SPORTSWOMEN’S CONSTRUCTIONS OF IDENTITY AND LEARNING THROUGH PERSONAL NARRATIVES: A POSTSTRUCTURAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS FOR CREATING HISTORY AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Open Access
- Author:
- Greenawalt, Anne
- Graduate Program:
- Adult Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Education
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 28, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Elizabeth Jean Tisdell, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Elizabeth Jean Tisdell, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Robin Redmon Wright, Committee Member
Mary Napoli, Committee Member
Charles David Kupfer, Outside Member - Keywords:
- sportswomen
identity
adult learning
adult education
narrative learning theory
feminist theory
autoethnography
feminist critical discourse analysis - Abstract:
- The purpose of this qualitative study was to gather and analyze the discourse of the stories, images, and artifacts that sportswomen used to narrate their athletic careers, bodies and lives to determine the discourse sportswomen use when discussing themselves. The study is grounded in two theoretical frameworks: poststructural feminist theory and narrative adult learning theory. Poststructural feminism is a marriage of poststructuralism and feminist theory to discuss discourse, language, meaning making, power, and knowledge in terms of how it can end women’s oppression. Narrative adult learning theory assumes that adults are able to narrate their experiences and/or their identities in order to interpret their stories and make sense of them. The study’s design combines narrative autoethnography to gather and present data and feminist critical discourse analysis to analyze the collected data. Data collection consisted of two sets of interactive interviews, which are collaborative efforts between the researcher and participants that discuss a particular topic—in this case competitive athletic careers, lives, and bodies. Data analysis revealed three themes of findings related to the participants’ discourse when discussing their athletic careers. First, the study found that the participants only moderately assimilated and/or subverted the dominant discourse related to sports participation or neither assimilated nor subverted it. Second, all participants used alternative narratives, which neither reproduced the dominant discourse nor deliberately subverted it. The alternative narrative most common among the participants was engaging in a community of athletes. In addition, most athletes used a humble discourse, which was not mentioned in any of the current literature on sportswomen. The study concluded with a discussion of the findings in light of poststructural feminist theory and narrative adult learning as they relate to identity development.