Challenging interpretive privilege in elite and professional sport: one [athlete’s] story, revised, reshaped and reclaimed

Abstract

This performance autoethnography explores some of the tensions, contradictions and consequences of stories in elite sport. Using my embodied experience, the performance questions how the socially constructed physical ‘I’ is created by those with interpretive privilege. Sports news media, collected over a 14-year period – stories about me – provide one strand of a dialogical narrative in which the focus is sporting excellence. Contrasting these stories, I draw on diary extracts, stories, poems and songs, written by me, to weave a second reflexive understanding of my self, identity and life-playing professional sport. The justification for turning to arts-informed research practice was to explore and include creative, embodied, subjective and emotional aspects of life, identities and selves which can be too easily obscured or omitted through traditional methodological approaches. This approach makes possible a more holistic portrayal of identity development, selfhood and relationships, and therefore provides some unusual, if not unique, insights regarding how athletes’ lives can be interpreted, shaped, edited, revised and reclaimed. I hope the performance, and its textual representation here, contributes to the expanding use of arts-informed research by showing the relevance to practitioners in elite and professional sport.

Keywords:

• elite athletes
• professional sport
• newspaper analysis
• performance autoethnography
• ethnotheatre

View correction statement:

Erratum

Acknowledgements

My appreciation and gratitude go to David Carless and Emeritus Professor Kim Etherington for their unwavering interest and support for this project. I should also like to thank Professor Anne Flintoff and delegates at the Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and the Auto/Biography Conference for their comments and encouragement. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and supportive comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2014.912823).

1. Arts-informed research ‘is a mode and form of qualitative research…influenced by, but not based in, the arts broadly conceived’. Where the central purpose is to ‘enhance understanding of the human condition through alternative (to conventional) processes and representational forms of inquiry and to reach multiple audiences by making scholarship more accessible’ (Coles and Knowles 2008, p. 59).

2. Saldaña (2005) provides a useful distinction defining ethnodrama, as ‘dramatised, significant selections of narrative collected through interviews, participant observation, field notes, journal entries, and/or print and media artefacts such as diaries, television broadcasts, newspaper articles, and court proceedings’ p. 2), whereas ethnotheatre is the ‘traditional craft and artistic techniques of theatre production to mount for an audience a live performance event of research participants' experiences and/or the researcher,s interpretations of data’ (p. 1).

3. Revised, Reshaped and Reclaimed has been performed for the general public in Bristol, at the Auto-Biography Conference, University of Reading, UK in 2012, at the University of Huddersfield 2013, during drama/performance reading, Wales 2013, and the first half of the performance was performed in a panel session at the Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Champaign, Illinois in 2013. The feedback I refer to in the introduction has been taken from these audiences.

4. Preventing athletes speaking or showing solidarity with political movements is one-way sport practices damage athletes’ moral agency. The promotion and acceptance of stories which suggest the athlete was ‘born to run’ or perform in a particular discipline because of their ‘body type’ ‘fast twitch muscles’ or other ‘god given or inhered talent’ is a practice that naturalises the athlete’s body. Describing ‘locker room humour’, when it is sexist, misogynistic or homophobic as ‘normal’ and not ‘really’ abusive deflects attention away from the abuse and the harm caused to some athletes in these environments.