Skip to main content
Book cover

Sports, Society, and Technology pp 147–174Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Possibilities of Feminist Technoscience Studies of Sport: Beyond Cyborg Bodies

Abstract

Feminist studies of sport offer a rich, interdisciplinary literature on the gendered dimensions of physical culture. This literature illuminates distinct aspects of women’s sporting experiences as well as how gendered, sexed, and intersectional difference informs practices, cultures, and representations of sport and physical activity. Feminist analyses of the entanglements of science, technology, and sport, while increasing in number, are comparatively limited in scope. This chapter surveys approaches used to study technosocial relations, particularly feminist technoscience, considering their current and potential contributions to studies of sport. First, it reflects on how scholars have used and adapted Haraway’s notion of the cyborg in analyses of sport. It then examines how scholars have employed agential realism and assemblage, considering their potential for feminist studies of sport. The chapter concludes by summarizing the possibilities of feminist technoscience studies of sport, while also considering how the study of embodiment, sport, and physical activity offers important reminders for scholarship on science, technology, and society.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • DOI: 10.1007/978-981-32-9127-0_7
  • Chapter length: 28 pages
  • Instant PDF download
  • Readable on all devices
  • Own it forever
  • Exclusive offer for individuals only
  • Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout
eBook
USD   119.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • ISBN: 978-981-32-9127-0
  • Instant PDF download
  • Readable on all devices
  • Own it forever
  • Exclusive offer for individuals only
  • Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout
Softcover Book
USD   159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
Hardcover Book
USD   159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Ahmed (2008) characterizes new materialism’s “caricature of poststructuralism as matter-phobic” as both unfair (p. 34) and “motivated, as if the moment of ‘rejection’ is needed to authorize a new terrain” (p. 33). For more information about the debates around materialism, readers should consult a series of articles published in European Journal of Women’s Studies, which span 2008 through the present.

  2. 2.

    Some important feminist technoscience theories—such as “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1991, p. 183), “strong objectivity” (Harding 1991, p. 138), and “agential realism” (Barad 2007, p. 132)—have wide appeal within and beyond STS (Subramaniam 2009, p. 960). Situated knowledge, for example, reflects a recognition that robust knowledge cannot come from a bird’s eye view of phenomena; rather, it emerges from “partial, locatable accounts of the world that are both accurate and explicitly embedded within the contexts of its own production” (Haraway 1988, pp. 575–599). Proponents of strong objectivity contend that persons and groups who occupy marginalized positions are more likely to be attentive to dimensions of social dynamics and systems often overlooked by more privileged observers; thus, in order to strengthen objectivity, their perspectives must feature centrally in knowledge production (Harding 1991).

  3. 3.

    While scholars of feminist technoscience acknowledge that this shift may pose challenges for political organizing and might endanger institutional gains made by earlier feminist efforts (see Subramaniam 2009; Foster 2016), Foster (2016) draws attention to the limited benefits secured through liberal feminist agendas as they failed to consider structural inequalities and the erasure of colonial legacies that disproportionately affect different groups of people.

References

  • Adams, M. L., Helstein, M. T., Kim, K., McDonald, M. G., Davidson, J., Jamieson, K. M., et al. (2016). Feminist cultural studies: Uncertainties and possibilities. Sociology of Sport, 33(1), 75–91.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Ahmed, S. (2008). Imaginary prohibitions: Some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the new materialism. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 15(1), 23–39.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. (Eds.). (2008). Material feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Andrews, D. L. (1993). Desperately seeking Michel: Foucault’s genealogy, the body, and critical sport sociology. Sociology of Sport Journal, 10(2), 148–167.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Åsberg, C., & Lykke, N. (2010). Feminist technoscience studies. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 17(4), 299–305.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Bal, M. (2002). Traveling concepts in the humanities: A rough guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe half way: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Birrell, S. (1988). Discourses on the gender/sport relationship: From women in sport to gender relations. Exercise and Sport Reviews, 16(1), 459–502.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boyle, P., & Haggerty, K. D. (2009). Spectacular security: Mega-events and the security complex. International Political Sociology, 3(3), 257–274.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Brownell, S. (1995). Training the body for China: Sports in the moral order of the people’s republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butryn, T. M., & Masucci, M. A. (2003). It’s not about the book: A cyborg counternarrative of Lance Armstrong. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 27(2), 124–144.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butryn, T. M., & Masucci, M. A. (2009). Traversing the matrix: Cyborg athletes, technology and the environment. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 33(3), 258–307.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cole, C. L. (1993). Resisting the canon: Feminist cultural studies, sport and technologies of the body. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 17(2), 77–97.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Colls, R. (2007). Materializing bodily matter: Intra-action and the embodiment of ‘fat’. Geoforum, 38(2), 353–365.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Crawford, K., Lingel, J., & Karppi, T. (2015). Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 479–496.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Davidson, J. (2013). Sporting homonationalisms: Sexual exceptionalism, queer privilege and the 21st century international lesbian and gay sport movement. Sociology of Sport Journal, 30(1), 57–82.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Esmonde, K., & Jette, S. (2018). Fatness, fitness, and feminism in the built environment: Bringing together physical cultural studies and sociomaterialisms, to study the ‘obesogenic environment’. Sociology of Sport Journal, 35(1), 39–48.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Foster, L. A. (2016). The making and unmaking of patent ownership: Technicalities, materialities and subjectivities. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 39(1), 127–143.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, M. (1990). History of sexuality, vol. 1, an introduction. New York: Vintage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fouché, R. (2012). Aren’t athletes cyborgs?: Technology, bodies and sporting competitions. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40(1&2), 281–293.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Fullagar, S. (2017). Post-qualitative inquiry and the new materialist turn: Implications for sport, health and physical culture research. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 9(2), 247–257.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Haggerty, K. D., & Ericson, R. V. (2000). The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 605–622.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hargreaves, J. (1994). Sporting females: Critical issues in the history and sociology of women’s sport. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henne, K. (2015). Testing for athlete citizenship: Regulating doping and sex in sport. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Howe, P. D. (2011). Cyborg and supercrip: The Paralympics technology and the (dis)empowerment of disabled athletes. Sociology, 45(5), 868–882.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Kerr, R. (2016). Sport and technology: An actor-network theory perspective. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • King, S. (2009). Virtually normal: Mark Bingham, the War on Terror, and the sexual politics of sport. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 33(1), 5–24.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • King, S., & Weedon, G. (2016, November 4). Protein ecologies: Building surplus muscle, regenerating excess whey. Presentation delivered at the annual meeting of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, Tampa, Florida.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liao, J., & Markula, P. (2016). ‘The only thing I am guilty of is taking too many jump shots’: A Deleuzian media analysis of Diana Taurasi’s drug charge in 2010. Sociology of Sport Journal, 33(2), 167–179.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Lowry, D. W. (2004). Understanding reproductive technologies as surveillant assemblage: Revisions of power and technoscience. Sociological Perspectives, 47(4), 357–370.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Lupton, D. (2016). Digital companion species and eating data: Implications for theorizing digital data–human assemblages. Big Data & Society, 3(1), 1–5.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Magdalinski, T. (2008). Sport, technology, and the body: The nature of performance. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Markula, P. (2003). The technologies of the self: Sport, feminism, and Foucault. Sociology of Sport Journal, 20(2), 87–107.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Markula, P. (2018). What is new about new materialism for sport sociology? Reflections on body, movement, and culture. Sociology of Sport Journal, online first. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2018-0064.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Maurstad, A., Davis, D., & Cowles, S. (2013). Co-being and intra-action in horse–human relationships: A multi-species ethnography of be(com)ing human and be(com)ing horse. Social Anthropology, 21(3), 322–335.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • McCullough, S. R. (2010). Body like a rocket: Performing technologies of naturalization. Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Thought and Culture, 9(2). Retrieved from http://journals.sfu.ca/thirdspace/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/mccullough.

  • McDonald, M. G., & Sterling, J. (forthcoming). Feminist new materalisms and the troubling waters of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic and Paralympic Games. In J. Newman, H. Thorpe, & D. Andrews (Eds.), Sport, physical culture and the moving body: Materialisms, technologies, ecologies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Messner, M. A. (2007). Out of play: Critical essays on gender and sport. Albany: State University Press of New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miah, A. (2003). Be afraid, very afraid: Cyborg athletes, transhuman ideals, and posthumanity. Journal of Evolution & Technology, 13. Retrieved from https://www.jetpress.org/volume13/miah.html.

  • Moser, I. (2006). Sociotechnical practices and difference: On the interferences between disability, gender, and class. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 31(5), 537–564.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Norman, M. E., & Moola, F. (2011). ‘Bladerunner or boundary runner’?: Oscar Pistorius, cyborg transgressions and strategies of containment. Sport in Society, 14(9), 1265–1279.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Nyberg, D. (2009). Computers, customer service operatives and cyborgs: Intra-actions in call centers. Organization Studies, 30(11), 1181–1199.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Ong, A., & Collier, S. J. (Eds.). (2005). Global assemblages: Technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Patton, P. (1994). Metamorpho-logic: Bodies and powers in A Thousand Plateaus. Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, 25(2), 157–169.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Pink, S., Sumartorjo, S., Lupton, D., & La Bond, C. H. (2017). Mundane data: The routines, contingencies and accomplishments of digital living. Big Data & Society, 4(1), 1–12.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Prasad, A. (2017). Biopolitical excess: Techno-social assemblages of stem cell research in India. Science, Technology and Society, 22(1), 102–123.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Prins, B. (1995). The ethics of hybrid subjects: Feminist constructivism according to Donna Haraway. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 20(1), 352–367.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Puar, J. K. (2012). ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory. Philosophia, 2(1), 49–66.

    Google Scholar 

  • Puar, J. K. (2017). The right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Rail, G., & Lefebvre, M. R. (2003). Sculling cyborg: Scientific discourses, media representations and the effacement of Silken Laumann’s subversive potential. Recherche sémiotique—Semiotic Inquiry, XXII(1–2), 3–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sefiha, O., & Reichman, N. (2016). When every test is a winner: Clean cycling, surveillance, and the new preemptive governance. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 40(3), 197–217.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sluggett, B. (2011). Sport’s doping game: Surveillance in the biotech age. Sociology of Sport Journal, 28(4), 387–403.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Subramaniam, B. (2009). Moored metamorphoses: A retrospective essay on feminist science studies. Signs, 34(4), 951–980.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Swartz, L., & Watermeyer, B. (2008). Cyborg anxiety: Oscar Pistorius and the boundaries of what it means to be human. Disability & Society, 23(2), 187–190.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Sykes, H. (2016). Gay pride on stolen land: Homonationalism and settler colonialism at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Sociology of Sport Journal, 33(1), 54–65.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Thorpe, H. (2016). Athletic women’s experiences of amenorrhea: Biomedical technologies, somatic ethics and embodied subjectivities. Sociology of Sport Journal, 33(1), 1–13.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Travers, A., & Shearman, N. (2017). The Sochi Olympics, celebration capitalism and homonationalist pride. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 41(1), 42–69.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Whelan, C. (2014). Surveillance, security and sporting mega-events: Toward a research agenda on the organization of security networks. Surveillance & Society, 11(4), 392–404.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, M. W. (2009). Cyborg geographies: Towards hybrid epistemologies. Gender, Place and Culture, 16(5), 499–516.

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Kathryn Henne

Authors
  1. Kathryn Henne
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kathryn Henne .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Jennifer J. Sterling

  2. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Mary G. McDonald

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Henne, K. (2020). Possibilities of Feminist Technoscience Studies of Sport: Beyond Cyborg Bodies. In: Sterling, J., McDonald, M. (eds) Sports, Society, and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9127-0_7

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9127-0_7

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-32-9126-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-32-9127-0

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)