Feminist collaborative becomings: an entangled process of knowing through fitness objects

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper details a collaborative journey in which we sought to use new materialist theoretical and post-qualitative approaches to explore the entangled phenomena of women’s moving bodies and fitness objects. In particular, we engaged with Karen Barad’s agential realism to explore the materiality of the sports bra and its material-discursive relationality with women’s bodies, fleshy exertions, and physical forces. In this paper, we outline our improvised process of using new materialist theory to guide our research journey as we moved and lived with lululemon’s Enlite sports bra. We describe the fluid, unscripted nature of this entangled collaborative research process, including visiting a lululemon store together, a seven-month digital dialogue about our experiences of moving with Enlite, and different techniques (i.e., cutting together-apart, moving methods, and creative writing) used to challenge the boundaries of our collaborative knowledge production process. In so doing, we contribute to two key bodies of literature, i) scholarship exploring the onto-epistemological challenges of new materialisms, and ii) a growing body of work by feminist scholars drawing upon new materialisms to examine sporting objects and the fine details of women’s moving bodies. Although some may consider the sports bra to be a trivial object, this paper reveals a feminist politics in rethinking the research process and carefully examining the entangled relations that unfold between women’s moving bodies and everyday fitness objects.