![Sample our Sports and Leisure journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5949/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Sports-Leisure.jpg"})
Abstract
The aim of this article was to explore how young women with physical impairments make use of technology in their identity construction, drawing on the metaphor of the cyborg as well as on science and technology studies and disability research. In addition to participant observation, semi-structural interviews were conducted and video diaries were kept of the women playing sledge hockey, wheelchair basketball or table tennis. The informants included their wheelchairs in constructing their identities as young women and active subjects. In talking about pleasure and strength, they opposed the discourse that characterizes disabled people as leading empty, tragic lives. They challenge stereotypical notions of gender in sport by displaying determination, strength and risk-taking, while embodying a more traditional femininity when resisting the widespread view of disabled women as non-gendered and asexual.
Notes
1 CitationKvale, Den kvalitativa forskningsintervjun, 92 (all translations by the author).
2 CitationHughes and Paterson, ‘The Social Model of Disability’.
3 CitationBolling, ‘OS för “Andra”?’, 31; CitationHargreaves, Heroines of Sport, 180; CitationPeers, ‘(Dis)Empowering Paralympic Histories’, 656; CitationÖstnäs, ‘Handikappidrott som socialt fenomen’, 2. For instance the first World Games for the Deaf took place in 1924 in Paris.
4 Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport, 181, italics in original.
5 Östnäs, ‘Handikappidrott som socialt fenomen’, 7.
6 CitationRiksidrottsförbundet, ‘Sports in Sweden’, 6.
7 CitationPeterson, ‘Idrotten som integrationsarena?’, 148–50; CitationPeterson‘The Professionalisation of Sport’, 5–6; CitationTrondman, Unga och föreningsidrotten, 225.
8 CitationRiksidrottsförbundet, ‘Idrotten vill’, 8.
9 Ibid., 10.
10 Ibid., 11.
11 CitationSvenska Handikappidrottsförbundet, ‘Handikappidrottpolitiskt program’.
12 Ibid., 3.
13 Ibid., 8.
14 CitationApelmo, ‘(Dis)Ability and Citizenship’.
15 Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport, 203; CitationWickman, ‘The Discourse of Able-Ism‘, 10.
16 CitationWickman, ‘Bending Mainstream Definitions’, 50; Wickman, ‘The Discourse of Able-Ism’, 6.
17 CitationFoucault, The History of Sexuality, 144.
18 CitationTurner, ‘Disability and the Sociology of the Body’, 253.
19 CitationEdwards and Imrie, ‘Disability and Bodies’, 248.
20 CitationThomas, Sociologies of Disability and Illness, 96–7.
21 CitationGrue and Heiberg, ‘Notes on the History of Normality’, 240, CitationHughes, ‘Medicine and the Aesthetic’, 561.
22 CitationMoser, ‘Disability and the Promises of Technology’, 388.
23 Ibid., 374–5.
24 Wickman, ‘The Discourse of Able-Ism’, 7.
25 Moser, ‘Disability and the Promises of Technology’, 375.
26 CitationHaraway, The Haraway Reader, 322.
27 CitationHaraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 170.
28 Ibid., 178.
29 CitationMcRuer, Crip Theory, 224.
30 CitationMoser, Kyborgens rehabilitering, 69.
31 CitationHughes, ‘The Constitution of Impairment’, 165.
32 Ibid., 163.
33 McRuer, Crip Theory, 18.
34 CitationKoivula, ‘Gender in Sport’, 54.
35 CitationSwartz and Watermeyer, ‘Cyborg Anxiety’, 189.
36 Ibid., 188.
37 Koivula, ‘Gender in Sport’, 54.
38 CitationMalmberg, Kvinna, kropp och sexualitet.
39 CitationThomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 29.
40 Moser, Kyborgens rehabilitering, 215.
41 CitationSunderland et al., ‘Missing Discourses’, 703.
42 Moser, Kyborgens rehabilitering, 69.