Simone Fullagar

Governing the Healthy Body: Discourses of Leisure and Lifestyle within Australian Health Policy:

In the past 30 years there have been significant shifts in the way Australian public health policy has problematized the role of leisure, recreation and physical activity in relation to the WHO identification of lifestyle disease risks to individual and social wellbeing. This article offers a cultural analysis of the way discourses of leisure and healthy lifestyles have been produced through the governmental objectives of health policy and promotion aimed at the body (Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1999). Two campaigns (1970’s Life be in it! and 1990’s Active Australia) are examined in relation to the rationalities and ethics through which individuals are encouraged to govern their own healthy lifestyle practices in the name of freedom.

Leisure Practices as Counter-Depressants: Emotion-Work and Emotion-Play within Women's Recovery from Depression

This paper draws on post-structural feminist theories of emotion to explore the significance of leisure within womens narratives of recovery from depression. I engage with the stories of 48 women in rural and urban Australia to identify the gendered discourses governing depression and recovery. Leisure figured as a site of identity transformation where women enacted creative, embodied, and connected subjectivities. The performance of gender through leisure enabled women to practice a different ethic of care for self and, hence, different relations of care for others. These stories make visible the cost of womens emotion work by identifying how negotiations over leisure and the embodiment of emotion play can facilitate recovery in ways that biomedical treatments cannot.

Wasted lives The social dynamics of shame and youth suicide

Youth suicide is a specific gesture of waste, a throwing away of the gift, and thus it embodies a powerful statement about young peoples refusal to live. In this article I suggest that it is a refusal to engage with, and be sustained by, the particular economies of value, morality and meaning that govern identity within contemporary cultural life. From a post-structuralist perspective the metaphors through which suicide comes to be known are examined via indepth interviews conducted with young people ( n = 41) as part of a larger study also involving adults/professionals ( n = 40) within urban and regional communities. Shame figures predominantly in young peoples accounts of suicidal experiences and the everyday social relations that govern the expression of emotion. In contrast to the positivist bent of much suicide research and policy, this article argues for the necessity of understanding the social dynamics of shame in relation to the forces of affect that constitute the emergent subjectivities of young people.

Reflexive methodologies: an autoethnography of the gendered performance of sport/management

Abstract Autoethnography has emerged as a relatively new methodological approach within the fields of leisure, sport, and tourism studies and more broadly within the social sciences. As a reflexive methodology it offers the beginning and the experienced researcher a means of critically exploring the social forces that have shaped their own involvement in leisure practices and subsequent professional careers. In this paper we discuss the significance of autoethnography as it was utilised by the first author in her student research on womens participation in cricket and the management dilemmas within this sport. The process involved recollecting, writing, and re‐reading experiences in light of feminist theories that explore the performance of gender through sport. The second authors involvement in the project is discussed in terms of the relational, supervisory context that can foster writing of the self into research within honours and postgraduate programs. In this way the writing practices that mediate knowledge produced about leisure or sport are made transparent and foregrounded within the research process itself. The autoethnographic approach used in this paper contributes to the emergent methodological literature that embraces the textual or narrative turn within qualitative studies of leisure and sport.

Immobility, Battles, and the Journey of Feeling Alive Women’s Metaphors of Self-Transformation Through Depression and Recovery

Australian mental health services have responded to the problem of depression by adopting an early intervention and recovery orientation. Using qualitative research conducted in Australia with 80 women aged 20 to 75 years, we examine how participants invoked particular metaphors to construct meaning about the gendered experience of depression and recovery. We argue that women’s stories of recovery provide a rich source of interpretive material to consider the everyday metaphors of recovery beyond clinical notions and linear models of personal change. We identified key metaphors women drew on to articulate the struggle of self-transformation through depression and recovery: the immobilizing effect of depression, recovery as a battle to control depression, and recovery as a journey of self-knowledge. Our findings might be useful for mental health professionals in a range of clinical contexts to reflect on the power of language for shaping how women interpret their experiences of recovery from depression.

Becoming roller derby grrrls: Exploring the gendered play of affect in mediated sport cultures

This article explores how the global revival of roller derby as an alternative sport for women has been mobilised through online social networks, league promotion and fan sites that create imagined communities of ‘roller grrrls’. In the creation of sport culture we argue that the virtual performance of ‘derby’ identities is as significant as the embodiment of play. Like other sports, derby sites mobilise affect (passion, pleasure, pain, desire to play) through a discourse of ‘empowerment’ that urges women to overcome limits and reinvent gendered subjectivity. However, within the virtual space of roller derby, complex affects are produced and circulated within power relations that can include or exclude. Through an analysis of the way affect is mobilised in selected roller derby sites, we identify how virtual sport identities are connected through the movement of ‘affects’ across bodies and leagues. These affects both circumscribe and undermine the notion of a single derby community.

The pain and pleasure of roller derby: Thinking through affect and subjectification

Writing about pain in roller derby challenges us to rethink old dichotomies that separate mind and body, ‘real’ and virtual, feminine and masculine. The ‘tough’ roller derby ‘girl’, willing and able to endure pain for the pleasure of the game, has become a powerful figure in contemporary western popular culture. Our analysis of roller derby reveals women’s complex relation to pain and pleasure, as part of a feminist reimagining of sport. Through an analysis of derby texts we explore how painful affects are mobilized in particular ways: to imagine collective belonging, to invent alternative feminine subjectivities, and to mark out the limits of self and other. In this way we endeavour to think through the affective experience of derby and how sport might become more gender inclusive as a transformational cultural site. The embodiment of pain is not simply one of ‘overcoming’, but a corporeal relation that is productive of multiple feminine subjectivities.

“It's all about the journey”: women and cycling events

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a gendered understanding of womens experience of a mass cycle tour event.Design/methodology/approach – This research uses an ethnographic approach to explore womens experiences of a cycle tour event. Qualitative data are analysed through the conceptual framework of post‐structural feminism.Findings – Key themes included the meaning of womens cycle tour experience as a “shared journey”, the centrality of the “body” in event design (comfort, safety, enjoyment) and an event culture of “respect” (encouragement, skill development, knowledge sharing).Research limitations/implications – This research is based on a particular sample of women who were largely Anglo‐Celtic, middle to lower middle class and middle aged Australians. Hence, this research does not claim to be representative of all womens experiences. Given the strong focus on quantitative research within event management, this research identifies the need for qualitative and feminist approaches.Prac...

Post-qualitative inquiry and the new materialist turn: implications for sport, health and physical culture research

Abstract In this article, I examine the ‘turn to’ post-qualitative inquiry (PQI), new materialism and post-humanist theories to consider the challenges of, and implications for, doing research in sport, health and physical culture. The term ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ indicates a decisive departure from the ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions that have informed the humanist interpretive tradition of qualitative research. Moving beyond a theory/method divide, PQI draws its methodological inspiration from critical post-humanist debates concerned with how ‘matter’ is thought and constituted through entanglements of human and non-human bodies, affects, objects and practices. Such a shift reorients thinking around relational questions about the material-discursive forces co-implicated in what bodies can ‘do’ and how matter ‘acts’, rather than a concern with what ‘is’ a body or the agentic meaning of experience. I discuss how these new styles of thought reorient our onto-epistemological assumptions and theory–method approaches through engagement with PQI within (and beyond) sport, health and physical culture scholarship.

Problematizing the neurochemical subject of anti-depressant treatment: The limits of biomedical responses to women's emotional distress

In this article we situate empirical research into women’s problematic experiences of anti-depressant medication within broader debates about pharmaceuticalization and the rise of the neurochemical self. We explore how women interpreted and problematized anti-depressant medication as it impeded their recovery in a number of ways. Drawing upon Foucauldian and feminist work we conceptualize anti-depressants as biotechnologies of the self that shaped how women thought about and acted upon their embodied (and hence gendered) subjectivities. Through the interplay of biochemical, emotional and socio-cultural effects medication worked to shape women’s self-in-recovery in ways that both reinscribed and undermined a neurochemical construction of depression. Our analysis outlines two key discursive constructions that focused on women’s problematization of the neurochemical self in response to the side-effects of anti-depressant use. We identified how the failure of medication to alleviate depression contributed to women’s reinterpretation of recovery as a process of ‘working’ on the emotional self. We argue that women’s stories act as a form of subjugated knowledge about the material and discursive forces shaping depression and recovery. These findings offer a gendered critique of scientific and market orientated rationalities underpinning neurochemical recovery that obscure the embodied relations of affect and the social conditions that enable the self to change.