Powerlifting, a competitive strength-based sport, offers a rich and compelling site for investigating the digital mediation of gendered subjectivities. The substantive implications of feminist knowledge as interventions in physical cultures are well documented. This article seeks to extend the onto-epistemological precepts of a Feminist New Materialist framework to further a generative analysis of women's physically active moving bodies. The digital lifting journeys of ten women and their physical-digital everyday experiences of becoming-strong comprise the sample with the intent of understanding something different about the micropolitics of self-world transformations entangled within moving-desiring practices. Hence, we argue in this article that the ephemerality of digital traces embedded within networked-based platforms such as Instagram have the potential to change the 'Face' of strength-based sport with significant implications for expanding the cultural imaginary of/for sportswomen more broadly.
Feminist engagement with fight sports is often ambivalent given the masculine history of combat and the achievement of “self” transformation at the “expense” of another, exist in tension with the possibilities of women’s empowerment. Acknowledging the multiplicity of embodied meanings produced through Muay Thai Boxing (Thai Boxing), this feminist post-qualitative project seeks to do “research differently” through a generative ethos of knowledge production that is co-constituted with participants and the coach-researcher (Erin). We explore how a Thai boxing program—“fight camp”—worked through-with an affective feminist coaching pedagogy that sought to transform gendered patterns of movement mobilizing moments of discomfort and pleasure. This research practice involved attuning to the embodied dynamics of learning-coaching—the intra-actions of boxing—in terms of what these movement practices “do” and how they “affect” women in the process of becoming-fighters. We write through three provocations—“the drunk uncle,” “get ugly with it,” and “show and tell”—to engage readers in the affective relations entangled within the processes of coaching-researching MTB. Our post-qualitative research approach has implications for the provision of physical cultural practices and alternative coaching pedagogy more broadly.
This article narrates the affects and experiences of the CaiRollers, the first and only roller derby team in Egypt. Through visual affective discourse analysis of their Instagram account and interviews with team members, the article addresses the question: What do physical practices such as roller derby ‘do’ in e/affecting and mobilising change? In conversation with feminisms from the Middle East, our analysis highlights how the team’s ‘sisterhood’ is a site of affective politics that transcends the roller derby track. At the same time, a desire to be tough and to embrace risk permeated the CaiRollers discourses. Yet, while the team has established its legitimacy within the transnational roller derby community, we narrate the obstacles they face in Egypt. In sum, we found that the CaiRollers involvement in roller derby was entangled in mobilising change in political movements, gender politics, transnational mobilities and questions of legitimacy and sport.
In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new ways of knowing-thinking-doing response-able collaboration. In an effort to come “together-apart” as author-collaborators, working from our different positionings and locations in the world, we shared text and images of the various ways the ideas from individual papers (nodal points) and our diffractive processes were moving (with) us. Sharing these creative respondings, new relations co-emerged through the texts-images and the various diffractive patterns that traveled widely through screens, devices, bodies, from New Zealand and Australia, to Iran, London, Finland, Canada, and the West and East Coasts of the United States. Paying attention to the fine details, difference emerged, as did new forms of more-than-human connection. The visual and written respondings were then cut together-apart (literally, metaphorically and methodologically) to represent the multiplicities of the diffractive process, bodies, hauntings, absences and excess, and the tensions and affective vulnerabilities that co-emerged through our process. We present four visual montages of the diffractive patterns that surfaced from the individual papers as nodal points and our creative collaborative processes of becoming-with the special issue. We conclude with some final thoughts on the process of diffracting the special issue, inviting the reader to join us in imagining new lines of flight, alternative possibilities for becoming a more response-able, more-than-human academic community.
In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to articulate our experiences of the diffractive review process. In the later part of the dialogue, we turn toward imagining the possibilities for creatively exploring ways to represent how the ideas from this collaborative process travel with us, into our everyday lives. We discuss the ethical and political response-abilities in such diffractive collaboration and respondings, and in so doing, different author perspectives, positionalities, and productive tensions and knots, come to the fore. In so doing, this article connects the first part of the issue—the nodal points (author manuscripts)—with the final part of the issue (diffractive respondings), and provides insight into our collaborative and diffractive process.
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