Feminist phenomenology and the woman in the running body

Modern phenomenology, with its roots in Husserlian philosophy, has been taken up and utilised in a myriad of ways within different disciplines, but until recently has remained relatively under-used within sports studies. A corpus of sociological-phenomenological work is now beginning to develop in this domain, alongside a longer standing literature in feminist phenomenology. These specific social-phenomenological forms explore the situatedness of lived-body experience within a particular social structure. After providing a brief overview of key strands of phenomenology, this article considers some of the ways in which sociological, and particularly feminist phenomenology, might be used to analyse female sporting embodiment. For illustrative purposes, data from an autophenomenographic project on female distance running are also included, in order briefly to demonstrate the application of phenomenology within sociology, as both theoretical framework and methodological approach

Beside-the-mind: an unsettling, reparative reading of paranoia

Having undertaken a critical analysis of a transnational program of research to identify and intervene on the prodrome, a pre-psychotic state, here I experiment with an unsettling, reparative reading of its affective coils—paranoia. Etymologically joining para (beside) with nous (mind), “paranoia” denotes an experience beside-the-mind. I attempt to follow these roots, meeting a non-human figure—Coatlicue—as introduced through Chicana philosopher and poet, Gloria Anzaldúa. In the arms of this goddess, the prodrome points to the vitality and the milieu of paranoia, re-turning it as a capacity, calling for modes of attunement and apprenticeship, and perhaps protecting our psychological and political practices against yet another operation of colonialist capture. Challenging the subject, interlocutors, and form typically adopted by not just Psychology but Affect Studies too, I hope in this performative essay to also lift up the problems and possibilities of Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’ as a means to open the potential decoloniality, and thus response-ability, of these fields within the present political moment

Reontologising race:the machinic geography of phenotype

In contradistinction to the treatment of race as a problem of epistomology—how is phenotype represented in racial discourse—the author seeks to defend a materialist ontology of race. The creative materiality of race is asserted following the ‘material turn’ in feminism, anthropology, complexity theory, and Deleuze. Race is shown to be an embodied and material event, a ‘machine assemblage’ with a different spatiality than the self/other scheme of Hegel. Taking issue with the calls for the transcendence of race amongst cultural studies scholars such as Paul Gilroy, the author ends the paper by suggesting that the political battle against racial subordination includes a serious engagement with its biological dimensions. Race should not be eliminated, but its energies harnessed through a cosmopolitan ethics which is sensitive to its heterogeneous and dynamic nature