Feminist New Materialist Entanglements With “Kinetic Excess” in Women’s Muay Thai Boxing: Moving With Embodied Discomfort as a Post-Qualitative Coach-Researcher

Abstract

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.

The Special Issue as Diffractive Process: A Collaborative Dialogue

“…How did those ideas move us, connecting or resonating in particular ways? How do they disrupt, disturb, the excess of the ideas, a bit like Erin's notion of the 'kinesthetic excess' (see Nichols et al, 2023). And what do we do with that?…”

Women's Physical Activity as Becoming: Lines of Flight from the Fitness Assemblage

“…Over recent years, some feminist scholars have turned to new materialist and more-than-human theories (e.g., Braidotti, Barad, Deleuze) to expand their understanding of the affective, embodied, and material dimensions of women's movement practices (Thorpe et al, 2020;Baxter, 2020;Clark, 2020;Fullagar, 2020;Fullagar et al, 2021;Markula, 2023). In so doing, such approaches have offered a different perspective to the previous social constructionist literature of women's physical cultural experiences, highlighting how pleasure, joy, pain, guilt, longing, desire, and shame are entangled in more-than-human sporting and fitness assemblages, as well as signposting new capacities for transformation (Avner et al, 2021;Brice, 2022;Jeffrey et al, 2021Jeffrey et al, , 2022Markula, 2006aMarkula, , 2006bNichols et al, 2023;Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2013, 2015, 2016.…”