Negotiating female judoka identities in Greece: A Foucauldian discourse analysis

What can gender tell us about the pre-retirement experiences of elite distance runners in Finland?: A thematic narrative analysis

“…The 136 recent practical implication of the cultural praxis heuristic is the cultural praxis of athletes' careers, 137 which merges the holistic lifespan perspective on athletic career (Wylleman & Lavallee, 2004;138 Wylleman et al, 2013) with a cultural mindset to stimulate the development of culturally situated 139 career research and assistance (Stambulova & Ryba, 2013 (Kavoura, Ryba, & Chroni, 2015). The present study contributes to the body of 144 empirical research within cultural praxis.…”

“…Also, when 502 female athletes discussed parents' involvement in their athletic career, mothers were not mentioned, 503 but fathers were considered as the main supporters. Therefore, not only is the running culture 504 dominantly masculine, but also family members socializing female athletes into sport are most often 505 men (see also Kavoura et al, 2015). Moreover, male athletes expressed much more interest and 506 perceived competence for coaching than female athletes, whose main barriers related to lack of 507 time, lack of expertise and bad experiences with their own coaches.…”

'Pink Gloves Still Give Black Eyes': exploring 'alternative' femininity in women's combat sports

“…Often, female fighters' embodiment of femininity is considered somewhat oppositional to, or even incompatible with, their development of fighting skills [Halbert 1997;McCaughey 1998;Guérandel and Mennesson 2007;Kavoura et al 2015]; it can also be framed as symbolic of the limited extent to which MACS practices can challenge wider social formations of (hierarchal) gender difference [Mennesson 2000;Velija et al 2013;Paradis 2014;Weaving 2014]. In this sense, the extant feminist literature on women in MACS, with its overarching commitment to exploring how female practitioners can challenge or subvert women's subordination, has often tended to reaffirm what Jayne Caudwell describes as the general tendency among wider feminist sport sociology to read sportswomen's femininity as 'duped' [Caudwell 2006: 155].…”

“…In other words, what they are capable of is argued to not represent the capacities of other, 'normal' women; at best, they count as 'honorary men', and are thereby dismissed from troubling normative symbolic constructions of male superiority [Griffin 2002;Kavoura et al 2015]. And thanks to the stigmatising, homophobic conflation of lesbianism with female masculinity often accompanying this process, as well as the historical marginalisation and denigration of homosexuals within sport, 3 participating in 'masculine' sports can present a great deal of 'gender trouble' for women, regardless of their actual sexuality [Lindner 2012].…”

“…Much has been written over the past two decades about the experiences of women participating in martial arts and combat sports (MACS) of various kinds [e.g., Guthrie 1995;Halbert 1997;McCaughey 1997;Mennesson 2000;Hollander 2004;Sisjord and Kristiansen 2009;Lökman 2010;Paradis 2012;Mierzwinski et al 2014;Allen-Collinson and Owton 2015;Jennings 2015;Kavoura et al 2015;Channon and Matthews 2015a; see also Follo 2012 andChannon andJennings 2014 for wider reviews of this literature]. A significant amount of the scholarly work concerning these female martial artists, boxers, wrestlers, and self-defence practitioners has echoed themes prominent within the broader field of research on women's sport, identifying in particular the 'empowering' experiences of female fighters and the broader, gender-subversive potential involved with these phenomena [e.g., Hargreaves 1997;McCaughey 1998;De Welde 2003;Noel 2009;McNaughton 2012;Velija et al 2013].…”