Overview
- Examines the emergence of new femininities in sport and physical culture
- Provides new theoretical and conceptual approaches for understanding the female body and how it is experienced
- Reveals strategies used by women in sport to make sense of postfeminist discourse in relation to their own bodies
Part of the book series: New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures (NFDPSC)
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Postfeminism and the Sport-Media-Industrial Complex
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Everyday Athletic Girls and Women Negotiating Postfeminism
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Postfeminism in Online Sport and Fitness Spaces
Keywords
About this book
This edited collection critically explores new and emerging models of female athleticism in an era characterised as postfeminist. It approaches postfeminism through a critical lens to investigate new forms of politics being practised by women in physical activity, sport and online spaces at the intersections of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and ability.
New Sporting Femininities features chapters on celebrity athletes such as Serena Williams and Ronda Rousey, alongside studies of the online fitspo movement and women’s growing participation in activities like roller derby, skateboarding and football. In doing so, it highlights key issues and concerns facing diverse groups of women in a rapidly changing gender-sport landscape. This collection sheds new light on the complex and often contradictory ways that women’s athletic participation is promoted, experienced and embodied in the context of postfeminism, commodity feminism and emerging forms of popular feminism.
Reviews
“This volume presents a unique set of refreshing and comprehensive issues when studying postfeminism, sporting femininities and physical activity. New Sporting Femininities encourages more in-depth analysis of the cultural, political, social and economic conditions influencing the postfeminist era. It offers fresh perspectives and new interventions to help build a more equal and level playing field in the world of sports for everyone, regardless of their gender, race, religion, ethnicity, health status, sexuality or nationality.” (Meltem Ince-Yenilmez, LSE Review of Books, June 28,2020)
“The field of sport studies has been waiting for this book. This collection offers a new critical vocabulary and a crucial sense of scale, scope and timeliness—from Serena Williams to roller skating to UFC fighting to digital representations and beyond--and is an indispensable guide to the constantly changing and often contradictory field of gendered sports studies.” (Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser, University of Southern California, USA)“New Sporting Femininities helps us to understand the multiple, complex and contradictory discourses that circulate around women’s bodies in sport. It also makes an important contribution to the growing literature about the relationship between postfeminism and new feminist activisms. A brilliant read, with lots of up to date case studies, it marks a key intervention in feminist studies of sport.” (Professor Rosalind Gill, City, University of London, UK)
“A timely and valuable addition to the work in sport feminism, this important collection highlights how post-feminism operates through diverse sport media platforms and as an effect permeates sport women’s lived experiences. Bringing together a group of bright international scholars, it critically outlines how feminism has been appropriated within contemporary neoliberal consumerism in various sporting contexts. It is essential reading for any scholar interested in the popular physical culture, gender, and the media.” (Professor Pirkko Markula, University of Alberta, Canada)
“This engaging, inspiring, and wide-ranging collection makes an invaluable contribution to scholarly analyses of femininities, postfeminism, and neoliberalism by exploring questions of gender, embodiment, and subjectivity in the fields of sport and physical culture. Geographically, the book engages with a range of spatial contexts; conceptually, several chapters set out to explore the complex interplay of gender with other axes of difference; and thematically, the collection engages with a rangeof phenomena in the physical and virtual worlds of sport and movement culture.” (Dr Christina Scharff, Kings College London, UK)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Kim Toffoletti is Associate Professor of Sociology at Deakin University, Australia. She specialises in the study of women’s sporting experiences and representations, using transnational feminist and critical postfeminist perspectives.
Holly Thorpe is Associate Professor of Sport and Physical Culture at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her recent publications include Women in Action Sport Cultures (Palgrave, 2016) and Transnational Mobilities in Action Sport Cultures (Palgrave, 2014).
Jessica Francombe-Webb is Lecturer in Sport and Physical Culture at the University of Bath, UK. Her research draws from the discipline of feminist physical cultural studies in order to explore the contested politics of the (in)active body in relation to health, physical activity, body size, and appearance.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: New Sporting Femininities
Book Subtitle: Embodied Politics in Postfeminist Times
Editors: Kim Toffoletti, Holly Thorpe, Jessica Francombe-Webb
Series Title: New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72481-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-72480-5Published: 01 August 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-10208-1Published: 08 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-72481-2Published: 25 June 2018
Series ISSN: 2522-0330
Series E-ISSN: 2522-0349
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVII, 334
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations, 9 illustrations in colour
Topics: Sociology of Sport and Leisure, Gender Studies, Sociology of Culture