Moss E. Norman

‘Bladerunner or boundary runner’?: Oscar Pistorius, cyborg transgressions and strategies of containment

This article uses disability studies and cyborg theory as lenses to explore the disabled body in contemporary sporting contexts and situates the reader by critically reviewing social theory. Using the case of Oscar Pistorius, a South African Paralympian, we explore how the intense scrutiny on his prostheses forecloses examining how scientific discourses are called upon as arbiters to discern the ‘truth’ of his body. Moreover, while Pistorius invariably transgresses the boundaries of the modern sporting project and liberal humanist subject, he is subjected to powerful strategies of containment and domination. Threatening to undo secure notions of humanness, we illustrate how Pistorius is both fascinating and anxiety-provoking, and renders moral angst in the public consciousness. In order to rethink the stranglehold of ability and disability in the collective psyche and ‘do’ disability sport differently, this article calls for a radical cyborg politics.

Rural youth and emotional geographies: how photovoice and words-alone methods tell different stories of place

In this paper we discuss how photovoice and words-alone methods used in a study with young people living in communities on the west coast of Newfoundland, Canada, helped to tell different stories of rurality. Instead of the dominant narrative of rural decline in the focus groups and interviews with youth, through photovoice young people talked more positively about their home places. Drawing on recent work on emotional geographies and combining realist and constructionist frameworks, we argue that the photographs represent culturally accepted and appropriate ways of thinking, talking, and feeling about place, and that these shared affective practices provide a sense of community and continuity in a context of uncertainty in fisheries communities. It is our contention that such shared practices offer a strategy to deal with, indeed to heal, the damaging impact of the near extinction of fisheries stocks by maintaining a stable sense of self and place.

Playing in the woods: youth, leisure and the performance of gender relations in rural Newfoundland

Based on qualitative interviews and focus groups with youth (12–24 years) living in rural, coastal Newfoundland, Canada, we examine how leisure practices within this context served to reproduce and naturalize localized gender relations. More specifically, we argue that the participants drew upon dominant discursive constructions of rural leisure to reiteratively enact a binary distinction between the ‘town’ as a space of constraint, youth-adult tensions, and consumerism in contrast to the freedom and privacy of the ‘woods’. This dichotomy was mapped onto gender binaries, where the town was coded as feminine and the woods, masculine. We argue that these constructions served to mark the boundaries of normative gender leisure practices in the production of embodied gender subjectivities.

“The fishery went away”: The impacts of long-term fishery closures on young people's experience and perception of fisheries employment in Newfoundland coastal communities

There is a growing body of research documenting the impacts of fisheries collapses on communities and fisheries workers. Less attention has been paid to the sustainable use of fisheries resources so that future generations have access to these resources, or to the creation of mechanisms that might contribute to the intergenerational continuity of recruitment of fisheries workers and the regeneration of fisheries communities. In this paper we report on young people’s experiences and perceptions of fisheries employment in Newfoundland and Labrador to deepen our understanding of the resiliency of small-scale fisheries. We found that these young people’s experiences of fisheries employment are extremely limited and their perceptions of the quality of fisheries work is primarily negative while, at the same time, they recognize its importance to the vitality of their communities. We argue that stock collapses and subsequent downsizing and regulatory changes in the industry have disrupted intergenerational continuity in fisheries work and shaped how young people view their communities and options.

The weight of (the) matter: A new material feminist account of thin and fat oppressions

Critical feminist approaches to eating disorders and “obesity” have recently come under criticism for relying too heavily on textual- and image-based analyses of health, identity and body weight, shape, and size. In this article, we examine qualitative interviews with self-identified anorexic and “obese” women using a new material feminist lens—particularly the work of Karen Barad—to see what this perspective contributes to conceptualizations of weight-based oppressions. In addition to outlining how the material world actively participates in ongoing processes of oppression, we also highlight how the body presses back, offering up potentially less oppressive processes of materialization. The article concludes on a cautiously optimistic note, pointing to how a new materialist framework may draw attention to micropolitical processes of becoming otherwise.

On judgement day: Anorexic and obese women’s phenomenological experience of the body, food and eating:

In contemporary Western society, both anorexic and obese 1 bodies are regarded to be “out of bounds.” Although scholars have enhanced our understanding of anorexia and obesity, these “disorders” have most often been studied in isolation from one another. In this article, we examine the similarities and differences in the embodied experiences of anorexic and obese women. Informed by the phenomenological research tradition, we follow in the footsteps of other scholars who have already begun to depart from binarized, polarized views by describing how women living with anorexia and obesity in two Canadian provinces experience the body, food and eating. Anorexic and obese women described a vast range of intense emotional experiences to characterize their relationship to food, the body and eating. Shame marked the bodies of these women. Family relationships also changed how the women experienced the body and food over time. The women ascribed a diverse array of complex meanings to the body and food. We hope that our study opens new phenomenological terrain to dialogue with and for anorexic and obese bodies in a relational way, recognizing that both of these bodies hurt in a remarkably similar manner. In a judgement day of sorts, both anorexic and obese bodies carry the heavy burden of culture’s expectations to fit within a narrow range of normative slenderness.