Superwomen? Young sporting women, temporality and learning not to be perfect
Peer reviewed, Journal article
Published version
Date
2020Metadata
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Original version
International Review for the Sociology of Sport. 2020, Artikkel 1012690220979710. 10.1177/1012690220979710Abstract
New forms of neoliberal femininity create demanding horizons of expectation for young women. For talented athletes, these pressures are intensified by the establishment of dual-career discourses that construct the combination of high-performance sport and education as a normative, ‘ideal’ pathway. The pressed time perspective inherent in dual-careers requires athletes to employ a variety of time-related skills, especially for young women who aim to live up to ‘superwoman’ ideals that valorise ‘success’ in all walks of life. Drawing on existential phenomenology, and in-depth interviews with 10 talented Finnish sportswomen (aged 19–22), we explored their experiences of lived time when pursuing dual-careers in upper secondary sport schools. Exploring participants’ bodily experiences of inhabiting the achievement life-world, we analyse how these sportswomen either learned ways of living up to this ambitious script or came to understand the detrimental effects of the script, necessitating other ways of being. For those who experience a disjuncture between the ‘perfect’ and their embodied experience, self-care practices are needed to restore life-world harmony, and orient to alternative futures.
Description
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).