This book examines the historical present as a turning point for women who are moving into traditional masculine cultures of team contact sports. The authors investigate how shifting gender dynamics are reshaping sports practices, organisations, and representations. They ask: What happens when women’s sporting bodies enter spaces that have historically excluded them? How is this change embodied, experienced, and navigated by athletes, stakeholders, and organizations within the broader spor...

Transforming Sport and Physical Cultures through Feminist Knowledges contributes new perspectives on the entanglement of digital and physical cultures, more-than-human relations, post and decolonial ways of knowing, and how onto-epistemologies of sport come to matter. These perspectives are explored through a diverse array of topics, including, the embodiment of netball through Feminist Physical Cultural Studies; pregnant embodiment and implications of the postgenomic turn; posthu...

Drawing upon insights from feminist new materialism the book traces the complex material-discursive processes through which women’s recovery from depression is enacted within a gendered biopolitics. Within the biomedical assemblage that connects mental health policy, service provision, research and everyday life, the gendered context of recovery remains little understood despite the recurrence and pervasiveness of depression. Rather than reducing experience to discrete biological, psycholo...

As a new breed of lifestyle sport enthusiasts ’derby grrrls’ are pushing the boundaries of gender as they negotiate the nexus of pleasure, pain and power relations. Offering a socio-cultural analysis of the rise and reinvention of roller derby as both a new, globalized women’s sport and an everyday creative leisure space, this book explores the manner in which roller derby has emerged as a gendered space for self-transformation, belonging and embodied contest, in which women are invited to...

Identity and Language Learning draws on a longitudinal case study of immigrant women in Canada to develop new ideas about identity, investment, and imagined communities in the field of language learning and teaching. Bonny Norton demonstrates that a poststructuralist conception of identity as multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change across time and place is highly productive for understanding language learning. Her sociological construct of investment is an important complement ...

In this trenchant inquiry into the state of feminism, Angela McRobbie breaks open the politics of sexual equality and ′affirmative feminism′ and sets down a new theory of gender power. Challenging the most basic assumptions of the ′end′ of feminism, this book argues that invidious forms of gender re-stabilisation are being re-established. Consumer and popular culture encroach on the terrain of so-called female freedom, appearing supportive of female success, yet tying women into new post-f...

This timely collection brings feminist critique to bear on contemporary postfeminist mass media culture, analyzing phenomena ranging from action films featuring violent heroines to the “girling” of aging women in productions such as the movie Something’s Gotta Give and the British television series 10 Years Younger. Broadly defined, “postfeminism” encompasses a set of assumptions that feminism has accomplished its goals and is now a thing of the past. It presumes that wom...

The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.The zeal with which television executives seize on the easily replicated formats is matched equally by the eagerness of audiences to offer themselves up as television participants for others to watch and criticise. But how do we react to so many people breaking down, fronting up, tearing apart, dominating, empathising,...

From an established author with a growing international profile in media studies, Media/Theory is an accessible yet challenging guide to ways of thinking about media and communications in modern life.Shaun Moores draws on ideas from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and expertly connects the analysis of media and communications with key themes in contemporary social theory.Examining core issues of time and space, Moores also examines mat...

Rave is one of the first distinct and significant youth subcultures to emerge since the early days of punk rockers and skinheads. A middle-class culture renowned for drug use computer-generated "techno" music and all-night dance parties rave has been described as everything from a drug cult to a neo-hippie community. Brian Wilson uses his ethnographic research on rave during the mid and late 1990s in Southern Ontario to discuss the ways in which young people participate in social and cultural...

The first book focusing exclusively on this subject, Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory captures the newest and best writing on an emerging focus of study that brings in perspectives from a number of disciplines including sports studies, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, and queer studies. An accessible introduction to this dynamic field, this is an explorative analysis of lesbian, gay, transgender, transsexual and intersex people’s experiences...

Feminist research is informed by a history of breaking silences, of demanding that women’s voices be heard, recorded and included in wider intellectual genealogies and histories. This has led to an emphasis on voice and speaking out in the research endeavour. Moments of secrecy and silence are less often addressed. This gives rise to a number of questions. What are the silences, secrets, omissions and and political consequences of such moments? What particular dilemmas and constraints do t...