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.

This book offers the first critical examination of the contributions of feminist new materialist thought to the study of sport, fitness, and physical culture. Bringing feminist new materialist theory into a lively dialogue with sport studies, it highlights the possibilities and challenges of engaging with posthumanist and new materialist theories. With empirical examples and pedagogical offerings woven throughout, the book makes complex new materialist concepts and theories highly accessible. It vividly illustrates sporting matter as lively, vital, and agentic. Engaging specifically with the methodological, theoretical, ethical and political challenges of feminist new materialisms, it elaborates understandings of moving bodies and their entanglements with human, non-human, technological, biological, cultural, and environmental forces in contemporary society. This book extends humanist, representationalist, and discursive approaches that have characterized the landscape of critical research on active bodies, and invites new imaginings and articulations for sport and moving bodies in uncertain times and unknown futures.

The only anthology available documenting 100 years of women in American sports

This important new book brings together gender studies and sexuality studies to provide original and critical insights into processes of identity formation in a wide range of sport-related contexts. The authors draw on contemporary debates concerning gender and identity from a range of disciplines including sociology, social and cultural geography, media studies and management studies, to address key issues in masculinity, femininity and sexuality: Part 1: Representing masculinities in sport analyses media representations of men’s sports, exploring the variety and complexity of concepts of masculinity. Part 2: Transgressing femininities in sport makes use of case studies to examine the experiences of women in male-dominated sporting arenas. Part 3: Performing sexualities in sport analyses the role of queer theory in sport studies, explores experiences of and responses to homophobia in sport, and examines the significance of the Gay Games. This book will be of particular interest to students and academics working in sport studies, leisure studies, gender studies, queer and sexuality studies, social and cultural geography, and sociology.

This book engages with the ongoing question of why many girls stop doing sport and physical activity in their teenage years. Previous research has found that many girls’ disengagement from sport takes place despite their childhood enjoyment and that frequently these same women take up sport again as adults. Within these chapters, Sheryl Clark explores what it is about this period of time that persuades many girls to disengage from sports when their male peers continue to take part; why some girls continue to take part; and most importantly how girls understand this participation. She suggests that girls’ participation in sport should be viewed as part of their ongoing constructions of ‘successful girlhood’ within a competitive schooling system and broader socioeconomic context.

Chinese Literature: Lydia H. Liu