Abstract
Sport and fitness have long been linked with healthy lifestyles, yet most sporting events and consumption practices are highly detrimental to the environment. While academics have examined the harmful effects of sporting mega-events and the production and consumption of sport equipment and clothing, there has been less engagement with the “mundane,” everyday activities of consuming, laundering, and recycling of fitness objects. In this paper, we explore the potential in feminist new materialisms for rethinking the complex relationships between sport, fitness, and the environment. In particular, we explain how our engagement with Karen Barad's theory of agential realism led us to rethink women's habitual fitness practices as connected to environmental degradation. Working with Barad's concept of entanglement, we came to notice new human-clothing-environment relationships, focusing on how athleisure clothing itself is an active, vital force that intra-acts with other non-human (and human) matter within the environment. Adopting a diffractive methodology that included reading interviews with women about their activewear practices, our own experiences, new materialist theory, and environmental literature through each other, we focus on two examples that emerged through this process: laundering and disposal practices. Through these examples, we demonstrate the ways in which new materialisms encouraged us to move toward non-anthropocentric understandings of the sport-environment relationship and toward new ethical practices in our everyday fitness lifestyles.
Highlights
The world is facing a massive environmental crisis with rapid rates of deforestation, increased production of greenhouse gases, rising global temperatures and sea levels, and extensive loss of biodiversity as the Sixth Great Extinction looms (Carrington, 2017)
Baradian theory holds great potential for those interested in exploring the connection between sport and the environment. It was with agential realism and a diffractive research process that we came to think differently about women’s embodied fitness and consumption practices
Reading different data sets and environmental and theoretical knowledge through each other, we were prompted to attend to the vitality of activewear clothing and its various environmental entanglements
Summary
The world is facing a massive environmental crisis with rapid rates of deforestation, increased production of greenhouse gases, rising global temperatures and sea levels, and extensive loss of biodiversity as the Sixth Great Extinction looms (Carrington, 2017). Towards More-Than-Human Understandings of Sport and the Environment responsibilities in these processes, many scholars have begun turning toward different ontological and epistemological approaches that view the world through a more connected and relational lens One such framework is new materialisms, an umbrella term for a range of theories and concepts that are premised on a relational ontology where human and non-human matter are seen as constantly intra-acting and where matter is recognized as lively and agentic. We speak to some of these new noticings, primarily drawing upon Barad’s concept of entanglement to explore how women’s habitual fitness practices and the activewear phenomenon (clothes worn for physical activity) are intimately connected to environmental degradation. We explain how our engagement with feminist new materialist scholar Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism prompted us to rethink the more-than-human relations with fitness practices, moving bodies, clothing, and the environment. Looking at the vitality of matter, at the “life” of activewear after it leaves the human helps to bring to light the impactful (and often unnoticed) role activewear clothing and women’s consumption practices are having on the production of greenhouse gases
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