Superwomen? Young sporting women, temporality and learning not to be perfect

Abstract

New forms of neoliberal femininity create demanding horizons of expectation for young women. For talented athletes, these pressures are intensified by the establishment of dual-career discourses that construct the combination of high-performance sport and education as a normative, ‘ideal’ pathway. The pressed time perspective inherent in dual-careers requires athletes to employ a variety of time-related skills, especially for young women who aim to live up to ‘superwoman’ ideals that valorise ‘success’ in all walks of life. Drawing on existential phenomenology, and in-depth interviews with 10 talented Finnish sportswomen (aged 19–22), we explored their experiences of lived time when pursuing dual-careers in upper secondary sport schools. Exploring participants’ bodily experiences of inhabiting the achievement life-world, we analyse how these sportswomen either learned ways of living up to this ambitious script or came to understand the detrimental effects of the script, necessitating other ways of being. For those who experience a disjuncture between the ‘perfect’ and their embodied experience, self-care practices are needed to restore life-world harmony, and orient to alternative futures.

Earth(l)y pleasures and air-borne bodies: Elemental haptics in women's cross-country running

“…From a sport sociological perspective, any lack of analytic attention to the specificities of embodiment wrought by, for example, gender, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, degrees of dis/ability, etc., would be highly problematic and neglectful. Hence, there are benefits of incorporating analytic insights drawn from other theoretical traditions, such as feminist sociology and theory (Allen-Collinson, 2011b; Ronkainen et al, 2020), feminist philosophy (Chisholm, 2008; Young, 1998), and critical sociology (Hughson and Inglis, 2002) in addressing the sporting body. In the form of phenomenological sociology employed here, embodiment and lived experiences are acknowledged to be fundamentally shaped by these sociological “variables,” and also, importantly, by the norms and values of specific sporting cultures.…”

The Impacts of Sports Schools on Holistic Athlete Development: A Mixed Methods Systematic Review

“…Norway Quantitative non-randomised 1 1 1 1 1 5 Moseid et al 2019b [58] Norway Quantitative non-randomised 1 1 1 1 1 5 Mudrak and Zabrodska 2014 [43] Czech Republic Qualitative 1 1 1 1 1 5 Perez-Rivases et al 2020 [48] Spain Quantitative non-randomised 1 1 1 1 1 5 Rasyid et al 2020 [73] Malaysia Quantitative descriptive 1 1 1 1 1 5 Romar 2012 [44] Finland Quantitative descriptive 0 1 0 1 0 2 Ronkainen et al 2020 [59] Finland Qualitative 1 1 1 1 1 5 Ronkainen and Ryba 2018 [66] Finland Qualitative 1 1 1 1 1 5 Rosendahl et al 2009 [60] Germany Quantitative descriptive 1 1 1 1 1 5 Ryba et al 2017 [36] Finland Qualitative 1 1 1 1 1 5 Sandström et al 2012 [ 61] Sweden Quantitative non-randomised 1 1 1 1 1 5 Skrubbeltrang et al 2020 [45] Denmark Quantitative descriptive 1 1 0 1 0 3 Skrubbeltrang et al 2016 [67] Denmark Qualitative 1 1 1 1 1 5 Sorkkila et al 2017 [18] Finland Quantitative descriptive 1 1 1 1 1 5 Sorkkila et al 2018 [74] Finland Quantitative non-randomised 1 1 1 1 1 5 Sorkkila et al 2019 [75] Sweden Quantitative non-randomised 1 1 1 1 1 5 Stambulova et al 2015 [37] Sweden Mixed methods 1 1 1 1 1 5 Stenling et al 2015 [62] Sweden Quantitative descriptive 1 1 1 0 1 4 Stornaes et al 2019 [63] Norway Quantitative non-randomised 1 1 1 1 1 5 van Rens et al 2012 [49] Netherlands Quantitative non-randomised 1 0 1 1 0 3 Zhao et al 2020 [64] China Quantitative non-randomised 1 1 1 0 1 4…”

“…Twenty-one studies explored the impact of sports schools on health and well-being, through interviews [27,36,40,55,59], clinical analysis [53], laboratory tests [61], non-specified questionnaires [23,45,50,53,58,[61][62][63], standardised questionnaires [26,48,51,54,[56][57][58]60], and male and female silhouettes [60]. Sports school student-athletes indicated a high incidence of injury [48,58] and illness [58].…”

“…Nine studies [20,27,37,42,47,59,[65][66][67] explored psychosocial impacts. The thematic analysis included four subthemes: social skills, higher social status, family and friends, and life skills.…”

“…Twenty-one studies [18,22,23,28,37,40,42,43,45,46,49,59,63,[68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75] in total explored psychological impacts. The thematic analysis shaped five sub-themes: perceived pressure and anxiety, motivation, identity and orientation, self-optimisation and burnout.…”