Sportswomen as ‘biocultural creatures’: understanding embodied health experiences across sporting cultures

Participation in Sport, Empowerment, and Safety From Violence: Critiquing the Connections Through Women’s Experiences in Aotearoa/New Zealand

“…Since Hargreaves' ground-breaking work, women's experiences of sport have been examined from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives, exploring experiences in a range of sports and roles within sport cultures, and examining these in the context of neo-liberal times and post-feminist discourses (see, for example, Toffoletti et al, 2018). While a full review of this literature is beyond the scope of this article, women's gendered, lived experiences of sport have been examined from diverse inter-disciplinary perspectives (in the New Zealand context see, for example, Cox & Pringle, 2012;Cox & Thompson, 2000;Marfell, 2012;Palmer & Leberman, 2009;Thorpe, 2005;Thorpe et al, 2021). While women's experiences in sport have been explored from a range of disciplinary perspectives and have been subject to extensive feminist analysis, this area remains underexplored among feminist criminologists and no research to date has interrogated the framing of women's participation in sport as part of the solution to gender-based violence.…”

The transdisciplinary health research apparatus: A Baradian account of knowledge boundaries and beyond

“…Despite a rapidly growing body of sport science and medical literature examining the prevalence and effects of LEA among athletes and exercising women (and increasingly male athletes), to date very little research has examined women’s experiences of LEA (see Thorpe, 2016) or explored the influence of sporting culture on the complex relationship between biology and culture in women’s embodied experiences of this condition (Thorpe et al, 2019). While sports medicine and science scholars and practitioners seem to recognize the importance of culture on sportswomen’s experiences of RED-S—impacting risks, prevalence, treatment, and recovery—they are largely ill-equipped to explore questions of how culture intra-acts with biological sporting bodies.…”

“…More specifically, the project engaged quantitative and qualitative research data from: (i) a survey gathering initial demographic, training, and nutritional information; (ii) physiological measures, including resting metabolic rate (RMR) to establish current energy availability status, a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scan to assess body composition (particularly per cent body fat, fat mass, lean body mass and bone health), baseline blood work to measure key hormonal changes related to RED-S (estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, iron status, cortisol, C-reactive protein, hepcidin, and thyroid function); and (iii) semi-structured interviews. The same methodology was repeated across two different sports (endurance multi-sport, rugby), with the first phase including 12 elite, non-professional endurance female athletes (competing in triathlon and/or Ironman events), (Thorpe and Clark, 2020), and the second phase including 18 members of a national rugby sevens team (Thorpe et al, 2019).…”

Thinking through the Disruptive Effects and Affects of the Coronavirus with Feminist New Materialism

“…These dynamic affects and sleepless nights have moved us to write this commentary to think our way through with the intellectual resources of feminist new materialism (Barad, 2007;Coole & Frost, 2010;Fullagar, 2017;Haraway, 2016;Kumm et al, 2018;Lupton, 2019;Thorpe et al, 2019). It is an analytic approach that orients us towards the "moments of affirmation and moments of dissonance" afforded by changing leisure practices, policies and provision -in the effort to counter sexism, racism, poverty, homophobia, transphobia and environmental degradation (Bargetz, 2019, p.193).…”