Remembering learning to play: reworking gendered memories of sport, physical activity, and movement

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore young women’s memories of their experiences with sport, physical activity, and play during their childhood. Through collective memory work – sharing, discussing, writing, and analysing sporting memories/histories – we examine (re)constructions of young women’s experiences of gendered relations of power, bodily awareness, and regulation within movement-based practices. The approach taken explores relationships between theory and method, a feature of post-qualitative inquiry. Forming a collaborative memory workshop with six young women (aged 19–22) and two researchers, we illustrate how working memories facilitates the interrogation of taken-for-granted assumptions about women’s active bodies. Represented through two memories in this paper, their production, representation, and analysis were a collaborative effort, not solely representative of two individual experiences. Despite growing up within a period wherein women’s access to and engagement with sport and physical activity is more available, common, and diverse compared to the youth of past generations, young women’s experiences explored here illustrate the ways in which movement-based practices are located within the confluence of postfeminist sensibilities including, intensely scrutinised gendered body cultures, potent neoliberal configurations, and discourses of empowerment. It is these new sporting and active femininities and the gendering experiences of physical culture that are explored within this paper through memory work and collective biography.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• memory work
• collective biography
• femininity
• gender
• sport
• physical activity
• post-qualitative inquiry
• collaborative writing
• embodiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article draws upon and reworks analysis developed in Clift, Merchant, and Francombe-Webb (2021, which focused on temporal aspects of memory work, and Clift, Francombe-Webb, and Merchant (2020), an unpublished paper presented at the Qualitative Research Symposium, Bath, UK, 29 January 2020. We would like to thank participants at that conference for their feedback and insight.

2. Ethical approval was provided by our appropriate departmental ethics review committee (EP 18/19 013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bryan C Clift

Bryan C Clift is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department for Health at the University of Bath, and Director of the Centre for Qualitative Research.

Jessica Francombe-Webb

Jessica Francombe-Webb is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department for Health at the University of Bath, and an affiliate member of the Centre for Qualitative Research and the Centre for Equality in Sport, Physical Activity and Health.

Stephanie Merchant

Stephanie Merchant is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department for Health at the University of Bath, and an affiliate member of the Centre for Qualitative Research and the Centre for Equality in Sport, Physical Activity and Health.