Gut Feminism, new materialisms and sportwomen’s embodied health: the case of RED-S in endurance athletes

ABSTRACT

This paper critically explores the potential of feminist new materialist approaches to develop new understandings of the complex entanglements of the biological and socio-cultural dimensions of women athletes’ embodied health experiences. In particular, we draw upon Elizabeth Wilson’s (2015) Gut Feminism to ask ‘what conceptual and methodological innovations become possible when feminist theory is not so instinctively antibiological’? (1). Drawing upon two phases of interviews with 12 elite endurance sports-women involved in triathlon and Ironman events, we explore meanings of leanness, and the ‘ideal’ sporting body, as dynamically produced through socio-material-biological processes. Focusing particularly on their experiences of Low Energy Availability (LEA) and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), we illustrate some of the ways that the unique sporting culture presses upon women’s bodies, and how, for some women, their responses to physiological data evokes further biological ramifications. In so doing, we highlight biology as more dynamic, nonconsilient and less deterministic than many sport feminists have presumed. Ultimately, this paper signals the 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 find new ways to press back upon the sciences to rethink their approaches to understanding, diagnosing and treating complex health phenomena.

KEYWORDS:

• New materialism
• feminist theory
• Gut Feminism
• sportswomen
• health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Holly Thorpe

Holly Thorpe is a Professor of Sociology of Sport and Physical Culture at the University of Waikato. Her research interests include feminist theory, the body, youth culture, and girls and women’s participation in sport and recreation. Holly embraces interdisciplinary approaches and has published over 65 articles and chapters, three sole-authored books, and six edited books on these topics. She currently serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Sociology, and is co-editor (with Kim Toffoletti and Jessica Francombe-Webb) of a new series titled New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures. She is co-editor (with Joshua Newman and David Andrews) of the forthcoming Sport, Physical Culture and the Moving Body: Materialisms, Technologies, Ecologies (Rutgers).

Marianne Clark

Marianne Clark is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Waikato New Zealand. Her research engages poststructuralist and new materialist theory to examine women’s and girls’ experiences of the moving, performing body.  Her work also focuses on the role of emerging digital technologies in shaping our understandings and embodied experiences of health, physical activity, and exercise.  She acts as a Review Editor for Frontiers in Sports and Active Living and is the co-editor of The Evolving Feminine Ballet Body.