Feminist Theories of Emotion and Affect in Sport

Abstract

This chapter explores how the “affective turn” within feminist theory has shaped new ways of thinking about gendered power relations, subjectivities and embodied sport experiences. Scholarship on affect and emotion has advanced theorizing of embodied movement and meaning to enable more complex understandings of the entanglement of material, visceral, discursive dimensions of gendered subjectivities. Sport and leisure more broadly can be theorized as affective practices that gendered bodies enact as they move in relation to other human and non-human bodies, objects, surfaces, etc. Drawing on examples from roller derby in Australia and the This Girl Can campaign in the United Kingdom, we demonstrate how feminist theories of affect can be applied in nuanced ways to identify inequities in women’s sport.