Gut Feminism, new materialisms and sportwomen's embodied health: the case of RED-S in endurance athletes

This paper critically explores the potential of feminist new materialist approaches to develop new understandings of the complex entanglements of the biological and socio-cultural dimensions of women athletes' embodied health experiences. In particular, we draw upon Elizabeth Wilson's (2015) Gut Feminism to ask 'what conceptual and methodological innovations become possible when feminist theory is not so instinctively antibiological'? (1). Drawing upon two phases of interviews with 12 elite endurance sports-women involved in triathlon and Ironman events, we explore meanings of leanness, and the 'ideal' sporting body, as dynamically produced through socio-material-biological processes. Focusing particularly on their experiences of Low Energy Availability (LEA) and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), we illustrate some of the ways that the unique sporting culture presses upon women's bodies, and how, for some women, their responses to physiological data evokes further biological ramifications. In so doing, we highlight biology as more dynamic, nonconsilient and less deterministic than many sport feminists have presumed. Ultimately, this paper signals the need to address the antibiologism in the sociology of sport such that we can not only advance more multidimensional understandings of the bio-sociality of women's moving bodies, but also find new ways to press back upon the sciences to rethink their approaches to understanding, diagnosing and treating complex health phenomena.