154
a notable gap in terms of making the broader connections that Haraway prescribes.
The next section considers two distinct analytics that feminists and other critical scholars have used to study technosocial relations that include, but are not limited to, sport: agential realism and assemblage.
Recognizing that studies of cyborgs in sport retain a relatively narrow focus, it considers a wider array of STS-informed applications, with the aim of illustrating possibilities for studies of sport more generally and feminist studies of sport in particular.
From Bodies in Motion to Intra-Actions
155
feminist and critical projects that aim to unpack power and complexity, with a primary focus on sport and physical activity. Whereas agential realism emphasizes agency as an enactment that emerges from entangled relations (as opposed to coming from individual actors), assemblage pro- vides a mode of interrogating multiple and sometimes seemingly dispa- rate logics that can converge to inform specific events or situations (Ong and Collier 2005).
Agential Realism and Re(Con)Figurations as Intra-Action
A distinguishing feature of agential realism is that it does not posit indi- viduals—human or otherwise—as pre-existing actors. According to Barad (2007, p. 33), “distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action … [T]hat is, agencies are only distinct in rela- tion to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual ele- ments.” Intra-action, she explains, “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (p. 33). This ontological reorientation prompts a focus on how phenomena materialize, a distinctly different framing from more common examinations that look at interactions causing effects.
Instead, agency involves “the ongoing reconfigurings of the world,” not as a trait that actors possess (p. 141). This distinction has direct implications for how we think about human bodies. They are not autonomous agents who instigate changes independently, nor are they the outcomes of worldly processes. Instead, they are “part of the world in its open-ended becoming” (p. 150). Intra-action entails iterative practices, which, upon further scrutiny, reveal that matter and meaning are intertwined.
The embrace of materiality and its semiotic interconnections extends beyond agential realism (Alaimo and Hekman 2008). Barad’s claims about intra-action, however, stand out in terms of their explicit and spe- cific focus. She rejects the idea that technologies or other physical appa- ratuses simply measure objects; rather, they aid in the definition and creation. They are entangled in that the object does not exist without the apparatus, rendering them inseparable. Her reflection on one example, the fetus, serves as a case in point. Reproductive science has enabled
Possibilities of Feminist Technoscience Studies of Sport…
156
advancements in surgical practice and biological understanding. Three- dimensional ultrasound technology presents the fetus as seemingly distinct from the womb of its mother (Barad 2007, p. 221). The fetus’
existence as entity in the world reveals its constitutive relationships with technologies of visualization, which simultaneously can render the wom- an’s body invisible. Her analysis of this example does not suggest that the meanings of the fetus result from these technologies or that they are fixed.
Rather, for Barad (2007, p. 149), they are better understood as “an ongo- ing performance of the world in its differential dance,” in which “part of the world becomes determinately bounded and propertied in its emer- gent intelligibility to another part of the world.” Intra-action is not sim- ply the generation of a thing or object through physical and discursive interconnections. Phenomena instead reflect productive and dynamic practices, which include perceptive, affective, and subjective elements.
While the feminist sensibilities of agential realism may not at first appear clear, Barad (2007, p. 34) maintains that it has utility for “negotiating difficulties” around questions of materiality and materialization, particu- larly in relation to technology’s “crucial role in public discourse as well as in feminist theories of the body.”
Studies guided by agential realism vary in topic and scope. Employing intra-action to make sense of materialization, however, means being attentive to how non-human dimensions of entanglements. Daniel Nyberg’s (2009) ethnography of a call center details how service calls reveal a kind of performativity that is materially grounded and transcends presumed boundaries between the telephone, the customer service opera- tor, and computer systems (from screens, keyboards, and headphones to cables connecting parts, as well as one’s physical connectivity to the mouse and cursor). Central to his analysis is the consideration of embodi- ment as it emerges through technosocial engagement. Rather than net- worked interactions between human and non-human actors, he explains their intra-action as an assembly of actors that materializes through a conjoined labor process (Nyberg 2009, p. 193). In a distinctly different vein, Rachel Colls (2007) examines the materialization of “fat” bodies, highlighting key aspects: first, that fat has its “own internal momentums”
in which its texture, movement, and capacity to take up or react to differ- ent spaces enable it to be at times within and outside the body; and sec-
K. Henne
157
ond, that fat can be a force that acts and is not simply acted upon by measurement devices or embodied practices (e.g., eating, cooking, exercising), doing so in ways that can render some actions unacceptable by normative standards (Colls 2007, p. 353). Taken together, they are the makings of “embodied topographies” (p. 363), which reorient fat so that it is not limited to an individual attribute. These topographies, Colls (2007) argues, offer an analytic alternative to the tendency to focus on discrimination against fat bodies and the condemnation of fatness—both of which minimize the role of agency.
These materialist insights into embodiment are arguably distinct from frameworks used in Sport Studies to conceptualize bodies, which often draw on Foucauldian approaches (e.g., Thorpe 2016; Fullagar 2017;
Esmonde and Jette 2018). For instance, explorations of the “disciplined nature of bodily existence” have been central to cultural and sociological studies of sport. They have focused explicitly on the various ways and modalities through which power operates to encourage bodies to be both productive and docile (Andrews, 1993, p. 148). Feminist scholars of sport have also attributed Foucault’s ideas as creating “an opening to question the modernist foundation of feminism’s own categories of power, political action, resistance, and agency” (Markula 2003, p. 104).
Thus, even though scholars reiterate the importance of asking “how mat- ter comes to matter,” developing the answers to shifting questions about bodies is arguably not easy (Barad 2003, p. 829).
According to Simone Fullagar (2017), materialist analyses require new kinds of qualitative research questions. She suggests moving away from “a hermeneutics of lived experience that has privileged the interpretive sub- ject and towards the material-discursive relations that make the life of the body and its movement (im)possible” (p. 248). While some feminist scholars of sport, such as Holly Thorpe (2016), express enthusiasm for how these reconsiderations might enable new modes of interrogating the interplay between biology and culture, others highlight some notable complications. For example, Esmonde and Jette (2018) have incorpo- rated feminist materialist insights to problematize claims that certain environments contribute to obesity and that human bodies can overcome them through more activity. They reframe the relationships between bod- ies and environments as entangled, not causal. While they acknowledge
Possibilities of Feminist Technoscience Studies of Sport…
158
that both Barad and Haraway convincingly use feminist technoscience to unearth overlooked power asymmetries, they express concerns about whether “political and ethical claims” are “severely undercut if there is no posited difference between the agency of humans and non-humans”
(Esmonde and Jette 2018, p. 44).
Despite somewhat cautious endorsements of feminist new material- ism, analyses of intra-action do point to productive possibilities for stud- ies of sport, especially in terms of reconsidering the anthropocentric tendencies of sport and studies of sport. According to Mary G. McDonald and Jennifer Sterling, these tendencies “promote binary thinking, falsely separating ‘humans’ as apart from—and in control of—‘nature’” (forth- coming). Specifically, they incorporate Barad’s insights on intra- action to draw attention to the range of actors and lives implicated in the controversies that emerged around the polluted waterways in and around Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and gained international attention in the lead up to the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games. McDonald and Sterling acknowledge that media narratives tended to focus on the public health threats to athletes and tourists, as well as to the failures of technological solutions to prevent and remedy these risks. They point out that these foci “privilege a particular form of human need that creates deleterious effects and consequences” (p. 17). They argue for an ontological reorien- tation that attends to trans-corporeality, which recognizes how human corporeality cannot be disconnected from nature cultures—that is, the inseparability of nature and culture both ecologically and socially.
Accordingly, McDonald and Sterling re-center the place of water, reaf- firming both indigenous and feminist traditions that approach water as a central starting point for the study of human and non-human life and livelihoods (p. 18). Further, and aligned with Barad’s (2007) call to reconfigure objects of inquiry, they reflect on how water intra-acts rela- tionally with other organisms and actors in ways that disrupt assump- tions that water can be understood as a thing distinct from or outside those relations. Their reading of the water pollution controversies, in turn, captures a wider range of actors, organisms, and inequalities that coalesce in the hosting of the Olympic and Paralympic Games and sheds light on overlooked forms of violence enabled by modern sport and its celebration of human-centered achievements. Importantly, they do so
K. Henne
159
without losing sight of postcolonial legacies, capitalist practices, geo- graphic distinctions, and social inequalities.
Others have employed intra-action to illuminate neglected dimensions of cross-species relationships. For example, Anita Maurstad, Dona Davis, and Sarah Cowles (2013, p. 322) examine human-horse partnerships in equestrian sports as embodied “anthropo-zoo-genetic practice, where species domesticate each other through being together.” Their acknowl- edgment of nature cultures disrupts the oft-assumed dynamic of a (human) rider training a horse for a joint performance. Their analysis of these entanglements explains how horse and human become together through mutual engagement, verbal and “felt” co-communication, and recognition of the shifting boundaries between them. Their “co-being,”
to use Maurstad and colleagues’ language, not only appreciates how non- human and non-organic actors engage and diverse expressions of agency that destabilize the oft-presumed authority of the (human) rider, but it also emphasizes their shared intra-action without losing sight of the importance of embodiment.
The distinct intra-active insights gleaned through the aforementioned analyses reveal multiple materializations of actors, bodies, and physical- ity. In doing so, they enable further scrutiny of how space and embodied activity emerge constitutively. While cyborg readings of athletes show how cybernetic connections are integral to modern sport, they, for the most part, remain preoccupied with relations revealed through bodies and body cultures. Inter-action, however, requires careful consideration of symbiotic relations that exceed presumed human/non-human divides, such as those inherent to nature cultures, which Sport Studies scholars have only recently begun to explore in depth (e.g., King and Weedon 2016; also in this collection; McDonald and Sterling forthcoming).
However, it is worth noting that inter-action is also the subject of femi- nist critiques. Jasbir Puar (2017), for instance, points out that it may
“privilege an essentialized truth produced through matter,” missing an opportunity to interrogate the role of language because it is preoccupied with refuting the dominance of linguistic processes (Puar 2017, p. 172).
The next section considers assemblage as a possible response to the limits of being preoccupied with materiality.
Possibilities of Feminist Technoscience Studies of Sport…
160
Tracing Multiplicity and (Re)Formations Through Assemblages
Scholars working in and across critical data, feminist, queer, and social scientific studies have drawn on the concept of assemblage to explore and query globalized and technosocial changes (see Ong and Collier 2005), exploring unpredictable and contingent features across various domains of activity, including science and its regulation (Prasad 2017), surveil- lance (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), and reproductive technologies (Lowry 2004). A key attribute of assemblages is their inherent multiplic- ity and contingency. They can materialize in the form of events, but they are not fixed. Instead, they fluctuate or dissipate along different temporal and spatial registers. In short, assemblages are not permanent or stable, nor are they straightforward or coherent. This approach to matter is dis- tinct from agential realism in the sense that it attends to concerns of materialization, non-human agency, and the push to destabilize “human- ist notions of the body” and “the politics of voice and visibility” without dismissing the contributions of language within dynamic processes (Puar 2017, p. 20). Given the seemingly amorphous nature of assemblages, grounded examples often provide more conceptual clarity than explana- tions of its theoretical tenets, three of which I highlight next.
Globalized Assemblages
The anthology, Global assemblages: Technology, politics and ethics as anthro- pological problems, features a number of anthropological examples to showcase how “global forms are articulated in specific situations” that reveal how assemblages “define new material, collective, and discursive relationships” and serve as “sites for formation and reformation” (Ong and Collier 2005, p. 4). Sport mega-events, such as the staging of the Olympic Games and the Commonwealth Games, are notable sites for interrogating global assemblages because they are international spectacles enabled by transnational networks of human and non-human actors, including participants, audiences, infrastructure, media and surveillance
K. Henne
161
technologies, corporate sponsors, and governing sport bodies among others.
As global spectacles, sport mega-events require massive investment in infrastructure and security, which has meant the implementation of widespread and varied forms of surveillance. For Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson (2000), assemblage is an adept explanatory tool for making sense of these relations because it enables close scrutiny of the multiplicity of surveillance systems and the adjoining technosocial dynamics that accompany their expanding connections. As an assem- blage can grow in multiple directions, they create additional modes of surveillance and extend into other locations with more subjects becom- ing visible under the gaze of overseeing authorities. This type of expan- sion carries notable implications for population governance, as surveillance generates and relies on multiple representations of human bodies (e.g., images, data inputs, and other signifiers) as grounds for understandings of human behavior and developing practices of social control. Analyses of mega- events follow suit: they reveal how both spec- tacle and surveillance are central to the production and governance of these events, thereby troubling Foucault’s strong distinctions between spectacle and surveillance (Boyle and Haggerty 2009). Further, they demonstrate that legacies of security extend well beyond the actual sport mega-events themselves, operating across “structural, cultural, policy, technological, and relational” levels (Whelan 2014, p. 392). Within the assemblage, the staging of the mega-event remains important, even after its conclusion, because it facilitates the materialization of connections and enables the observation of what otherwise would appear as a diverse set of relations.
The surveillant assemblage has other applications as well. Consider Bryan Sluggett’s (2011) use of assemblage to explain the globalized anti- doping regime in sport: it emphasizes the networks of widespread surveil- lance and decenters the disproportionate focus on the “doping problem”
among athletes. Ophir Sefiha and Nancy Reichman (2016) offer a nuanced account of surveillance in cycling, looking beyond formal mech- anisms adopted by authorities to discursive and pervasive aspects of the assemblage that reveal themselves in athletes’ everyday lives. As such, they detail the extensive influence of required tracking, such as the bureaucratic
Possibilities of Feminist Technoscience Studies of Sport…
162
requirements of whereabouts registration and random out-of- competition testing alongside athletes’ self-surveillance of their food and supplement ingestion and peer-to-peer relations, including through social media.
Their conclusion reveals the blurred lines between organizational and non-organizational, as well as external and internal, surveillance among athletes, all of which are enabled and sustained through an assemblage of sociotechnical relations (Sefiha and Reichman 2016, p. 213). Moreover, these practices often emerge in anticipation of formal regulatory require- ments, not simply as a reaction to them, revealing a kind of preemptive governance that would otherwise be difficult to identify.
Digital Assemblages
The embeddedness of digital data in everyday life operates in ways that surpass social control through monitoring (Haggerty and Ericson’s pri- mary focus). Reflecting on encounters with digital data in everyday life, Deborah Lupton (2016, p. 1) elaborates on “digital data-human assem- blages,” offering a reminder that embodied practices actively contribute to the generation and employment of data. Specifically, she points out, assemblages are more than systems of extracting and using data about people; people also “learn from the assemblages of which they are a part”
(Lupton 2016, p. 2). They engage and negotiate data, gleaning insights as they do so, which can lead to the use or manipulation of personal data collection as well as changes in behavior. Thus, according to Lupton (2016), it is important to remember “the inevitability of our relationship with our digital data assemblages and the importance of learning to live together and to learn from each other” (p. 2). In this way, data emerge more as companions in everyday life than as foes.
Extending these observations on the liveliness of data within assem- blages, Sarah Pink et al. (2017) examine how data become a mundane part of physical experience and self-awareness. Drawing upon an ethno- graphic analysis of self-tracking cyclists, they document participants’
micro-routines, everyday adaptations, and emotive shifts in relation to both the technologies of data collection and the data collected about them. They conclude that data are not the outcomes of embodied practices,
K. Henne
163
but instead constitutive elements of embodied activity and subjectivity (Pink et al. 2017). Their observation that such assemblages can be central to notions of embodiment and self, however, is not necessarily new.
The advent of self-tracking wearable devices may bring about height- ened awareness of our relationships with digital data, but our connec- tions with biometric data can be traced to engagement with older technologies, such as the weight scale (Crawford et al. 2015). Although these historical predecessors did not harvest or share personal data digi- tally, Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingel, and Tero Karppi (2015) acknowledge that they nonetheless contributed to human subjectivity and behavior and operated in the service of regimes of social control, including weight management and health promotion agendas. What is distinct about digi- tal self-tracking devices is their contributions to the growth of networks, not all of which can be anticipated, felt, or understood by the human bodies engaged with them. The connectivity enabled through technoso- cial connections can be multiple and unpredictable within assemblages—
an observation that Roslyn Kerr (2016) has detailed in relation to sport science and medicine, the use of performance enhancement technologies, the incorporation of refereeing and judging technologies in different sports, and media broadcasting. Taken together, these analyses demon- strate how assemblage is a useful analytic for tracing cybernetic relations, such as those illustrated in the aforementioned cyborg theories. In con- trast to most examinations of cyborgs in sport, though, assemblage requires reflecting on wider networked dynamics rather than the ten- dency to examine bodies or body cultures.
Queer Assemblages
Queer and feminist adaptations of assemblage shine additional light on issues of power that are often missed or under-interrogated in many stud- ies of technosocial assemblages. As Puar is explicit in how assemblage can be employed to address the limitations of human-centric and identity- based frameworks and to avoid a kind of “ontological or material essentialism” that she associates with agential realism, her work figures centrally in this section (2017, p. 172).
Possibilities of Feminist Technoscience Studies of Sport…