Reconceptualizing Women's Wellbeing During the Pandemic: Sport, Fitness and More-Than-Human Connection

Thorpe, Holly; Jeffrey, Allison; Fullagar, Simone; Pavlidis, Adele

doi:10.1177/01937235221109438

Cited by 19 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 95 publications

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“…In their efforts to (re)create new everyday patterns, many engaged in exercise practices (i.e., walking, running, working out at home, online fitness, yoga) (Thorpe et al, 2022). Whereas some took up new activities, others modified their pre‐pandemic exercise regimes around new daily spatio‐temporal routines, modifying bedrooms, garages and backyards as spaces to workout alone and/or with family (Clark & Lupton, 2021).…”

Section: Analysis and Discussion: The Pandemic As Gender Arrhythmia I...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The pandemic as gender arrhythmia: Women’s bodies, counter rhythms and critique of everyday life

Thorpe

Brice

Soltani³

et al. 2023

Gender Work & Organization

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In this paper we build upon recent organizational research drawing upon the work of Henri Lefebvre, and feminist engagements with his theory of “Rhythmanalysis”, to examine how the COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted women's everyday lives and the impacts on their relationship with work. Drawing upon interviews with 38 women from diverse socio‐cultural backgrounds living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we describe the pandemic as an “arrhythmia”, a radical rupture to the familiar rhythms of their everyday social and working lives. We describe how the pandemic arrhythmia was felt in and through bodies (i.e., sleep, weight), and how women responded by creating counter rhythms (i.e., hobbies, exercise, food) as strategies to support their own and others wellbeing. Furthermore, radically disrupting linear repetitions of everyday work, social and family life, the pandemic prompted many to reflect differently upon how pre‐pandemic rhythms shaped by the social, economic and gendered structures of neoliberalism were causing various forms of alienation (i.e., from their own health and wellbeing, meaningful social connections, ethical and sustainable working practices, and from pleasure). For some women, the pandemic arrhythmia was a puncturing of their normalized time‐space gendered routines, leading to critique and transformation to their everyday work‐life patterns. Engaging a feminist reading of rhythmanalysis, this paper brings into focus how neoliberal gender regimes are reconstituted and disrupted in the rhythms and routines of women's everyday lives. In so doing, we highlight the potential in feminist engagement with arrhythmia to extend understandings of the gendered politics of everyday life during and beyond pandemic times, and the value in such approaches for organizational scholars interested in understanding the gendered rhythms of daily life and their effects on relationships with work.

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Section: Analysis and Discussion: The Pandemic As Gender Arrhythmia I...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The pandemic as gender arrhythmia: Women’s bodies, counter rhythms and critique of everyday life

Thorpe

Brice

Soltani³

et al. 2023

Gender Work & Organization

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“… Downing et al (2021) research with therapists described the ways that fostering a sense of safety and care online demanded intensive focus and “dynamic interactions between humans, objects and technologies” (p. 7). As feminist materialist scholars, we have considered the human and nonhuman (i.e., objects, environments, technologies, animals) aspects of women’s lives during the pandemic, and in the research process ( Jeffrey et al, 2021 ; Thorpe et al, 2022 ). In this article, we extend upon this work, examining not only what is required for multidimensional care but also what is meant by the term relational in new materialist feminist ethical scholarship.…”

Section: Literature Review: Rethinking Research Ethics In Pandemic Timesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relational Ethics of Care in Pandemic Research: Vulnerabilities, Intimacies, and Becoming Together-Apart

Jeffrey

Thorpe

2023

Qualitative Inquiry

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In this article, we draw upon the ethico-onto-epistemology of feminist new materialisms to reflect on our experiences as feminists doing research on women’s embodied experiences of sport, fitness, and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. For qualitative researchers around the world, COVID-19 presented a radically changed research environment. For many, the shift to doing digital interviews required the navigation of unfamiliar technologies and experimenting with different strategies for establishing connections through computer screens. As feminist scholars, working together and with the participants during times of increased stress and uncertainty prompted us to reimagine our ethical research practices. In this article, we engage and extend Rosi Braidotti’s writing on affirmative ethics and offer our personal experiences of grappling with the affective intensities of pandemic while doing ethical feminist research. Through this creative inquiry, we describe supporting one another through research and illustrate how the unique intersections of work, family, health, isolation, and exhaustion were influencing our own and participants’ lives differently. Engaging with Braidotti’s writings on affirmative ethics in the posthuman convergence, we illuminate the ways that our digital-material experiences and the human/nonhuman aspects of the research processes were re-turning our ethical considerations. Researching together, with a focus on creating space for the voices of women who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, we found moments of hope and joy as we creatively imagined expansive potentials for feminist research, fostered through caring collaborations.

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“…Under these challenging conditions, women's mental health was heavily impacted, with women experiencing higher rates of depression and anxiety than men (Thibaut & van Wijngaarden-Cremers, 2020). Research on the gendered dimensions of COVID-19 has revealed the importance of physical activity for women's wellbeing during the pandemic (Humberstone, 2022; Pandya, 2021), and how some women shared physical activity experiences with friends, family, and colleagues as a mode of connection and community (re)building (Thorpe, Jeffrey, Fullagar, & Pavlidis, 2023).…”

Section: Literature and Conceptual Framing: The Pandemic As Gendered ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Thorpe,

Brice,

O’Leary

et al. 2023

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

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Building upon and extending a growing strand of research engaging feminist new materialisms to understand women's moving bodies as more-than-human phenomena, this paper considers the pandemic as an event that initiated new expressions and contents for the fitness assemblage. Engaging a feminist reading of Deleuze and Guattari's writings on becoming, we examine women's physical activity practices during the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing upon object interviews with 38 women living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ask: How do women's pandemic relations with spaces (home, neighborhood), others (family, pets) and matter (objects of fitness) prompt new ways of knowing their own moving bodies and the importance of physical activity in their lives? Through our affective, material, and embodied analysis, we explain how the pandemic event surfaced new lines of flight away from the dominant gendered fitness assemblage. Women's affective relations and movement encounters prompted the emergence of new forms of bodily autonomy and fitness for pleasure and connection, offering glimpses of alternative ways of knowing, feeling, and sensing physical activity as becoming.

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Reconceptualizing Women's Wellbeing During the Pandemic: Sport, Fitness and More-Than-Human Connection

Cited by 19 publications

References 95 publications

The pandemic as gender arrhythmia: Women’s bodies, counter rhythms and critique of everyday life

The pandemic as gender arrhythmia: Women’s bodies, counter rhythms and critique of everyday life

Relational Ethics of Care in Pandemic Research: Vulnerabilities, Intimacies, and Becoming Together-Apart

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

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