Sport, Spinal Cord Injury, Embodied Masculinities, and the Dilemmas of Narrative Identity

By A. Sparkes, Brett W. Smith. 2002

245 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article focuses on the narrative identity dilemmas of four men who have experienced spinal cord injury (SCI) through playing rugby football union and now define themselves as disabled. The biographical data illustrate how body-self relationships moved from an absent presence in the lives of these men to something that was other, problematic, and alien. This transformation instigated anxieties concerning the combined loss of specific masculine and athletic identities that were formerly at the apex of the participants' identity hierarchy. In such circumstances, the desire for a restored self is highlighted, as are the limited narrative resources that frame this coping strategy. Suggestions for how this situation might be changed are then offered.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Gender Studies, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/845df6bb9134c4a23ab4c89454cc546b7c14c533

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Gender Studies

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

Coaching as caring (the smiling gallery): accessing hidden knowledge (2009, background): “Although Sugrue’s (1997) point about the ambiguity of such idealistic sentiments in the real-world is well taken, perhaps the challenge facing teachers, coaches and researchers is to reflect on and consider which actions create the circumstance and context for such relationships to flourish, thus en”
Men, sport, spinal cord injury and the construction of coherence: narrative practice in action (2002, methodology): “…body–self relationships through sport and physical activity (e.g. Smith, 1999; Sparkes, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002; Sparkes and Silvennoinen, 1999; Sparkes and Smith, 1999, 2002), we have been eliciting the life stories of men who have experienced SCI from playing this sport and now define…”
Sporting Spinal Cord Injuries, Social Relations, and Rehabilitation Narratives: An Ethnographic Creative Non-Fiction of Becoming Disabled Through Sport (2013, background): “…same topic (i.e. sporting spinal injury) through multiple forms of analysis and forms of representation to produce a series of related texts that build on each other to produce a highly complex picture of the topic (see e.g., Smith, 2013; Smith & Sparkes, 2005, 2008; Sparkes & Smith, 2002, 2003).”
Slim Bodies, Eating Disorders and the Coach-Athlete Relationship (2005, background): “By providing athletes with the confidence, security and space to ‘craft the people they can be’ coaches can help them to overcome their epiphanies and their dysfunctional athletic identities (Sparkes and Smith, 2002: 277).”
A meta-study of athletic identity research in sport psychology: Current status and future directions (2016, background): “Early studies focused on understanding how athletes’ identity narratives were disrupted and re-storied in illness, injury, or athletic retirement (Gearing, 1999; Sparkes & Smith, 2002; Sparkes, 1998).”