Digital self-tracking and spacetimemattering: Beyond linear understandings of mothers' sporting bodies

Abstract

After childbirth, many athletic mothers navigate dramatically altered bodies, new demands on their time and energetic resources, and must negotiate their past-present and future sporting bodies and selves alongside an array of socio-material and economic barriers. At the same time, they face intense scrutiny from popular and medical discourses urging them to achieve and maintain “fit” bodies in the name of “good” motherhood. Digital self-tracking devices are often sold as one solution to time and motivation barriers. Given the embeddedness of these technologies in our socio-cultural and political contexts, they become deeply implicated in the ways notions of “fit” motherhood are produced, performed, and contested. In this chapter, we examine mothers’ encounters with digital self-tracking devices through a feminist new materialist lens. In doing so, we attend to the corporeality and materiality of maternal fitness practices and of self-tracking itself. Using Karen Barad's concepts of intra-action and entanglement, we trace the ways digital self-tracking “re-centres” past-present-future fitness and sporting experiences in the context of motherhood, yields new bodily practices and capacities, and transforms mothers’ physically active bodies. With a vignette of a previously competitive running mother, our analysis seeks to extend scholarly dialogue around the materiality of women's physically active self-tracking bodies and draw greater attention to the generativity of corporeal and non-human material forces.