The Dis/appearing Sporting Body: The Complex Embodiment of Disabled Athletes

Journal article

Powis, B., Brighton, J. and Townsend, R. 2025. The Dis/appearing Sporting Body: The Complex Embodiment of Disabled Athletes. Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385251325452

Publication dates
Authors	Powis, B., Brighton, J. and Townsend, R.
Abstract	This article critically explores how disability appears and disappears in high-performance sporting environments. Drawing upon symbolic interactionism and embodiment theory, we specifically focus upon disabled athletes’ lived experiences of competing in a pan-disability setting and interrogate the interplay between corporeality and social interaction in the materialising of ability, disability and impairment. In this study, 22 (21 male and one female) disabled athletes participated in online semi-structured interviews. The sample was purposively selected from athletes who had been drafted for the Disability Premier League (DPL), a unique pan-disability, draft-based franchise cricket tournament. This article establishes the DPL as a site of sociological importance – a neo-liberal, ableist environment that pushes the boundaries of what a disabled athlete and the disabled body should be. Our wide-ranging findings demonstrate the complex and interactional ways in which the disabled body dis/appears in sporting spaces and the significant embodied repercussions of this process.
Keywords	Cricket; Disability; Disability sport; Embodiment; Impairment; Sport; Sociology; Symbolic interactionism
Year	2025
Journal	Sociology
Publisher	SAGE Publications
ISSN	0038-0385
	1469-8684
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)	https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385251325452
Official URL	https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380385251325452
Online	27 Mar 2025
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Deposited	27 Mar 2025
Accepted author manuscript	File Access Level Restricted
Publisher's version	powis-et-al-2025-the-dis-appearing-sporting-body-the-complex-embodiment-of-disabled-athletes.pdf License CC BY 4.0 File Access Level Open
Output status	Published
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