Superwomen? Young sporting women, temporality and learning not to be perfect

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Superwomen? Young sporting women, temporality and learning not to be perfect © The Author(s) 2020 Published version Ronkainen, Noora J; Allen-Collinson, Jacquelyn; Aggerholm, Kenneth; Ryba, Tatiana V Ronkainen, N. J., Allen-Collinson, J., Aggerholm, K., & Ryba, T. V. (2021). Superwomen? Young sporting women, temporality and learning not to be perfect. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 56(8), 1137-1153. https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690220979710 2021 https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690220979710 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 1 –17 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1012690220979710 journals.sagepub.com/home/irs Superwomen? Young sporting women, temporality and learning not to be perfect Noora J Ronkainen University of Jyväskylä, Finland Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson University of Lincoln, UK Kenneth Aggerholm Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Norway Tatiana V Ryba University of Jyväskylä, Finland Abstract New forms of neoliberal femininity create demanding horizons of expectation for young women. For talented athletes, these pressures are intensified by the establishment of dualcareer 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. Keywords superwoman, existential phenomenology, lived time, women’s dual-careers, identity Corresponding author: Noora J Ronkainen, Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Mattilanniemi 6, Kärki, PL 35, FI40014 Jyväskylä, Finland. Email: [email protected] 979710IRS0010.1177/1012690220979710International Review for the Sociology of SportRonkainen et al. research-article2020 Research Article 2 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 00(0) In addition to the ever-increasing physiological and psychological demands associated with high-performance sport, today’s talented athletes also face increasing societal expectations not only to complete, but also to excel in education. Some studies have found that adolescent athletes achieve better results than their non-athlete peers at school (Jonker et al., 2009), challenging the ‘dumb jock’ stereotypes still prevalent in the USA (Wininger and White, 2008). Although in US collegiate sport, ‘dual careers’ (the combination of sport and education) have long been established, in the European context, political actions to promote these careers are relatively recent. After the European Commission published its Dual Career Guidelines of Athletes (European Commission, 2012), research and policy initiatives have increased rapidly; for example, the Finnish Olympic Committee states on its website that ‘Dual Career is the Finnish sport system’s value choice’ (https://www.olympiakomitea.fi/huippu-urheilu/urheiluakatemiaohjelma/kaksoisura/). This creates additional expectations for elite athletes to achieve even more within the relatively short duration of their athletic careers. As a consequence of the ‘pressed time’ perspective that characterises dual career athletes’ lives (Burlot et al., 2018), research (particularly in sport psychology) has emphasised the centrality of time-related skills (using time efficiently, career planning, goal setting) in creating sustainable dual careers (Perez-Rivases et al., 2020). Research indicates a gendered patterning of dual careers, both in the USA (DilleyKnoles et al., 2010; O’Connor, 2019) and Europe (Skrubbeltrang et al., 2018). It appears that young sporting women are often more committed to combining sporting and educational goals and identities than are sporting men. Despite the growing professionalisation of women’s football (soccer) in Britain, many young players also invest in academic excellence (Harrison et al., 2020). In this latter study, one female participant explained: ‘I wanted to do really well in uni, I didn’t want to go there and just pass, you know I still want a first. And then again with soccer, I want to do the best that I can’ (Harrison et al., 2020: 16). Despite the growth of women’s sport, however, there remains a staggering structural inequality of opportunity that limits women’s social agency in developing a professional athletic career. For example, in Finland where we conducted the present study, only 1.6% of the country’s professional athletes in 2017 were women (https://kihu.fi/arviointi-ja-seuranta/ammattiurheilijoiden-maara-tasaisessa-kasvussa/). These numbers show that very few women have the privilege initially to construct a single career focused on sport, and dual-career discourses might be particularly relevant for young women, for whom it is more of a necessity to channel their development along these two tracks. Recent scholarship also raises the question of whether we are witnessing a ‘feminisation’ of dual-career discourses (Ryba, 2018). This links to broader discussions surrounding the ‘feminization’ of education (Leathwood and Read, 2008). As Skelton (2002) emphasised, however, simply having a greater number of women in education settings (e.g. in the role of teachers) does not necessarily make these environments ‘feminised’. Furthermore, linking masculinity and femininity firmly and unproblematically to male and female bodies neglects how women can also ‘do’ masculinity (West and Zimmerman, 1987). Sportswomen often construct identities emphasising toughness and independence, thus positioning themselves as oppositional to constructions of ‘emphasised femininity’ (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). The ‘ideal’ student-athlete is often constituted Ronkainen et al. 3 through masculinised discourses: she is constructed as highly autonomous, self-confident, manages time efficiently, and is in control of her fate (Burlot et al., 2018). The emerging literature on female dual-career athletes indicates that many might embody ‘the perfect’ leitmotif of contemporary femininity that captures ‘a heightened form of self-regulation based on an aspiration to some idea of the “good life”’ (McRobbie, 2015: 9). Forms of new (white, middle-class) femininities constructed in the 21st century have also been coined by US scholars as, respectively: the ‘Future Girl’ (Harris, 2004), ‘Alpha Girl’ (Kindlon, 2007) and ‘Successful Girl’ (Ringrose, 2007). These new individualistic femininities are compatible with many key elements of what Hughes and Coakley (1991) coined ‘the sport ethic’, such as high ambition, striving for distinction, risk-taking, and refusing to accept external limits. Indeed, athletic achievement (something that is devalued in those forms of ‘ideal’ femininity where bodily worth is tied to how the body looks, as opposed to what it can do) can occupy a central role in these ‘new’ girls’/women’s self-construction. As Azzarito (2010: 266) noted, ‘both the Alpha and the Future Girl emblematically represent new femininities, self-made, ambitious and independent girls, to whom sport and career paths are the most important areas of selfdefinition and of success in society’. Interestingly, scholars have noted that some versions of the ideal – such as the myth of a Finnish superwoman – have existed in cultural imaginations for many centuries (Lietzén et al., 2015). As Lietzén et al. (2015) noted, the Finnish superwoman myth has been tied to what they describe as ‘the mythical Finnish model’ where equality is achieved by economic independence through education. Although Alpha and Future girls might claim agency, resist victimisation and refuse categorisation as ‘the second sex’ (De Beauvoir, 1972), attempts to live up to these new ambitious femininities can also come at great personal costs. As McRobbie (2015: 4) noted, ‘the idea of the perfect is both part of female “common sense”. . . and also something potentially dangerous, a mechanism unleashing new waves of self-harm’. Research indicates that endorsing the ‘superwoman’ ideal can constitute a risk factor for disordered eating (Mensinger et al., 2007), with increasing numbers of young women experiencing intensified body-anxiety and even body-disdain (McRobbie, 2015). Whether and how aspiring young women can match their lived experience to these ideals in the world of elite sport is problematic, for: ‘despite strong dedication, perfection is unobtainable and failure inevitable’ (Roderick, 2014: 143), and pressures to give a ‘perfect’ performance, both frontstage and backstage, are intense (Roderick and Allen-Collinson, 2020). Despite the literature on the new femininities and their manifestations in popular culture, there is a paucity of research on how these femininities are actually ‘lived and felt’ and made meaningful in aspiring sporting women’s life-worlds. Building on McRobbie’s (2015) notion of ‘the perfect’, we focus here on pre-elite student-athletes, to explore what it is like to pursue excellence in both sport and education, and what happens if young women’s experiences fail to align with the idea of perfection. Drawing on existential phenomenological insights, including temporality as a fundamental component of human experience, we explore the nature of lived time in young women’s dual careers when they ‘live up to’, struggle to live up to, or abandon the cultural ideal of the perfect. The article contributes to sociological understandings of young sporting women’s subjectivities in an era of high-achieving young ‘superwomen’, and the salient role of lived time in structuring the life-worlds of achievement (and ‘failure’). 4 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 00(0) Phenomenological perspectives and lived time There are many, complex strands of phenomenology, some of which we have charted in our work on sporting embodiment (e.g. Allen-Collinson, 2009, 2011a). In addressing what he perceived as the inadequacies of scientific, ‘objective’ studies of human existence, Husserl (1983), the founder of modern phenomenology, sought to question everyday ‘common-sense’ as well as scientific habits of thought that left unquestioned extant assumptions and presuppositions regarding phenomena. To identify and reveal the essence or eidos of a phenomenon, Husserl (1983: 6) advocated the adoption of the phenomenological attitude, engaging in the epochē (a form of bracketing), temporarily to step back from the phenomenon of interest, and challenge the everyday thinking of the ‘natural attitude’. Whilst diverging from ‘pure’ philosophical phenomenology, forms of more ‘sociologised’ phenomenology acknowledge and subject to analytic attention the wide-ranging and fundamental effects on lived experience of social-structural position and other sociological variables (see Allen-Collinson, 2011b). Phenomenology informed by sociological and/or feminist critiques is thus well-placed to provide a powerful lens on sporting women’s lived experiences as situated within a particular historical social structure (e.g. Allen-Collinson, 2011b; Chisholm, 2008). In phenomenological thought, time is not an object or container, but intrinsic to human existence and the very condition for it to be meaningful at all. Gallagher and Zahavi (2008) clarified Husserl’s account of temporality where any conscious act is structured by retention and protention, which make it possible for us to recollect past experiences and build expectations for the future. Central to many phenomenological accounts of experience are the specific ways we experience time subjectively, as what has been termed durée, the present moment of subjective experience (Schütz, 1967). We might experience time as ‘extending’, for example, particularly during painful, difficult, or challenging sporting experiences (Allen-Collinson, 2003). Such experiences, particularly during periods of pain, suffering or injury (and rehabilitation), have been sociologically analysed from an emotion-work and interactional perspective by Allen-Collinson (2003) in relation to distance running and ‘lived time’/durée. As she highlights (2003: 341), during more enjoyable or pleasurable sporting experiences, where the body is performing with relative ease and we feel ‘on top of our game’, we may experience what Leder (1990) has termed ‘temporal constriction’ when time seems to pass swiftly and effortlessly. Between these two temporal poles or ‘speeds’ lies what we might think of as ‘objective’ time, where our experience largely coheres with clocktime or calendar time. Schütz (1967: 57) reminded us that the present contains the future, as ‘every action is a spontaneous activity oriented toward the future’. In our everyday existence, our activities show up as tacitly meaningful because we anticipate they lead to something; studying for exams leads to graduation, and sports training leads to a refined skill, improved endurance, and so forth. In Heidegger’s (1962) thought, all our experiences are structured as possibilities: we constantly leap ahead of ourselves to what is ‘not yet’. Human lives are made meaningful through choosing projects and committing to them (Adams, 2006), with a life project in elite sport as one specifically oriented towards perfection (Breivik, 2010). Ronkainen et al. 5 Finally, while existential phenomenology provides a backdrop for understanding subjective time, feminist phenomenological scholars have reminded that temporal attunement is shaped by gender (Schües, 2011). As Schües (2011: 75) noted: Not that the thinking itself can be regarded as ‘typically’ male or female, but the battleground between past and future is personal, and hence female or male in its concrete sense. . . the remembering, but also the anticipating are specifically gendered; when I remember myself I cannot remember just a neutral person. I always remember myself as a girl or as a woman in a particular context and in specific relations. In the current study, we approach the notion of the ‘perfect’ as a largely invisible background frame of reference that shapes young sporting women’s attunement to the world. The ‘perfect’ can be conceived as a particular type of futuring that shapes young sporting women’s attunement to their life projects, until, for some reason, they are unable to live up to the ideal. Methods This research builds upon longitudinal qualitative data, gathered for the Finnish Longitudinal Dual Career Study (Ryba et al., 2016), which has followed the life course and stories of 18 promising Finnish youth athletes (10 women) participating in the national talent development programme. The study commenced at the start of participants’ journeys in upper-secondary sport schools (age at baseline: 15–16) and focused on exploring subjective meanings of turning points and life transitions in these young people’s developmental trajectories. The longitudinal data were used to gain a deep understanding of participants’ life-worlds, and to design the current study in which NJR conducted a sixth round of interviews (T6). Analysis of the earlier data-sets identified ‘the superwoman’ as one constitutive discursive resource that shaped participants’ sense-making of their lives (Ryba et al., 2020). In the current article, we focus purely on the young women’s stories, with results based solely on T6. Conducting phenomenologically oriented research requires openness, curiosity and challenging our taken-for-granted familiarity with phenomena (Allen-Collinson, 2009; McNarry et al., 2020a). In our study, the interviewer (NJR) participated in a bracketing interview with TVR to challenge her assumptions about women’s sporting life-worlds. We also conducted a pilot interview with a talented female athlete who was not part of the longitudinal study, to gain feedback and reflect on the design of the interview. All authors contributed to developing the interview questions to invite participants to describe in rich detail their experiences. We were particularly attuned to the felt senses of continuity and discontinuity of youth athletes’ life-worlds and how they talked about the past, present and future. Notes were taken throughout the process to keep track of our evolving understanding of how the young women negotiated the ‘perfect’ cultural script in making life choices and pursuing their projects. Phenomenologically-inspired research requires participants to describe in rich detail their experience (McNarry et al., 2020a). Since young people sometimes struggle to express complicated understandings, we used creative non-fiction vignettes as a data 6 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 00(0) collection method to aid reflection (see Barter and Renold, 2000). These portrayed two athletes’ journeys (women’s stories for women/men’s stories for men) through an uppersecondary sport school, to encourage the interviewees to reflect on their journeys, attitudes and experiences of being a talented student-athlete. These vignettes portrayed a collection of discontinuous experiences identified from data generated by the previous interviews undertaken in the longitudinal research. These experiences covered: the transition to upper-secondary school, a conflict between school and sport, a break-up with a girlfriend/boyfriend, performing over expectations, conflict with parents, being abandoned by a coach, transitioning to the senior sport, serious injury and disengagement from sport. Through the use of vignettes as an additional tool to invite reflection, we sought to learn more about how participants were attuned to and navigated through the multiple demands of their life-worlds (including in education, sport and relationships). The interviews were conducted in Finnish and lasted between 73 and 90 min (mean 84 min). Seven participants were interviewed face-to-face and, given the geographical dispersion of participants, three were interviewed via SkypeTM. After transcriptions were completed, NJR coded and started to thematically analyse the transcripts, noting key experiences and the meanings participants assigned to them. We then identified more general patterns and the temporal structure underpinning participants’ accounts that shape experiential realities. The co-authors, all with substantial experience of working within existential-phenomenological and/or feminist-phenomenological methodological approaches, were involved in developing and contesting interpretations and developing phenomenologically-sensitive readings of the data. In our data analysis, we identified three ‘ideal types’ of young sporting women: those who were ‘living up to the perfect’, ‘struggling to be perfect’ and ‘ditching the perfect ideal’. As with other scholars who have drawn on the notion of ‘ideal types’ (e.g. Owton and Allen-Collinson, 2016), we acknowledge that all 10 participants’ accounts do not neatly fit into one category or pattern. All personal stories have their nuances and complexities; however, all accounts had a dominant pattern that fell within one of these three types. To preserve a rich sense of young women’s subjective experiences, we portray these ideal types through three individual athletes’ accounts (‘Katri’, ‘Jaana’ and ‘Nea’; all names are pseudonyms). These three young women portrayed the most representative cases of the types identified in the data. Focusing on three illustrative cases, rather than including quotes from all participants, has the advantage of preserving a rich sense of the first-person perspective and the temporal structure that is central to phenomenological thought, while also showing complexities and contradictions of lived experience. Results: three women’s accounts Living up to the perfect ideal The first of our ideal types is represented through Katri, who, at the beginning of the longitudinal research, had expressed her ambition to become a collegiate swimmer, to compete in the Olympics, and become a lawyer. She remarks: ‘my mum just said that in the seventh grade I was sitting in the car and saying that I will go and study in the USA’. Ronkainen et al. 7 At the end of upper-secondary school, Katri appears to be ‘on track’ with her life plan: she has graduated with excellent grades and received an athletic scholarship to the USA. However, not everything has followed a neat, linear progression: last season’s performance was difficult, and she was disappointed with some of her matriculation exam results. Recalling a disappointing performance in the national swimming championships, Katri reflects: It was a big disappointment. . . I am a competitor and it’s frustrating when I feel I cannot use my potential. . . [But] If I get disappointed badly. . . I forget about it quickly. I don’t continue ruminating about it. In orienting herself to athletic excellence, Katri is making selective engagements with the past in order to inform her present and future. While disappointments rapidly become a forgotten past, for her, repeated successes become her embodied anchor of self-confidence: I am a person of routine. I always wake up for morning training at the same time and do everything in the same order. . . If I repeat something, I get a lot of self-confidence from that. If something goes well once, I am: ‘okay’. Do it three more times and if it goes well the fourth time, then it gives me a lot of self-confidence. Then I know that it will also go well the next time. Katri’s storying is shaped by contemporary neoliberal discourses of girlhood/womanhood, where female subjectivity is constructed as powerful, confident and in control (Azzarito, 2010). However, besides these discursive resources, she also draws on her own embodied knowledge garnered from past successes, to ground her confidence and inform her ‘futuring’. As such, her attunement to the life-world is constituted by a sense of becoming, and she draws on past experiences as a resource for imagining a bright and promising future. Despite her high ambitions, Katri explains that she does not need to be perfect every day. Reflecting on the matriculation exams, she recalls: Everything just went very well. I didn’t notice being very stressed out. I had a study plan and if I didn’t have the energy to study some days, I didn’t stress out about that either. . . Also training went well. [And] when it went badly [I didn’t think], ‘oh no, now I must train very hard’. . . I could maintain a rational approach to training. When asked to elaborate on why and how she has been able to succeed, Katri cites possessing several time-related skills often promoted in contemporary dual-career discourses. She expresses being skillful in time ‘management’ as well as planning and goalsetting, seeking to demonstrate that she is in control of time, has time and also makes time. She continues: I understand that I can say no to some things. Sometimes I feel that my friends keep promising too many things and then they cancel because they notice that it’s too much. . . I have learned to manage my time and stick to my plans. 8 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 00(0) In many parts of her account, Katri’s orientation to her life projects seems almost mechanistic: she sticks to routines, stays rational in moments of disappointment, has a schedule for studying and training, and maintains her long-term dual-career goals. However, a vital element of her commitment to sport, to which she often refers, is the embodied sensation of ‘feeling good now’ and in-the-moment when she is swimming: ‘I think it is important to enjoy what you do’. She goes on to describe why she is drawn to swimming in particular: I think the best thing about swimming is when you get to train. Somehow it is just cool. . . Some other people like it when training is over and they’re like ‘wow, I’ve done something’. But for me, the best sensation is before a hard training session when you feel a bit anxious. And during the session, when you feel the lactic acid, but it is just, like, I have to keep going. There is something about that. Katri’s comments above resonate strongly with research by McNarry et al. (2020a, 2020b) that similarly demonstrates the ‘embracing’ and normalisation of sustained ‘hard training’ in performance swimming, as part of the ‘endurance work’ (Allen-Collinson et al., 2018; McNarry et al., 2020a) that characterises many sports requiring a level of endurance and tolerance of heavy training loads. Katri admits that there are some days when she is feeling fatigued, but then she reminds herself that ‘in the end, you are doing this for yourself’. Her ‘normal’ days are ‘good’ days when she goes to the swimming pool ‘for a couple of hours, to do your own thing’. Therefore, swimming is framed agentically as being part of her ‘own’ time, something she wants to do, and not what she has to do. Katri is among two of 10 female student-athletes involved in the longitudinal study, who sustained a dual-career throughout upper-secondary school and into higher education. Her story shows a selective and skillful engagement with the successes and failures of the past and embodied pleasures of the ‘now’ to inform her view of a bright and successful – if not necessarily perfect – future. Her long-term plan and sense of ‘becoming’ allow her to maintain a sense of harmony of the life-world (Jarvis, 2007) despite moments of disappointment and failure. Rather than merely chasing a remote dream of the future, however, she also stays grounded in the present, ‘owns’ her time, and finds immediate pleasure from her daily engagement with swimming. As we go on to consider next, Katri’s experiential realities stand in stark contrast to those of other young women who struggle to be perfect. Struggling to be perfect The second of our ideal types is represented through Jaana who was, at the time of the interview, pursuing university education and aiming to restart an athletic career in athletics that had been disrupted due to injuries and problems with her coach. She started her journey in upper-secondary sport school by moving away from home, and remembers the transition as a turning point when sport started increasingly to dominate her life-world: In secondary school, I had other hobbies, also non-sport hobbies, but then the choice came. I moved away from home and totally disengaged from all other hobbies. 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