Feminist New Materialist Entanglements With “Kinetic Excess” in Women’s Muay Thai Boxing: Moving With Embodied Discomfort as a Post-Qualitative Coach-Researcher

Abstract

Feminist engagement with fight sports is often ambivalent given the masculine history of combat and the achievement of “self” transformation at the “expense” of another, exist in tension with the possibilities of women’s empowerment. Acknowledging the multiplicity of embodied meanings produced through Muay Thai Boxing (Thai Boxing), this feminist post-qualitative project seeks to do “research differently” through a generative ethos of knowledge production that is co-constituted with participants and the coach-researcher (Erin). We explore how a Thai boxing program—“fight camp”—worked through-with an affective feminist coaching pedagogy that sought to transform gendered patterns of movement mobilizing moments of discomfort and pleasure. This research practice involved attuning to the embodied dynamics of learning-coaching—the intra-actions of boxing—in terms of what these movement practices “do” and how they “affect” women in the process of becoming-fighters. We write through three provocations—“the drunk uncle,” “get ugly with it,” and “show and tell”—to engage readers in the affective relations entangled within the processes of coaching-researching MTB. Our post-qualitative research approach has implications for the provision of physical cultural practices and alternative coaching pedagogy more broadly.