A feminist approach to sporting mobilities: affect, intimacies and embodied movement

This article asks, what can feminist theories of affect bring to sport mobilities? As a conceptual innovation, we demonstrate the possibilities that opens up through feminist affect theory and in doing so provide another way of thinking about sport mobilities. Using an example of research with women refugees involved in a sport program, we present a multi-scalar approach to mobilities that can account for the nuance, ethics, and intimacies of movement in sport. In doing so, we argue for a reconceptualization of sport as a ‘borderland’ of emotional wellbeing, moving beyond binaries, such as exclusion/inclusion, towards an acknowledgement of the complex, messy and generative capacities of sport mobilities. We understand sport mobilities as multiple: from global mobilities to minor everyday movements; from pausing and negotiating immobility to moving again; to a very different kind of movement on/to/around the hockey field. The article highlights how the sport mobilities paradigm can be extended through a feminist focus on relationality to account for the affective dynamics of sport: the intimacies, bodies and multidirectional movements (rather than linear, or even circular) that can happen in and around sport.