57, 62, 79, 84, 99, 110, 114, 126, 133, 142, 152, 177, 194, 195, 200, 205 Bennett, Jane enchantment, 92, 100, 102–103 thing power, 73, 74, 102, 103 vital materialism, 12, 23, 74, 102–103 Biodata, 98, 131, 135–139, 141 digital technologies, 135, 136 Biological Creatures, 127

Biological data, 129, 131, 138, 148, 149 Biology biological turn, 24, 121–129 queering of, 124 race, and, 122 as ‘strange matter,’ 127–129, 137 uberbiological, 126 Biopossibility, 123, 124 Biopower, 95 Birke, Linda, 24, 121, 124, 125, 129, 141, 142 Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), 88 Blood, 2, 19, 80, 125, 131, 138, 139, 143, 144, 157, 158, 160, 162 Bodies disabled, 123 gendered, 21, 41, 95, 106, 123, 133, 142 queer, 123 racialized, 123, 165 Bodily boundaries, 76, 83, 191, 200 Bohr, Niels, 153 Bones health, 131, 134, 139, 140, 157 injury (stress fractures, osteoporosis), 134, 140 Boundaries, 6, 10–12, 14, 15, 19, 25, 26, 37–41, 48, 51, 54–56, 75, 76, 83, 84, 87, 88, 101, 106, 111, 112, 122, 126, 134, 143, 145–175, 183, 185, 190 Braidotti, Rosi, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 25, 26, 56, 104, 184, 185, 187, 206 affirmative ethics, 14, 57, 205, 206 Butler, Judith, 4

 Index  C

Callon, Michel, 71 Capitalism, 63, 81, 183, 190, 205 Cartesian thought (Cartesian mind-body dualism), 8, 9 Circuit of culture, 65, 89 Class, 1, 13, 14, 20, 33, 34, 39, 63, 79, 81, 118, 119, 164, 182 Climate change, 2, 81, 85, 177, 178, 182, 186 Coding, 31 Collaborative writing, 18, 37, 179, 190, 195, 200, 205 Colonialism, 21, 183, 186, 205 Companion Species, 23, 92, 100–102 Consumption practices, 81, 189 Coole, Diana, 6, 8–11, 32, 61, 68, 103 COVID-19, 25, 179, 191, 195, 200 Creative and arts based methods, 44 Creative methods, 29 Creative writing, 25, 192, 195–197, 204, 206, 207 Crisis, 95, 150, 179, 190, 191, 196, 197, 200, 205 Critical race theory, 4 Cultural studies, 11, 17, 20, 36, 48, 50, 89, 93, 97, 100, 150, 187, 190 Cyborg, 23, 84, 92, 100–102 D

Data-sense, 97, 113, 118 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 6, 18, 23, 42, 50, 53, 67, 69, 73, 74, 100, 102–106, 113, 117 Derrida, Jacques, 4

263

Developmental systems theory, 122 Diet, 101, 135, 138, 140 See also Nutrition Digital data, 37, 96–99, 101, 102, 106, 108, 109, 112–114, 116, 117, 135 Digital data assemblage, 105, 106, 109, 115 Digital technologies, 20, 37, 89, 93–101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 116, 118 Disciplinary boundaries, 24, 25, 49–51, 145–147, 150, 151, 155, 157–164, 169, 172–175 Discourse, 3, 4, 6, 10, 14, 19, 41, 55, 66, 76, 81, 82, 88, 105, 113, 116, 117, 120, 122, 125, 130, 139, 155, 161, 162, 170, 186 E

Ecofeminism, 25, 184 Embodied knowledge, 92, 98, 113 Embodied methods, 40 Embodiment, 4, 9, 11, 66, 100, 120, 126, 127, 151, 183, 193 Endurance athletes, 132, 133, 142 Entanglement, 2, 9, 11, 17, 18, 23, 26, 41, 42, 49, 54, 55, 73, 76, 77, 79–89, 98, 100, 106, 110, 116, 122, 123, 133, 136, 141, 142, 178, 180, 182, 186, 189, 191–200, 204, 207 Environment, 2, 7–9, 14, 16, 17, 19, 25, 26, 54, 67, 68, 70, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 98, 99, 102, 117, 126, 127, 133, 166, 172, 177–207

264 Index

Environmental degradation, 2, 81, 181–183 Environmental humanities, 25, 178, 179, 183–185, 188, 204 Ethical Review Boards, 52, 53 Ethico-onto-epistemology, 15, 16, 150, 154 Ethics posthuman, 14, 43, 56, 193 representation, 179, 191–200, 204 F

Female athlete health, 5, 143, 147, 159, 161, 162, 165, 169–172 Female Athlete Triad (FAT), 129 Feminist collaboration boundaries within, 48 human and nonhuman collaborators, 204 relationships, 18–20 Feminist cultural studies, 62, 65–66, 88 Feminist environmental humanities, 183, 184, 186 Feminist ethics, 25, 177–207 Feminist historians of sport, 119 Feminist praxis, 128 Feminist sociology of sport, 4, 129 Feminist sport studies, 3, 141–143 Feminist technoscience studies, 72 Fine details, 50, 57, 156, 158, 162, 173 Fitbit, 5, 20, 24, 55, 91, 93, 99, 101, 102, 107–109, 111–113, 117 Fit motherhood, 110, 113–116

Fitness, 2, 4, 21, 23, 26, 41, 42, 46, 61–93, 96, 98–102, 107–109, 113–117, 189, 206, 207 Focus groups, 42 Foucault, Michel biopolitics, 94 discipline, 94–97 power, 4, 50, 94, 97 technologies of the self, 95 Fox, Nicholas, 6, 8, 14, 34, 38, 41, 50, 71, 103, 104, 177, 185 Frictional encounters, 16 Frost, Samantha, 6, 8–11, 24, 32, 61, 68, 103, 124–127, 129, 141, 142, 148, 149 Fullagar, Simone, 4, 5, 11, 14, 18, 30, 36, 46, 75, 94, 100, 104, 105, 110, 120, 185, 192, 195, 196, 200 G

Grosz, Elizabeth, 9, 26, 104, 121, 122, 125 Guattari, Felix, 6, 23, 53, 67, 73, 74, 100, 103–106, 113, 117 Gut feminism, 24, 127–141 H

Haraway, Donna, 6, 9, 12, 15, 16, 23, 25, 30, 36, 55–57, 69, 84, 88, 92, 100–102, 122, 184, 185, 193, 194, 205 Hard sciences, 147 Healthism, 82, 85

 Index 

Heywood, Leslie, 131, 150, 151, 173 High performance sport culture, 127, 132, 134, 172 nutrition, 137 training, 132, 136 Historical material feminisms (HMF), 63, 64 Hormones birth control, 136, 137 fertility, 139, 140 hormonal cycle, 137 Human exceptionalism, 8, 62, 65 Humanism, 30, 57, 179, 185, 186 I

Ideal’ sporting body,’ 131 becoming lean, 133 Identity politics, 12 Indigenous feminism, 4 Indigenous knowledge, 16, 86, 87, 169, 171, 178–180, 184, 199 Institutional Review Board (IRB), 52, 53 Intensive mothering, 107 Interpretive social science, 31 Intersectional feminism, 4 Interviews, 23, 31, 38, 40–42, 46, 52, 53, 73, 76, 77, 108, 131, 132, 138, 157–162, 165, 166, 168, 192 Intimacy, 24, 93, 109–111, 117 Intra-action ‘the burp,’ 160–161 embodied, 47 Inventive methods, 29 Ironman, 131, 132, 157

265

K

Kerr, Rosslyn, 71, 72 Kinesiology, 119, 146, 151 L

Lacan, Jacques, 4 Lather, Patti, 29, 31, 32, 34, 36, 41, 50 “getting lost” in data, 36 Latour, Bruno, 6, 8, 9, 50, 67, 70, 71, 73, 102 Law, John, 29, 30, 71 Leisure, 43, 61–65, 91, 92, 116, 190, 197 Leisure Studies, 48, 66 Lenz-Taguchi, Hillevi, 29, 37, 55 Life story interviews, 77 Live methods, 29 Low Energy Availability (LEA), 24, 129–141, 143, 147, 157, 159, 161–163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172 Lululemon, 78, 81, 85 Lupton, Deborah, 5–8, 14, 42, 45, 46, 74, 92–95, 97, 98, 100–105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, 135, 191, 192, 195 M

Manning, Erin, 45 Māori knowledge menstruation, 166 the waka metaphor, 171 Marxism, 3, 63, 64 Marxist feminism, 63, 64 Massumi, Brian, 6, 45, 104, 121

266 Index

Material-discursive, 14, 26, 39, 41, 44, 79, 86, 87, 116, 117, 152–154, 160, 161, 189, 196 Material-discursive entanglement, 41, 85, 115, 195, 204 Materialist methods, 29–59, 76–77 Material needs, 63 Material sciences, 77 Maternal bodies, 107, 108, 113, 115, 117 Mazzei, Lisa, 29, 32, 37, 41, 42, 46, 64, 192 Media analysis, 40–41 Media production, 40, 41 Menstruation, 119, 130, 136, 165–167, 170, 172 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 66, 97 Methodology without methods, 33–34 Methods, see Arts-based methods; Autoethnography; Interviews; Media analysis; Movement-­ based methods; Participatory methods Mixed methods, 23, 40, 49–51, 157, 159 Mixed-method research, 51 Mobile apps, 23, 91–93, 103, 105, 107 Mobile methods, 29 Möbius strip, 125 Modes of production, 63 More-than-human (MTH), 13, 16, 43, 48, 79, 99, 100, 103, 108, 178–180, 182, 183, 186, 189, 204, 206 More-than-human theories, 181, 188

Motherhood, 37, 55, 89, 107, 108, 110–116 Movement-based methods, 40, 47–49 N

Neimanis, Astrid, 54, 181, 183, 187, 193–195, 204, 205 Neoliberalism, 82, 83 Network of actors, 67 Neurobiological matter, 124 New empiricism, 34–36 New materialism critiques of, 17 key tenets, 3, 5–8 Nonhuman, 2, 4–9, 11–13, 15, 23, 26, 37, 38, 42–44, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54–57, 59, 62, 65, 67–70, 72–74, 80, 86, 87, 90, 100–104, 110, 115–117, 152–154, 159–162, 165, 169, 171–173, 177–180, 182, 184, 185, 187–190, 192–197, 200, 204–207 Nonhuman agency, 16, 86, 180 Non-representational theory, 62, 66–68, 88 Nutrition, 161, 166, 170, 171 O

Object interview, 76, 77 Object Oriented Feminism (OOF), 70 Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), 23, 62, 68–70, 76, 88, 89 Objects, see Sporting objects Ontological incongruencies, 42

 Index 

Ontological turn, 32 Ontologies of the body multiple, 29 Oppression, 3, 53, 63, 81, 183, 205

267

Pregnancy, 119, 120, 151 Privilege, 13, 21, 32, 75, 81, 86, 87, 146, 162, 166, 180, 183, 185, 186, 198

P

Pandemic, 2, 25, 177, 179, 191, 200, 205 Paradigmatic inconsistencies, 38 Participatory methods, 40, 42–43, 178 Participatory research (PR), 43 Phenomena, 8, 24, 34, 36, 39, 41, 51, 55, 74–76, 141, 143, 152, 153, 159, 163, 165, 168, 171–173, 192 Phenomenology, 4, 11, 62, 66–68, 88, 97, 193 Physiology, 51, 121, 130, 165, 174 Pitts-Taylor, Victoria, 2, 6, 14, 124, 148 Poetry, 46, 144, 192, 193, 195, 196 Positivism, 52, 147, 169 Postcolonial, 16, 123, 124 Postcolonial feminism, 168 Posthuman(ism), 2–5, 32, 44, 45, 48, 68, 85, 89, 182, 185 Posthuman affirmative ethics (affirmative ethics), 14, 57, 205, 206 Posthuman subject, 13 Postqualitative inquiry, 34–36, 45, 46, 57, 77, 192 Power, 4, 7, 9, 11–15, 19, 21, 50, 52–55, 64, 70–74, 77, 81, 88, 89, 94–97, 99, 100, 103, 106, 116, 120, 122, 124, 145, 146, 151, 156, 158, 169–172, 183

Q

Quantitative methods, 50, 157 Queer feminist critical-­ materialist, 123 Queer theory, 122 R

Race, 4, 12, 14, 46, 119, 122, 132, 133, 136, 186 Reflexivity, 23, 31, 51–57 Relational ethics, 13, 180 Relational ontology, 13, 56, 69 Relations of obligation, 57 Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), 129–143, 157, 159, 162, 163, 165, 166, 172 Research ‘after method,’ 29 Research assemblage, 34, 45, 53 Research creation, 45, 47, 179 Respondings feminist, 177–207 Response-ability, 15, 25, 57, 173, 182, 205 Reterritorialize, 53 Re-turn to qualitative methods, 49–51 Rolleston, Anna, 166, 168, 169 Royal sciences, 53 Rugby, 64, 157, 165, 166, 171

268 Index S

Science and Technology Studies (STS), 72 Self-tracking experiences of, 23 sensory dimensions of, 97 Sex testing, 120, 122 Sims, Stacy, 157, 170 Situatedness, 15, 19, 54 Social/biological divide, 121 Social Constructionism, 130 Social media, 170, 196, 200 Spacetimemattering, 13, 85, 164, 195, 200 Sport consumption, 83, 90, 189 environment, 133 mega-events, 188 Sporting objects, 23, 36, 61–68, 77, 80, 85–90 Sports bra, 20, 23, 62, 77–89 Enlite, 77–85, 87 Sports feminists, 120 Sports science/scientists, 119, 166, 170 Sportswomen, 119–144, 147, 157, 167 Stern-Gerlach experiment ‘sulphurous breath,’ 164, 167, 171 Subjectivity, 4, 13, 15, 37, 49, 50, 57, 65, 92, 94, 99, 100, 104, 105, 107, 108, 115, 156, 192 Surveillance, 96, 108 T

Theorizing difference, 12 Theory-method relationship, 40 Thing-power, 73, 74, 102, 103 Thrift, Nigel, 67, 121

Toolbox method approach, 32, 36 Transdisciplinary challenges of transdisciplinary research, 151, 152 differences with interdisciplinary research, 150 ‘invisible’ boundaries, 152, 158 processes of, 152 quagmires, 51, 156, 162 reading disciplines through each other, 157–159 research, 24, 50, 51, 145–175 sports research, 172 Transmateriality, 48 Transnational feminism, 4 Triangulation, 31 Triathlon, 131, 132, 157 V

Validity, 31 Vertinsky, Patricia, 3, 119, 120, 151 Vibrant Matter, 13, 23, 62, 68, 69, 73–74, 85, 88, 89, 92, 100 Vitalist theories, 5 Voice, 35, 41–43, 53, 54, 125, 144, 161, 163, 165–169, 178, 180, 181, 193, 194, 196, 206, 207 Voice without Organs (VwO), 42 W

WalkingLab, 48 Wilson, Elizabeth, 4, 24, 26, 122, 124, 127–129, 131, 135–138, 141, 142, 148, 149, 151, 159, 187, 189 Writing-feeling-together, 196–197, 200