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...

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...

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...

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...