Legitimacy and Respectability on the Skin: Bruises, Women’s Rugby and Situational Meaning

Branchu, Charlotte ORCID: 0000-0003-1514-3605 (2023) Legitimacy and Respectability on the Skin: Bruises, Women’s Rugby and Situational Meaning. Body & Society, 29 (4). pp. 53-78.

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Abstract

<jats:p> Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores amateur rugby women’s reflexive negotiation of the bruises they earn as a result of the physicality of the game. On one hand, participants take pride in body marks that confirm their athletic strength and rugby identity and which grants them respect and belonging. On the other hand, these body marks can be anchors of stigma, signalling women’s rugby bodies as ‘deviant’ to non-initiated audiences. The article unpacks this tension between bruises as empowering or disempowering artefacts by demonstrating the situational and interactional nature of gendered dispositions and expectations. I show that the moral and symbolic order of entrenched gendered expectations is perpetuated in the flesh, but that it must be understood as being produced and reproduced in situ through intercorporeal processes. Through the analysis of bruises, I argue that to study bodies is to study (social) space. </jats:p>

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Law and Social Justice
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	17 Aug 2023 08:12
Last Modified:	11 Dec 2023 03:05
DOI:	10.1177/1357034x231201941
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3172224