Let Me Tell You a Story: A Narrative Exploration of Identity in High-Performance Sport

Abstract

Following the research into narrative of scholars such as Laurel Richardson, Carolyn Ellis, and John Van Maanen, I explore the narrative as a way of writing about experiences of sport, specifically of my experiences of identity within high-performance sport. Using the narrative form, I create a space for a variety of my voices to emerge—including both my academic and my athletic voices. Narrative also allows me to show how different stories—stories of gender and racialization—are told, while exploring my identity and how the multiplicity of stories mirrors the hybridity or ambiguity of identity. These stories serve as an illustration of Debra Shogan’s argument that this hybridity of identity disrupts the normalizing project of modern high-performance sport (1999).