Suchergebnisse

It has become something of a truism, that within various athletic subcultures pain and injury are regularly normalised as 'part of the game'. One clear consequence which flows from this empirical reality is that athletes often need medical care in various forms. Recent developments in the gendered structuring of sport means that sportswomen are increasingly centred within this process. Yet, there is a broad consensus from sportswomen and academics alike that access to medical support and the availability of associated resources in women's sport is inadequate. Based on interviews with 17 women located in the United Kingdom, we cast new light on how medical support and care appears to be structured across various women's amateur sports. Two key findings are highlighted, firstly, that the majority of medical support was via first aid kits, which is problematic in their inconsistent restocking, and the availability of someone trained to use them. And, secondly, that there was a DIY approach to medical care which we explore via a discussion of athlete-to-athlete 'team-doctoring' – wherein sportswomen provided medical advice, care and treatments to each other. Our analysis of these two findings shows how medical care might be inconsistent, compromised and otherwise poor in quality, especially when viewed through the lens of critical scholarship about the sociology of sports medicine. This has specific consequences for the sports women we spoke with, and wider implications for our understanding of amateur sportspeople generally.

This commentary sits within a context of growing cultural concern over brain damage that occurs in many of the Western world's most popular, profitable and prized sports. After laying out evidence demonstrating this point, we discuss the increasing inclusion of women within sports which involve regular and routinised brain injuries. We problematise this apparent 'progress' with the title of our commentary. In particular, rather than offering some simplified yes/no answer, we argue that in light of the five decades of social scientific scholarship documenting the various harms produced by performance impact sports, working towards gender equality in brain damage is a nonsensical outcome. So, while there is clear evidence from academic gender studies that progress has been made towards tackling issues of exclusion and various forms of discrimination against women and girls in performance sport spaces, there has not been concomitant progress made in tackling the ways bodies and brains are often broken down, damaged and sometimes destroyed during participation in such sports. We do not suggest that consenting adults should be prohibited from enjoying impact sports and our aim with this commentary is not driven by a paternalistic, patriarchal belief which reflects historical notions around sportswomen being the 'fairer' sex, nor that responses to sport-acquired brain injury should be sex- or gender-specific. Rather, we conclude by suggesting that the emerging science on sport-acquired brain injuries should serve as an important inflection point to those leaders, organisers, practitioners and scholars working in this area to reconsider how we imagine, promote and structure sport – for everyone.