Toward More-Than-Human Understandings of Sport and the Environment: A New Materialist Analysis of Everyday Fitness Practices

Abstract

Sport and fitness have long been linked with healthy lifestyles, yet most sporting events and consumption practices are highly detrimental to the environment. While academics have examined the harmful effects of sporting mega-events and the production and consumption of sport equipment and clothing, there has been less engagement with the “mundane,” everyday activities of consuming, laundering, and recycling of fitness objects. In this paper, we explore the potential in feminist new materialisms for rethinking the complex relationships between sport, fitness, and the environment. In particular, we explain how our engagement with Karen Barad's theory of agential realism led us to rethink women's habitual fitness practices as connected to environmental degradation. Working with Barad's concept of entanglement, we came to notice new human-clothing-environment relationships, focusing on how athleisure clothing itself is an active, vital force that intra-acts with other non-human (and human) matter within the environment. Adopting a diffractive methodology that included reading interviews with women about their activewear practices, our own experiences, new materialist theory, and environmental literature through each other, we focus on two examples that emerged through this process: laundering and disposal practices. Through these examples, we demonstrate the ways in which new materialisms encouraged us to move toward non-anthropocentric understandings of the sport-environment relationship and toward new ethical practices in our everyday fitness lifestyles.

Postfeminism, consumption and activewear: Examining women consumers’ relationship with the postfeminine ideal

“…cotton) in their activewear purchasing choices. Therefore, for our participants there was more emphasis on environmental sustainability than on workers' or human rights (Brice and Thorpe, 2021b).…”

“…Thus, the phenomenon represents another example of the ways in which clothing plays an important role in the production of idealised femininity and standards for women's physically active bodies (Entwistle, 2000;Fuller, 2021;Warner, 2006). Recognising the important links between activewear with gender, fitness, wellness, and consumption, an emerging body of literature is examining this phenomenon from a multitude of perspectives (Brice and Thorpe, 2021b;Hwang and Kim, 2020;Luna Mora and Berry, 2021;Rothwell, 2023).…”

Assemblage Thinking as Attunement to Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Youth Sport Research

“…In a marketing scheme covering the entire planet, capitalism exudes the “immense functionality of consumerism in chaining populations to the very megamachine which oppresses them” (Saldanha, 2020, p. 23). Youth sport is entangled in these chaining affects, feeding a sporting goods industry reliant on global racial divisions of labour to produce sporting apparel and equipment that contribute to the planet's environmental degradation (Brice & Thorpe, 2021). Intricate forces of capitalist expansion abound in sport where political manoeuvring on the world stage sways the allocation of mega sporting events, setting in motion migrations, exploitation, corruption, and death for countless racialised migrant workers (Iskander, 2022).…”

“…Capitalist consumerism in youth sport is thus intricately connected to the planet's environmental degradation, inducing affects of racial, gender, and sexual oppression rooted in colonial vestiges of power (Brice & Thorpe, 2021). Thorpe et al (2021) stressed how “new ways of thinking are needed to foster a more productive politics of physical and cultural pursuits in environmentally vulnerable spaces” (p. 365).…”