Writing through the affective dynamics of body shaming as emotional abuse in para-sportswomen’s stories: a feminist posthumanist approach

Abstract

Elite sport has been a site of harm, with issues of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, including a strong culture of body shaming, and consequent heightened incidences of disordered eating. In the context of Paralympic sport, the dominant narrative of empowerment for people with disability has obscured the ambivalence and felt tensions for para-sportswomen where harm is experienced. There has been little research that explores the gendered conditions generating body shaming and emotional abuse. Drawing upon a feminist posthumanist approach, this article explores how women para-athletes negotiate their experience of body shaming through the entangled power relations of high-performance knowledge, practice and culture. We draw upon ‘affect as method’ as an approach that engages with interview data involving women elite para-athletes and the embodied experience of the first author. The entanglement of the researchers and participants is recognised in writing through affect as an extension and disruption of traditional qualitative assumptions about representation (self-present subjects revealing the truth of their experience through in-depth digital interviews). Through this feminist theory-method, we argue that paying attention to the felt affective intensities of body shaming in the research encounter rendered the experience intelligible as harm—emotional abuse–in a move against the normalised invisible harms that sport cultures can perpetuate.