Abstract
This article is the result of an ethnographic work on baton twirling clubs in Switzerland: clubs with few members coming from a modest origin, offering a social and physical activity with little resonance, composed of children, and young girls. The supervision is mainly the responsibility of close volunteers: family members, friends or neighbors and, for the majority of them, women. It is therefore an environment where people know each other, where gestures of familiarity are the rule and where tensions may sometimes arise due to various conflicts of proximity. Baton twirling is based on a public display of participants and the competitive aspiration for a self-presentation that solicits feminine stereotypes. It shows sociabilities and socialities framed by gender and age relationships: within clubs, knowledge transmission and childcare are combined in women's practices. The relationships between women and children transcend learning relationships. These relationships, which go beyond a vertical transmission of knowledge, call for approaches inspired by the theories of care. What is the meaning of these relationships based on women's care from the point of view of sociality and in relation to the institution of sport? This is the main question that will be addressed here. Approaches of care emphasize accompaniment, maintenance. They seem to be a good way to identify the contours of a “sports maternalism” which makes such a commitment valid while at the same time conferring legitimacy on a sports practice that is poorly considered.
Highlights
If the historiography of sport has for a long time largely marked out the themes of identities–be they political, cultural, social, ethnic or gender, it has not shown the same interest in questions relating to the characteristics and determinations linked to age in sporting practices
They answer the following question: What is fundamental in this word or gesture? (Paillé and Mucchielli, 2012) To do this, it is necessary to proceed in two steps, first to identify the significant ideas and to categorize them. This is how the raw data is processed (Negura, 2006). These thematic categories include the relationship to health and pain, to learning through caring and listening, to managing disappointment and attachment to the athlete, and to managing sportification
The previous excerpts illustrate in a concrete way the stakes around this sports maternalism from the point of view of care, a notion that makes it possible not to lock the actors on the field into a closed universe but to emphasize what this type of relationship to the other means
Summary
If the historiography of sport has for a long time largely marked out the themes of identities–be they political, cultural, social, ethnic or gender -, it has not shown the same interest in questions relating to the characteristics and determinations linked to age in sporting practices. Sports clubs have a lack of attention in terms of producing social identities. While cultural practices and behaviors of children and adolescents have been extensively studied in relation to institutions such as family or school as places of socialization, only some research has dealt with leisure activities in the context of associative life. Sport clubs occupy the reflection in French-speaking sociology of sport for example in terms of response to social problems (Pantaléon, 2003; Gasparini and Vieille-Marchiset, 2008; Coignet, 2013). The interest of this article is to grasp the club from the perspective of associative socialities and sociabilities
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