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

Branchu, Charlotte

Abstract

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.

Citation

Branchu, C. (2023). Legitimacy and Respectability on the Skin: Bruises, Women’s Rugby and Situational Meaning. Body & Society, 29(4), 53-78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x231201941

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 14, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Oct 14, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-12
• Deposit Date: Feb 15, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 15, 2024
• Journal: Body & Society
• Print ISSN: 1357-034X
• Electronic ISSN: 1460-3632
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 29
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 53-78
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x231201941
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2256770