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A feminist materialist inspired analysis of the meaning and management of pregnancy and reproductive health in Olympic and Paralympic female athletes

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The number of elite female athletes returning to professional sport following childbirth has gradually increased in recent years. There now exists a burgeoning of scholarship across sport and health-related disciplines that have paid attention to the experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in elite female athlete populations. This paper contributes to this expanding topic of inquiry by taking inspiration from feminist materialist approaches to examine the experiences and politics of pregnancy and reproductive health in elite female Olympic and Paralympic athletes on the United Kingdom elite sport funded programme–The World Class Programme (WCP). In doing so, we begin to foreground the bio-social-material practices and entanglements that constitute the WCP environment which actively shape athletes’ understandings of reproductive health and choice around pregnancy in particular ways. We discuss how the presented data has implications for female athlete embodied subjectivity and reproductive realities that complicate cultural narratives around athlete agency and gender equities in elite sport.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health

Volume

15

Issue

3

Pages

332-344

Publisher

Informa UK

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Acceptance date

2022-10-04

Publication date

2022-11-21

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

2159-676X

eISSN

2159-6778

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Gareth Wiltshire. Deposit date: 19 December 2022

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