Advancing feminist innovation in sport studies: A transdisciplinary dialogue on gender, health and wellbeing

Holly Thorpe; Sheree Bekker; Simone Fullagar; Nonhlanhla Mkumbuzi; Sophia Nimphius; Madeleine Pape; Stacy T Sims; A Travers

doi:10.3389/fspor.2022.1060851

Advancing feminist innovation in sport studies: A transdisciplinary dialogue on gender, health and wellbeing

Front Sports Act Living. 2023 Jan 4:4:1060851. doi: 10.3389/fspor.2022.1060851. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Holly Thorpe¹, Sheree Bekker², Simone Fullagar³, Nonhlanhla Mkumbuzi⁴, Sophia Nimphius⁵, Madeleine Pape⁶, Stacy T Sims⁷, A Travers⁸

Affiliations

¹ School of Health, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.
² Department for Health, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom.
³ Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel Management, Griffith University, Nathan, AU-QLD, Australia.
⁴ Department of Physiology, Midlands State University, Gweru, Zimbabwe.
⁵ School of Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, AU-WA, Australia.
⁶ Institute of Sports Science, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
⁷ AUT Sports Performance Research Institute, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand.
⁸ Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.

Abstract

Athlete health and wellbeing requires a holistic, multidimensional approach to understanding, supporting, and treating individual athletes. Building more supportive, inclusive, and equitable environments for the health and wellbeing of women and gender expansive people further requires gender-responsive approaches that promote broader cultural change. Feminist sport and exercise medicine practitioners, sports scientists, and social science researchers are increasingly coming together in their efforts to do this work. However, working across disciplines inevitably includes an array of ontological, epistemological, and political challenges. In this paper, we offer a curated 'dialogue' with a group of feminist scholars engaged in research and practice across disciplines, bringing them together to discuss some of the most pressing gendered issues in sport today (i.e., ACL injury, concussion, menstruation in sport, mental health, gender categories). In so doing, we amplify the voices of those working (empirically and clinically) at the disciplinary intersections of gender, sport and health, and learn about some of the current and future possibilities for transdisciplinary innovations and strategies for building (responsiveness to) cultural change.

Keywords: female athlete health; feminist sport science; gender; health and wellbeing; transdisciplinary.

Publication types

Review