A feminist materialist inspired analysis of the meaning and management of pregnancy and reproductive health in Olympic and Paralympic female athletes

ABSTRACT

The number of elite female athletes returning to professional sport following childbirth has gradually increased in recent years. There now exists a burgeoning of scholarship across sport and health-related disciplines that have paid attention to the experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in elite female athlete populations. This paper contributes to this expanding topic of inquiry by taking inspiration from feminist materialist approaches to examine the experiences and politics of pregnancy and reproductive health in elite female Olympic and Paralympic athletes on the United Kingdom elite sport funded programme – The World Class Programme (WCP). In doing so, we begin to foreground the bio-social-material practices and entanglements that constitute the WCP environment which actively shape athletes’ understandings of reproductive health and choice around pregnancy in particular ways. We discuss how the presented data has implications for female athlete embodied subjectivity and reproductive realities that complicate cultural narratives around athlete agency and gender equities in elite sport.

KEYWORDS:

• Pregnancy
• Elite Olympic and paralympic athletes
• Feminist New Materialisms

Introduction

The number of elite female athletes returning to professional sport following childbirth has gradually increased in recent years (McGannon and Busanich 2016). Despite this upward trend, managing a sporting career alongside motherhood remains something of a novelty for elite female athletes – perhaps explaining the wave of media attention paid to numerous elite athlete mothers (McGannon et al. 2015). While it may seem clear that antagonistic relationships between pregnancy, motherhood and competing in elite sport presents a challenge for more equitable visions of sport itself it is also important to note the implications of these matters outside of sport given that, for most female athletes, peak sporting performance occurs at an age that coincides with peak fertility and fewer pregnancy-related risks and medical complications (21–35 years) (Allen and Hopkins 2015; Davenport et al. 2022). As such, pregnancy, reproductive health and motherhood ought to be taken seriously as part of the ongoing feminist agendas within and outside of sporting contexts.

Recently, a number of athletes have spoken publicly about their experiences of managing pregnancy and motherhood within the elite sport environment and have highlighted some of the challenges they face in their decision-making around pregnancy. Such accounts give voice to the issues raised in previous academic literature on this topic. In the last few years, for example, there has been a burgeoning of scholarship across sport and health-related disciplines that has paid attention to the experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in elite female athlete populations (see, e.g. Darroch, Giles, and McGettigan-Dumas 2016; Darroch et al. 2019; Davenport et al. 2022; Martínez-Pascual et al. 2017; Massey and Whitehead 2022). These studies have documented the complex adjustments and negotiations elite female athletes experience when becoming mothers during their sporting careers including, for instance, managing financial precarity and risk through loss of sponsorship and funding streams (Darroch et al. 2019); navigating inadequate support structures and advice on return to training and competition postpartum (Appleby and Fisher 2009) and negotiating shifting identities and concomitant expectations and roles as both athlete and mother (Massey and Whitehead 2022; McGannon and Busanich 2016).

This paper seeks to offer a contribution to this expanding topic of inquiry. Drawing from qualitative interviews with elite female Olympic and Paralympic athletes who have experienced pregnancy or were considering pregnancy whilst on the United Kingdom (UK) elite sport-funded programme – the World Class Programme (WCP)¹ – the study asks how pregnancy and reproductive health is experienced and managed by athletes on the programme. In doing so and following scholars such as Jette, Esmonde, and Maier (2019) and Chadwick (2018) we engage with a range of feminist materialist perspectives alongside discursive inspired critiques in our reading of pregnancy experience. Our reason for taking this direction is that, whilst the existing studies on athlete pregnancy have made insightful contributions, there has thus far been limited engagement with perspectives capable of exploring and interrogating the complex interrelationships between the various contributing forces at play, such as the material, biological, social, psychological and ethical. Feminist materialist perspectives provide a unique offering in this regard. Concerned with the bio-social-material dimension and aspects of social practices and life (Thorpe and Clark 2020), the point of departure for feminist materialisms is a qualitative shift in thinking towards engagement with subjectivity, agency, and biology as it is ‘lived and constituted relationally through entanglements of human and non-human bodies, affects, objects and practices’ (Fullagar 2017, 248). It is a dynamic approach that has shown promise in allowing scholarship to think across traditional disciplinary boundaries in new and innovative ways – an approach that the issue of pregnancy in elite sport enthusiastically invites. However, while several studies on female athlete health engage with feminist materialism (e.g. Thorpe and Clark 2020; Brice, Clark, and Thorpe 2021) the literature remains in its infancy and elite athlete experiences of pregnancy have not yet featured within this theoretical framing.

In this paper, we draw on the work of feminist materialist scholars Elizabeth Grosz (1994), Karen Barad (2007) and Samantha Frost (2016) (see also Thorpe and Clark 2020) to illustrate how elite athletes’ experiences of pregnancy and reproductive health are entangled within the complex bio-social-material practices that make up the United Kingdom (UK) World Class Programme (WCP). We discuss how the configuration of these entanglements has implications for female athletes’ agential capacities and reproductive realities that complicate cultural narratives around athlete ‘choice’ and gender equities in elite sport. To that end, we conclude with a consideration of how feminist materialist perspectives may continue to contribute to future scholarship on female athlete pregnancy experience and embodied health.

Pregnancy and elite sport

There has been a wealth of feminist scholarship focused on pregnancy, reproductive labour, and the gendered politics of motherhood in contemporary Western society (e.g. Güney-Frahm 2020; Nash 2011). Contributing to the expansive scholarly field on the politics of motherhood is a growing body of work on the experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in both recreational (Batey and Owton 2014) and elite female athletes (Appleby and Fisher 2009; Martínez-Pascual et al. 2017; Massey and Whitehead 2022; Tekavc, Wylleman, and Cecic Erpic 2020). What is clear from this research is that the relatively unique structure, discourses and demands of elite professional sport exert significant pressure on female athletes not seen in other occupational contexts. Indeed, studies have documented the extent to which athlete experience and decisions around pregnancy are influenced by a complex interplay of socio-cultural narratives and discourses concerning pregnancy, risk, motherhood, and athletic performance propagated by structural and material barriers that exist within elite sport environments.

For instance, unlike other cultural contexts where the performance of both productive and reproductive work is expected (see Güney-Frahm 2020), studies on sporting mothers have identified the ubiquity of a cultural narrative that positions motherhood and elite sport as incompatible (Davenport et al. 2022; McGannon and Busanich 2016; Martínez-Pascual et al. 2017). Following Jette (2011) and Chadwick (2018) this narrative stems from biomedical discourses that have served to police female reproductive health via notions of risk, neoliberal (personal) responsibility centred on lifestyle management, and female vulnerability. Indeed, participation in excessive forms of exercise during pregnancy has been viewed as risky – potentially harmful to the foetus and the ‘fragile’ pregnant body – and thus in need of regulating alongside other lifestyle behaviours (nutritional supplementation, sleep regulation, etc.) (Jette 2011; Weaving 2020). There now exists a sizeable body of biomedical research centred on establishing measures of risk and impact of exercise on pregnancy outcomes and ‘safe’ prenatal exercise guidelines (see, Kimber et al. 2021).

Drawing on Foucauldian analytics of power, Jette, Vertinsky, and Ng (2014) have highlighted the role biomedical prenatal exercise discourse serve as contemporary technologies of gendered biopower (or biopolitics) where the ‘disciplining of the individual pregnant body results in the simultaneous regulation or management of the social [gendered and physically active] body’ (Jette, Vertinsky, and Ng 2014, 497). Biopolitics – a term developed through the work of Foucault (1991) – describes how contemporary modes of power are harnessed to target and optimise life at the individual and population level through inciting practices, transitory affects, and forms of normative bodily conduct.

The Foucauldian concept of biopower has informed much feminist scholarship on the management of female athlete bodies in high-performance sports cultures (Thorpe 2016; McMahon and Penney 2013). This has included aspects of female athlete reproductive health (see Thorpe 2016; Thorpe and Clark 2020) and athlete pregnancy (e.g. Darroch and Hillsburg 2017; Martínez-Pascual et al. 2017; Weaving 2020) and has pointed to the degree to which the structures and discourses of elite sport has tended ‘to treat pregnancy and childbirth as a dysfunctional medical condition’ (Weaving 2020, 185).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, research has highlighted the unequitable and paternalistic treatment towards pregnant athletes within the elite sport environment. For instance, research by Darroch et al. (2019) document how pregnant athletes experience a lack of support and guidance from sport governing bodies and may lose funding and corporate sponsorship. This results in many pregnant athletes experiencing financial difficulty, strategizing pregnancy around contracts, competition schedules and major events, and establishing informal spousal and peer support networks (see also Massey and Whitehead 2022). This is compounded by the fact that, in the UK at least, athletes are not protected by employment law unlike in other occupational contexts and therefore any maternity support offered by sport governing bodies to assist athletes throughout pregnancy and on return to sport is discretionary.

According to Davenport et al. (2022) elite female athletes face additional concerns around fertility health as a result of training schedules and volumes that can often lead to irregular menstruation (see also Thorpe and Clark 2020). Indeed, Davenport et al. (2002, 454) notes that efforts to plan pregnancy in the context of high-performance sport where ‘peak performance and fertility windows overlap’ was particularly difficult to balance leading ‘athletes to make critical decisions about whether they should compete, become pregnant or try to do both’. This was further complicated by wider discourses around prenatal exercise risk coupled with a lack of specific guidance offered by sport governing bodies and federations around prenatal and postpartum training intensities (see also Martínez-Pascual et al. 2017; Darroch, Giles, and McGettigan-Dumas 2016).

Research has also documented the extent to which elite female athletes experience conflict in their identity and roles as elite athlete and mother postpartum (Appleby and Fisher 2009; Massey and Whitehead 2022; McGannon and Busanich 2016). The competition and training schedules of elite athletes typically require long periods of time away from home and can lead to athletes missing critical moments in their child’s development which can induce feelings of guilt, anxiety, and put pressure on family/peer support networks.

(New) feminist materialism, female athlete embodied health and pregnancy

Whilst the aforementioned studies have provided important and insightful contributions to this area of study, they have largely centred on approaches that typically emphasise the structural, cultural and/or identity-related factors in elite athlete pregnancy experience. Building on this work, we suggest that thinking with a feminist materialist perspective offers a way towards a more relational understanding around pregnancy experience in elite athletes that considers the entanglement of material discursive forces and micropolitics embedded within elite sport practices and environments. In the last few years, there has been a growing engagement with feminist materialisms within the field of qualitative sport and health research (e.g. Brice, Clark, and Thorpe 2021; Thorpe and Clark 2020; Lupton 2019). Located under the broader theoretical umbrella of New Materialism (Fullagar 2017), feminist materialist perspectives pay attention to the bio-social-material entanglement and dimension of social practices and lived experience as they relate to goals of gender equality. In so doing, it has often been argued that feminist materialisms challenge the anthropocentric limitations and traditional ontologies concerning gender politics that have historically viewed biology and the non-human as an innert presocial strata by emphasising the role of matter (things, objects, bodies, biologies, spaces, and places) within – not apart from – the socio-cultural dimensions of gendered experience (Lupton 2019).

Feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz (1994), Rosi Braidotti (1989; 2019) and Karen Barad (2007) (among others) have been influential in the development of feminist materialist thought. Barad’s (2007) feminist materialism – defined as ‘agential realism’ – has been taken up by feminists across a range of disciplines. For Barad’s (2007) matter and discursivity are entangled and in constant intra-action. Barad uses the term intra-action alongside entanglement to capture the relationality of exchanges and forces within/through material-discursive relations and practices. As Lupton (2019, 1999) explains, the Baradian term intra-action ‘differs from interaction by emphasising that agencies are not exchanged between one actor and another, but rather emerge with and through the entanglements of actors as they be/come together’. Intra-activity is then a dynamic generative process which constitutes lived reality, affects embodied experience, agential capacities and realities, and social processes in particular ways (Barad 2007). Indeed, intra-activity is where knowledge, matter and embodiment meet and where boundaries or performative practices with properties and meanings are enacted around particular phenomena – what Barad’s (2007) terms as an ‘agential cut’ – constructing lived realities that enable and constrain, include and exclude, empower and disempower. Crucial to Barad’s agential realism, however, is the focus on agency as materialising in/through intra-activity – ‘it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has’ (Barad 2007, 235) – and is therefore co-productive of both possibilities and constraints produced together in one movement – a ‘cutting together/apart’ (Barad 2014, 168).

Whilst Barad’s (2007) feminist materialism situates intra-activity, agential realities (‘cuts’) and boundaries within the material-discursive, others have directed attention towards the material specificities of embodiment (Grosz 1994; Frost 2016). For instance, Grosz’s (1994, 165) corporeal feminism emphasises the intra-action or entanglement of ‘biological processes to material objects and social practices’ where cultural practices and meanings ‘seep into the functioning of the body itself’ (190). Indeed, Grosz’s (1994, 23) proposed that the body is ‘not opposed to culture … it is itself a cultural, the cultural, product’ open to ‘organic processes, to cultural intervention, transformation … production’. This principle is central to Samantha Frost’s (2016) feminist materialism which draws on insights from epigenetics to demonstrate the way cultural, social and biopolitical practices of the environment individuals inhabit shape embodied biological experiences and realities. Extending this point, Frost (2020, 5) claims ‘the ways our bodies grow and function are deeply and durably susceptible both to the places we live and to our modes of living’, however, ‘it is not just that meaning is imposed on bodies or absorbed by them in ways that directly or indirectly affect biological processes but also that a body’s responsiveness to those impositions and absorptions is in itself meaningful’ (Frost in interview with Tamari 2021, 4).

Frost’s (2016) work has been utilised by a handful of scholars exploring female athlete embodied health and the entanglement of the bio-social within elite sport environments (e.g. Thorpe, Clark, and Brice 2021; Thorpe and Clark 2020). Providing much inspiration for this paper, these authors have explored the experience of the health condition known as Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) in elite female athletes who participate in endurance multi-sport events and rugby sevens. They highlighted how the material-discursive and biopolitical practices of the elite sport environment centred on the optimisation of sporting (physical) performance, such as weight management techniques and intense training regimes, were implicated in the physiological changes to female athletes’ menstrual functioning and bone health. In doing so, Thorpe and Clark (2020, 16) illustrate how the ‘sporting biocultural body’ is ‘always in dialogue with, transformed by, and also transformative of, the sporting (knowledge) cultures and habitats in which … athletes move, perform, compose and decompose’.

Thorpe and Clark (2020) and Thorpe, Clark, and Brice’s (2021) work demonstrate the significance and richness feminist materialisms bring to the study of female athlete embodied health. Indeed, as Fullagar (2017) has previously noted, it enables feminist sport scholars to consider the relational forces that generate gendered embodied sporting ‘life in particular ways (that matter)’ (Fullagar 2017, 248) and in doing so generate alternative ways of understanding sporting gendered practices and subjectivity as processes ‘through which particular material properties emerge and other realities are excluded from being’ (Hollin et al. 2017, 933).

Although pregnancy has often been used by feminist materialist scholars as an emblematic example of the body as biocultural – as both organism and subject (e.g. Shildrik 2015); as irreducibly material (Grosz 1994); and as a ‘material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production’ (Barad 2007, 217) – it has rarely been discussed directly with feminist materialisms (see Chadwick 2018; Jette, Esmonde, and Maier 2019 as exceptions). This is certainly the case within the sport and exercise literature where the experiences of pregnancy by elite athletes have remained absent from the growing body of work on female embodied health and feminist materialism. This context has thus led scholars such as Jette, Esmonde, and Maier (2019) to encourage researchers to consider the bio-cultural with more conventional biopolitical critiques of pregnancy experience.

In our attempt to answer such calls, this paper draws on the feminist materialist work of Grosz’s (1994), Barad’s (2007) and Frost (2016) to better understand the ‘complex entanglements of the biological and social-cultural dimensions’ (Thorpe and Clark 2020, 2) of pregnancy experience in elite female athletes. As such, we hope to develop alternative insights around elite athletes’ experiences of pregnancy whilst further contributing to the growing body of work around female athlete embodied health inspired by feminist materialist approaches.

Feminist new materialist methodology

New materialist approaches share a specific set of ontological foundations that have stimulated lively debates within the field of qualitative research around how methodological practices are implicated with new theoretical turns (Fullagar 2017). Indeed, unique to new materialist theoretical concepts is the recognition of radical immanence or, in other words, the existence of a single ontological plane where all processes, interactions and things are transversally linked. The elision of an inside/outside associated with radical immanence offers a novel way of thinking beyond methodological dualisms (e.g. subject/object, researcher/researched) that have been central to humanist epistemologies and representational forms of knowledge production (Fox and Alldred 2015).

As such, new materialist perspectives have led to the emergence of Post Qualitative Inquiry (PQI)² which has begun to encourage new openings for thinking through and doing new materialist research consistent with a transversal ontology (e.g. Brice, Clark, and Thorpe 2021). Yet, although PQI offers a radical break from humanist qualitive research designs, working with new materialist theories does not render familiar methodological tools redundant (see, for instance Thorpe and Clark 2020). However, for many new materialist scholars, to remain consistent with materialist ontologies one must reconfigure the relationship between the various parts of the knowledge production assemblage, including (at least) the embodied researchers and participants, the practices enacted through methods, and the discursive resources available in the literature. Such reconfigurations disrupt the linear scientistic modalities that take for granted the position of the researcher as expert arbiter and instead reframe the knowledge production process as an assemblage of relational activity that is itself a boundary making practice (Barad 2007). Extending this, Barad (2014) describes how all research is an apparatus – a ‘shared enactment’ or ‘doing’ – that position (qualitative) research as part of – not separate from – a field of intra-activity that temporally manifests ‘patterns of understanding-becoming’ (construction and deconstruction) (Barad 2014, 187, ftn 63). In Barad’s (2007, 90–91) words:

We do not uncover pre-existing facts about independently existing things as they exist frozen in time like little statues positioned in the world. Rather, we learn about phenomena – about specific material configurations of the world’s becoming. The point is not simply to put the observer or knower back in the world (as if the world were a container and we needed merely to acknowledge our situatedness in it) but to understand and take account of the fact that we too are part of the world’s differential becoming.

Our research apparatus involved qualitative interviews with 11 elite female³ Olympic (n = 6) and Paralympic (n = 5) athletes who have experienced pregnancy or were considering pregnancy whilst on the UK elite sport funded programme – The World Class Programme (WCP). Interviews were conducted between January and May 2021 with questions intended to open up dialogue around lived experiences of negotiating the gendered practices, meanings and contexts of the sporting environment in relation to pregnancy and parenthood.

Informed consent was provided on the basis of full anonymity and confidentiality which is particularly important to note in light of the potential for being able to identify participants given the public profile and small population of athletes on the UK WCP. As such pseudonyms, personal characteristics, and reference to participants’ sport and/or event have not been labelled alongside the presented data. We are aware, however, that this has resulted in presenting our findings in a way that is somewhat indiscriminate between our participants’ divergent lived experiences of race, sexuality and (dis)able-bodiedness. Our intention is not to ignore these differences or silence marginalised voices – indeed we are particularly cognisant of the extent scholarship around reproductive health both within and outside of sport has focused almost exclusively on non-disabled bodies contributing to dominant notions of able-bodiedness as a marker of reproductive fitness (see, Ettorre and Kingdon 2010). As such, we wish to highlight to readers that while this paper focuses on some of the shared embodied experiences that coalesce around pregnancy and reproductive health, the voices presented are not limited to white, able-bodied, heterosexual voices.

Our reading of the interview transcripts and subsequent representation was inspired by Barad’s (2007, 72) diffractive analysis which seeks to explore ‘patterns of difference that make a difference’ (Barad 2007, 72) in data whilst remaining sensitive to theoretical insights and histories of (research) entanglement (e.g. with previous literatures, discourses, practices, etc). It took us several attempts to move beyond the familiar thematic analytical approach and the peer review process gave us productive pause to reconsider ways in which we might orientate the analysis process towards questions of how material-discursive assemblages around pregnancy materialise and stabilise in ways that come to matter for the elite female athlete body. Reading interview transcripts diffractively, as Taguchi (2012, 275) puts it, is to uncover a material-discursive ‘reality that already exists among the multiple realties being enacted in an event’ perhaps not ‘previously disclosed’ but which constitutes to the mattering of a phenomena in important ways. Our analysis, therefore, is an enactment of three ‘being becoming’ processes we describe here under the headings: Managing performance and reproductive health; Exclusionary boundaries and reproductive agencies; Biocultural realities.

Managing performance and reproductive health

As with many elite sport programmes, the UK WCP is centred on performance outcomes and the provision of training, medical and lifestyle support in the management of the UK’s elite athlete population. Embedded within the programme however are sets of biopolitical gendered practices that regulate athlete bodies in particular ways (see McMahon and Penney 2013). Whilst research exists that documents the way biopolitical practices embedded in elite sporting environments shape female athlete corporeality, behaviours and health and well-being such as extreme dietary practices, weight (self-)management techniques and specific training interventions (Thorpe 2016; McMahon and Penney 2013), far less is known about how this extends beyond the corporeal to include the biological/hormonal (material) dimensions of embodied sporting experience (Thorpe and Clark 2020). For material feminist scholars, such as Grosz (1994), the material (sexual) specificities of the female body in this instance cannot be ignored. As she reminds us, the female body ‘as a body which leaks, bleeds, which is at the mercy of hormonal and reproductive functions’ is a body always in need of ‘containing’ and ‘controlling’ (Grosz 1994, 204).

This becomes apparent when considering the management of female athlete reproductive health on the WCP. For instance, female athletes are the subject of a targeted educational program, termed SmartHER, which centres on promoting greater knowledge and awareness around female embodied health within the networks of the elite sport environment. This intervention, in the words of one athlete, tries to ‘get women thinking more about being a woman and what that means from bras to periods … and what that looks like with your training’. Another athlete noted that within the SmartHer intervention ‘[physiologists] talk to us about periods and how they can help with performance’.

Whilst the SmartHer intervention engages with the material specificity of the female athlete body within the elite sport context, it does so through a set of very specific material-discursive relations that are deeply entangled with a form of sporting knowledge aimed to promote the self-management and active embodied engagement with menstruation for the purpose of performance outcomes. Reflecting on the discussions that took place in her experience of SmartHer, one athlete explained how, 'the [sport] doctor – who was a guy – told me to go on the [contraceptive] pill just so I knew when my period was going to be, and then she [SmartHer practitioner] came in and said ‘oh no, you don’t want to do that because actually you are taking away the hormonal benefits that you have got and you might be missing those big energy spikes you can get’. Both recommendations – whether it be attempting to work around the menstrual cycle in order minimise disruption or work with the menstrual cycle to exploit the hormonal benefits – are clear efforts to engage with the materiality of the body for performance outcomes.

Excluding work by Thorpe and Clark (2020) and Thorpe, Clark, and Brice (2021), there is limited research on the way the biological dimension of reproductive health within female athlete populations is managed within the elite sport system. Certainly, the example above gives us pause to consider the way female athletes on the programme are impelled to actively engage with the biological changes that occur around menstruation revealing an intricate relationship between the biopolitical management of the female body in elite sport culture and its ‘biological functioning and processes’ (Thorpe and Clark 2020, 10). Put differently, this example begins to highlight how the material specificity of the female athlete body – as a body which ‘leaks and bleeds’ (Grosz 1994, 204) – materialises within/part of a material-discursive intra-activity of athlete bodies with a specific form of knowledge around menstruation and performance (see also Thorpe and Clark 2020).

However, what is particularly interesting here is that despite the open dialogue on menstruation that the SmartHer intervention enables (which should be praised), pregnancy and/or family planning as related dimensions of female embodied health are less welcomed within such discussions. Indeed, one athlete noted how ‘pregnancy is just not a topic of conversation’ with similar experiences expressed by many others through claims such as ‘it’s not really discussed’, ‘it has never been a formal conversation’ and ‘It’s not something that’s spoken about a huge amount’.

Clearly, the discussions, ideas and targeted interventions (e.g. use of the contraceptive pill) that occur around menstruation appear to materialise as/within a field of relations and intra-activity that are largely separated from the biocultural realities of pregnancy or family planning. Drawing on Barad (2007), this process operates as a boundary making practice – an agential cut which makes intelligible particular material realities, regulatory practices, relationships, affects, bodily performances, and agential capacities within locally determinate structures and networks. These differing boundaries – around menstruation and pregnancy – are drawn in the same process of intra-activity (a cutting together/apart) yet they operate to produce and stabilise particular meanings, knowledges, relations of power and agential capacities for female athletes on the programme. Indeed, as Barad (2007, 817) reminds us, boundary making practices are co-productive of possibilities and constraints within a phenomenon and ‘the realisation of different agential possibilities’. Here, we can begin to see how the agential possibilities, or rather impossibilities, constituted through the enactment of specific boundaries on the programme manifests a culture of silence around pregnancy that contribute to athletes experiencing a sense of restriction in discussing pregnancy and motherhood with their immediate support staff.

Exclusionary boundaries and reproductive agencies

Many of the athletes in the study described a very different experience in their approach to discussing pregnancy with immediate support staff compared with other areas of female embodied health, such as menstruation. Indeed, claims made by athletes, such as ‘I didn’t feel like I could have those conversations’ and ‘I didn’t feel comfortable enough to say to the staff that I wanted to back off [training] because I wanted to get pregnant’ were quite typical across the athlete interviews. Some athletes described feeling ‘nervous’ in approaching the topic of pregnancy with a staff member. For instance, one athlete noted: ‘I would certainly be nervous to speak to a coach before I had actually come to that decision’ with another claiming that ‘I would be nervous to ask staff members but also to seek out the facts’. Subsequently, unlike other aspects of female embodied health, athletes suggested they would seek advice about pregnancy and family planning from sources outside of the programme structure; as one athlete noted, ‘I’d have to almost outsource it because there isn’t anyone I could ask’.

Such claims resonate with the experiences of elite female athletes in the study by Davenport et al. (2022) who similarly expressed a hesitance and/or sense of discomfort in disclosing their pregnancy to support staff. Whilst above we have suggested how specific boundaries enacted around the issue of pregnancy on the programme contribute to restricted agential capacities in relation to pregnancy disclosure, the claims here speak to a structure of affective responses – discomfort, nervousness, hesitancy – that materialise in/with this agential reality. These responses indicate the embodiment of discourses that place the responsibility of athletes to self-manage (control and contain) their hormonal and reproductive functions (Grosz 1994). Indeed, as one athlete claimed,

I feel like at the moment if you had to sit the coaches down and explain that you were pregnant it would almost feel like a teen pregnancy, like ‘well, that was irresponsible’ or ‘how did that happen? Have you not been taking proper precautions?’.

Importantly, this mattering is produced in and with a history that borrowing from Barad (2007, 113) is ‘thickly threaded’ with the patriarchal and paternalistic discourses of elite sport culture (see Weaving 2020). This has been linked to the male dominated structure and cultures of elite sport which have historically seen leadership and coaching positions occupied by men. Participants in this study certainly felt this to be the case on the programme; indeed, one athlete described how ‘there are no females in terms of our leadership team; it is a very male dominant hierarchy’ with another claiming that ‘we have an all-male coaching team and support staff … basically our head coach, our assistant coach, our weights coach, our physiotherapists are all men’.

According to one athlete, this male dominated environment is ‘one of the challenges’ to knowing which member of staff to approach if they were considering pregnancy whilst on the programme. Another athlete shared a similar feeling, explaining,

there are not really any females up there [in leadership positions] you would go to first to have the conversation … I would prefer to speak with a female about it first, but it is a very male-dominant leadership team that we have got.

The absence of women in leadership positions forms an important dynamic in the ongoing intra-activity (Barad 2007) that occurs within the programme as well as having affective implications for the human–human relations between athletes and leadership staff with whom athletes anticipate a greater level of empathy as a result of shared embodiment. Unsurprisingly perhaps, athletes dealt privately with matters concerning family planning whilst on the programme. Reflecting on her experience one athlete claimed,

When I was pregnant with the first baby obviously I didn’t tell anyone, and it was kind of easy to cover up because I was taking a break from the sport after the Games – a lot of athletes do that. And then when I lost that baby, people from my sport, like the coaches, were saying ‘you need to come back; you need to start playing [competition removed]’, and obviously I was going through a miscarriage and also knowing that I wanted to get pregnant again. So, I had to tell them.

This experience is particularly troubling insofar that it demonstrates the pressure and reality athletes experience through the lack of dialogue around pregnancy and the inadequate support available for athletes who become pregnant and/or experience miscarriage and other complications whilst on the programme (see also Davenport et al. 2022). Yet, the biopolitical management of performance outcomes and athlete health in elite sport cultures, particularly in sports where weight classes are used for competition (see Thorpe and Clark 2020) means there is some difficulty in keeping pregnancy a private matter. Reflecting on this, one athlete explained, ‘so much of what we do is so highly monitored that I think it would be exhausting having to keep that [pregnancy] a secret from the people around you’.

Indeed, and with the above discussion in mind, many athletes in our study viewed the intra-actions and relations between groups and individuals in the sporting environment as ‘causally constraining’ (Barad 2003, 823) in their decision around pregnancy. For example, claims such as ‘at the moment there’s definitely a feeling, at least in [named sport], that pretty much if you want to have kids then retirement comes hand-in-hand with it’ and ‘the tradition is basically if you are to get married or have a baby it’s retirement time – like, that’s it’ were typical among the athletes in the study. These claims resonate with much of the previous research that positions motherhood as incompatible with elite sport (Davenport et al. 2022; Massey and Whitehead 2022; Martínez-Pascual et al. 2017) and continue to highlight the extent retirement is viewed as the only option for elite female athletes wishing to start a family (McGannon and Busanich 2016). However, thinking with the concepts of Barads agential realism begins to highlight the differing yet relational embodied forces that constitute this reality for female athletes on elite funded programmes.

Biocultural realities

As indicated above, there are some clear issues on the programme around the extent athletes feel they can discuss pregnancy with their immediate social network such as coaches, sport doctors and lifestyle support advisors. Whilst this has serious implications for athletes’ agential capacities and voice in respect to pregnancy and family planning, many female athletes are cognisant of the extent pregnancy is often not an option whilst on the programme due to the changes that occur in relation to reproductive health because of training demands. As one athlete explained,

They [sport doctor] fertility tested most of the squad and found basically everyone was infertile at the moment because our bodies are under a lot of physical strain so then it’s like well, no, I wouldn’t say to the coaches that I was thinking of having a baby because chances are it wouldn’t happen whilst I was on the programme.

Another athlete described how her training was ‘detrimental to being able to get pregnant’. This is compounded in sports where athletes’ weight is heavily regulated and monitored. Indeed, as one athlete claimed, ‘it’s easier for me to have a child and come back because I don’t need to have the physical fitness … but I still have to be in weight so that’s a challenge’.

With the exception of Davenport et al. (2022), the issue of fertility health and inconsistent menstrual cycles has rarely been discussed in previous research on this topic. Yet, the claims made above resonate with Frost’s (2016) materialist feminism and the role cultural, social and biopolitical practices of the environment individuals inhabit shape embodied biological experiences and realities. Put quite simply by one athlete, ‘You’re dealing with a human body and a human body that you tend to put under a lot more strain than anyone else in the normal world’. For this group of elite athletes, the environment implicates them in an embodied reality that extends to changes to reproductive health. Indeed, with Thorpe and Clark (2020, 9), it demonstrates the extent the ‘boundaries between the performing body and both the physiological and cultural demands of … sport become blurred, rendering the cultural and biological inseparable’.

However, as indicated above, athletes and immediate support staff are aware of the implications that stringent training regimes have on reproductive health – and whilst there is clearly very little dialogue around what this means for family planning or pregnancy in the context of the programme – athletes respond and act on this embodied knowledge in particular ways that ‘is in itself meaningful’ (Frost in interview with Tamari 2021, 4). For example, this extends to considering the implications of this in relation to factors such as, age, Olympic and Paralympic cycles, and the length of time it might take to become pregnant once they had left the programme. Indeed, as one athlete described:

I definitely do think about it [pregnancy] in the context of, well, if I do decide to do the Paris Olympiad, it’s not a given that I could finish that Olympics at [age] and fall pregnant soon after. It might be that it takes a year for my body to adjust, or two years or longer – it’s not a given.

For her and others there was a sense of uncertainty around the implications that staying on the programme would have on their ability to become pregnant in the immediate future. This was articulated by another athlete who explained, ‘as long as I was able to develop a more balanced approach to physical activity … I think, I hope that would be enough to re-settle things [reproductive health]’.

Indeed, athletes were reflective of the biological ‘limits’ in their reproductive capacities and the fact that peak sporting performance coincides with peak fertility (see also Davenport et al. 2022). As one athlete claimed:

When your body is at its best, you’re going to be performing best, but when your body is at its best it’s probably also the best time for carrying a baby and going through the trauma of birth and everything that comes with it.

Within the material-discursive environment of elite sport, athletes are thus faced with an agential reality that holds in tension the materialisation of their reproductive and performance capacities – as it is now, and as it might be in the future. As Barad (2012, 44) reminds us, space, time and matter do not ‘stay put’ but rather are ‘iteratively reconfigured and enfolded through the world’s ongoing intra-activity’ making and remaking boundaries, subjectivity, matter and meaning. This process – termed spacetimemattering (Barad, 2012) – is at the same time then a cutting together/apart whereby both possibilities and constraints in reproduction and performance outcomes are produced together within the specific material-discursive environment of elite sport.

Yet, the athletes in the study were certainly not ambivalent or passive actors in their knowledge of the changes that occurred in their biological realities and the possibilities and constraints in reproduction and performance outcomes. Here, we agree with Thorpe and Clark (2020, 10) who note that athletes ‘understand their own biologies as somewhat malleable, and not as unyielding or determining forces’. Indeed, in a bio-cultural reality that holds in tension the materialisation of their reproductive and performance capacities combined with restricted agency in discussing pregnancy as an option whilst on the programme, athletes become ‘entrapped’– to borrow from Braidotti (2019) – within an agential reality whereby retiring or leaving the programme to become pregnant is one of the few options available. As one athlete explained,

I felt my body almost needed that recovery to have the energy to get pregnant, so I made the conscious choice to leave. I wasn’t pregnant at the time that I left. I made the conscious choice to leave. I got pregnant about 9 months to a year after that. It took quite a while … I don’t think I would have got pregnant or got pregnant as quickly as I did if I had stayed on the program because of the stress and the training – it was all just too much at that time.

In this example, we get a sense of how embodied capacities shift and respond once again to the change in material environment (Frost 2016). In the experience of this particular athlete, removing herself from the ‘stress and the training’ of the performance focused elite sport environment gave her a sense of control over the process of becoming pregnant.

Reflections

This study was premised on the notion that issues around pregnancy, reproductive health and motherhood are increasingly worthy of attention for research as well as for the project of sports feminism more broadly. Taking inspiration from feminist materialist scholarship – and seeking to contribute to a growing body of feminist materialist inspired work on female athlete embodied health – our paper highlights the extent matter and meaning are ‘interimplicated’ in the management of fertility health and pregnancy on the United Kingdom (UK) elite sport funded programme – the World Class Programme (WCP).

We suggest that this study opens opportunities for further research on this topic. Having begun to interrogate the bio-social and material forces and relations that operate within the sporting environment it would seem an appropriate progression to engage with a broader variety of data sources in future. In investigating the material forces and relations pertinent to pregnancy in elite sport we see space for research designs that are maximally inclusive of ‘data’ that are revealing of, for example, human–nonhuman relations (e.g. physiological monitoring devices), human–human relations (e.g. involving medical and sport staff as affective agents) and biometric data (e.g. menstrual cycle patterns, body mass changes) (see Thorpe and Clark 2020). In doing so, we may begin to better understand and complicate the bio-social relations involved in, for example, prenatal and postpartum exercise ‘risk’ discourse.

Throughout our analysis, feminist materialist perspectives have enabled us to consider the ways in which cultural, biological, political, material and affective forces on the WCP are implicated in the materialisation of elite athlete bodies and have agentic effects on athletes’ biological and performance realities; a reality that ultimately enables, constrains and informs experiences of pregnancy for female athletes in specific ways. In doing so we sought to bring new materialist approaches in dialogue with research on elite athlete pregnancy experience (e.g. Davenport et al. 2022; Darroch and Hillsburg 2017) – a body of work which has rarely engaged with the bio-cultural entanglement and ‘fleshy’ dimensions of reproduction and pregnancy – as one way of moving beyond discursive onto-epistemologies.

Importantly, bringing the bio-cultural to the fore in understandings of elite athlete pregnancy holds much potential for considering avenues towards political and social transformation. By moving away from thinking about pregnancy experience as purely an effect of power on athletes gendered agency (unidirectional) toward materialisation and the role of the bio-social in the workings of power, enables us to effectively interrogate the making/unmaking of possibilities around elite athlete pregnancy in the intra-action with other aspects of embodiment and material-discursive relations and practices of elite sport. For instance, if we are to challenge the pervasive cultural narrative that motherhood and elite sport are incompatible, we must firstly consider how biological and performance capacities are both implicated and co-emergent in the very materiality of athlete bodies that have reciprocal agentive effects on/for athletes. By doing so, we can consider how practices that engage more fully with the material specificity and reproductive limits of the female body within the elite sport environment can be developed to better support commitments to gender equity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. More information on the United Kingdom (UK) elite sport-funded programme – the World Class Programme (WCP) – can be found here: https://www.uksport.gov.uk/our-work/world-class-programme. In the paper, we refer to the World Class Programme as the programme.

2. We are unable to expand on the particularities of PQI in the scope of this paper. For a fuller explanation see St Pierre (2019).

3. The athletes in the study were assigned female at birth.