Figuring More Livable Elsewheres: Queering Acts, Moments, and Spaces in Sport (Studies)

Abstract

Inspired by calls for an emphasis on the “potentiality of the present” in feminist and queer (sport) studies, this article explores queering acts, moments, and spaces in stories of athletes living nonstraight. To do this, we use Haraway’s and Braidotti’s notion of figuration and creative analytical writing. With one foot rooted in what is, our three figurations of the queering athlete take us into and beyond heteronormativity to what can be(come). Two figurations enact how sex segregation and gender norms in sports can serve as conditions of possibilities that open up for other-worlds-in-the-making and the third works sexuality against identity and queers the hetero–homo binary. They are figurations—in form and content—of a “science of the possibility of science.”