Remembering learning to play: Reworking gendered memories of sport, physical activity, and movement

In this presentation, we explore young women’s memories of their experiences of sport and physical activity during their childhood by drawing upon collective memory work. The objective of this work is to explore and examine constructions of young women’s experiences of gendered relations of power, bodily awareness and regulation, and socialisation within movement-based practices. To do so, we draw on collective memory as inspired by the work of Frigga Haug and colleagues. As a novel, creative, and quasi-established qualitative research method emerging in the 1980s‚ but may well be considered a form of post-qualitative inquiry-collective memory deployed here involves reading, sharing, discussing, writing, and analysing sporting memories/histories. Forming a collaborative working group with six young women and two researchers, we illustrate how working memories facilitates the interrogation of taken-for-granted assumptions about women’s active bodies. Despite growing up within a period wherein women’s access to and engagement with sport and physical activity is more available, common, and diverse compared to the youth of past generations, young women’s experiences as expressed here in distinctive memories illustrate the ways in which movement-based practices continue to shape contemporary feminine subjectivities. Wrestling with feminine subjectivities is made possible through memory work, which as an act of feminist praxis, can foster participants’ active negotiation of the bodily practices and discourses shaping their past (and future) experiences.