Movements

Abstract

The “nature of sport” is to sculpt bodies through rhythmic movements and bring these bodies into the public sphere through a dramatic staging of mastery, strength, and agility. When sporting bodies enter the public realm on TV screens, in prose, and as work colleagues, they do so sculpted through the materialization of meaningful movements. Women’s sports often provide especially good examples of this process. The preceding chapters describe how culture moves through the many examples of ponytailed customs and fashions, oscillating amid young and adult heteronormative womanhood, and in democratic tales and hopes motivated by social (in)justice. This chapter shows how the female athlete materializes motions, both physical and cultural, in the form of a cultural kinetics captured in their ponytails, moving with them and imbued with this movement.