Sport in Society

Feeling Competitive: Sport as Affective Practice

What are the stakes of sporting competition, what does it feel like, and what kinds of subjects does it produce? How are gender, sexuality, class, race, citizenship, and the nation felt, practiced and fought over via sport? If sport is political in part because it is affective, then how do emotions facilitate the work of power?

For this special issue, we welcome contributions exploring the mutually constitutive relationship between sport, competition, and affect. While it is widely acknowledged that sport is a highly emotional social practice (e. g. Keys 2022; 2013; Avner et al. 2023; Elias and Dunning 1986; Doidge et al. 2020; Andrews and Silk 2018), we ask specifically how affects and emotions shape social and political subjectivity. In so doing, we conceive of competition as an embodied performance, social process, and producer of feelings through which subjectivity is cultivated and contested across a range of sporting contexts. To explore the unresolvable tension between empowerment, docility, unruliness, and social hierarchy brought forth by sporting practice, we invite cultural, ethnographic, and historical case studies to analyse how subjects fashion themselves and are themselves fashioned by affect in sport. Our collective aim is to emphasize the political, cultural and visceral conditions of competition which play a role in racializing, gendering, dis-/enabling, and sexualizing its subjects. 

To understand sport as an affective practice which produces competitive and competing subjects by means of feeling, sensing and sounding, we see the areas below as intersecting foci to be developed through contributions to this special issue: 

• Sport as fashioning subjectivity: Sport as a site for fashioning, reproducing, and transforming the self, where desire, aspiration, and agency coincide with constraint and cultural hegemony. We invite analyses that examine how affect diagnoses power, from feminist and queer sport spaces to postcolonial reconfigurations of sporting values and practices.
• Competition: Moving beyond the axiom that sport is political, we claim that sport is political because it is affective. We seek work that traces how feeling, sensing bodies and circulating emotions shape subjects and social worlds, within and beyond the lines of play, including tensions between notions of “fair play,” antagonism, and the commodification of conflict. A focus on competition enables an investigation into the stakes and emotional investments entangled with sporting praxis.
• Self-optimization and emotional labor: We welcome studies of competitive self-relations, the longue durée of ambition and bodily techniques, and the emotional labor of instructors, coaches, and athletes navigating market logics, while also probing transgressive and agentive possibilities.
• Power, difference, and embodiment: Analyses that show how race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation are constituted, contested, and felt through competitive practices.