Assemblage Thinking as Attunement to Race,Gender,and Sexuality in Youth Sport Research

Youth sport is defined as an organised and most often adult supervised activity where youth practice/play in different leagues, clubs, or associations operating at varying levels (e.g., local, regional, state, provincial). Youth sport participation occurs on a shifting continuum of competitiveness (i.e., recreational, developmental, elite) and usually culminates in varying forms of end-of-season tournaments or championships. According to Dorsch et al. (2022), the youth sport system encompasses many individuals (i.e., parents, siblings, peers, coaches, referees, administrators) and contextual influences that impact youth's experiences of and outcomes derived from participation. To this day, in most social circles, youth sport remains positioned as a movement-based practice with inherent virtues that can promote personal and collective wellbeing (Coakley, 2021; Kwauk, 2022). Although there is abundant literature on the benefits of youth sport participation (e.g., Anderson-Butcher, 2019; Holt et al., 2017), evidence continues to accrue that youth sport may not be reaching its declared ideals due to asymmetric distributions of power woven into its structure (Whitley et al., 2021). Coakley (2021) has long denounced the great sport myth (i.e., sport's purported goodness) as misbehaviour and maltreatment continue to propagate. Youth sport thus operates as an increasingly professionalised practice entrenched in neoliberal ideals privileging competitive reward structures. It also acts as an archetype of meritocracy and social order along defined racial and gender lines. Although youth sport is prefaced as accessible, it most often affords the privileged open entry while forcing others to constantly struggle against naturalised systems of advantage (Barnes & Adams, 2021). Scholars have discussed how youth sport perpetuates social controls designed to help participants develop economically productive skills needed to secure stable employment (Ronkainen et al., 2021). This instrumental approach reinforces neoliberal logics prioritising the shaping of youth, with little efforts made to change the very structures known to perpetuate long-standing inequalities. Youth sport thus inculcates youth to conform to normative practices through a steady regimen of resilience and self-discipline needed to “make it” in a competitive world (Kwauk, 2022).

As Whitley et al. (2021) noted, inequalities are pervasive in youth sport and have grown since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, intensifying calls for researchers to adopt alternative lenses to confront increasing complexities related to race, gender, and sexuality. Grove and Pugh (2015) stated how socialisation forges truths that objectify through artificial binaries, enframing identities and disciplining bodies. Youth sport is not immune to such objectification and efforts are needed to unsettle binarised identities through transformative theoretical manoeuvring that challenges how race, gender, and sexuality are studied in youth sport research. Alternative modes of thinking should be allowed to take flight and enable researchers to inquire in areas diverging from conventional humanist onto-epistemologies. Given our current anthropogenic climate change, racial injustice, and gender inequality, we should make efforts to conduct research that recognises the complex forces shaping embodied movement (Fullagar, 2020). Assemblage thinking can help youth sport researchers conceive of race, gender, and sexuality as performative doings, paving the way for envisaging a different kind of youth sport experience.

Purpose

The purpose of the paper is to deploy assemblage thinking as attunement to race, gender, and sexuality in youth sport research. Attunement refers to letting one's internal state resonate with ways of knowing that decentre the subject and recognise shared human/nonhuman agency. Assemblage thinking is positioned as offering a distinct viewpoint enabling researchers to “unpick the structures, dynamics and ruptures that ultimately make up the social” (Dewsbury, 2012, p. 149). The paper is organised in three sections. First, assemblage thinking is defined for what it is and what it can do. Second, assemblage thinking is deployed to attune to race, gender, and sexuality. Third, key considerations are offered by situating youth sport along the forces of academia and capitalism. It should be noted that the arguments put forth and the examples provided are targeted at youth sport researchers, yet most of the claims made for attuning to race, gender, and sexuality from the lens of assemblage thinking are also highly relevant to sport researchers working with populations other than youth.

Positionality

The paper coalesces ideas on assemblage thinking from the sport sciences and other fields, bringing together a myriad of notions in conversation with one another. As facilitator of this conversation, I identify as a white man and university professor. I recognise the ethical requirements of how I must constantly attend to the angle of vision I inhabit in my deployment of assemblage thinking and understand how my positionality comes with historical entitlements (Kinkaid, 2020a). I acknowledge how my early socialisation exposed me to master narratives and cultural scripts that largely hid the privileging dynamics of whiteness (Hazelbaker et al., 2022). I recognise how whiteness has an ongoing history of orienting bodies, which directly influences the theoretical space I can take up and what I can accomplish conceptually in terms of attuning to race, gender, and sexuality (Ahmed, 2021). I also understand how assemblage thinking is shaped by colonisation (McLeod & Fullagar, 2021) and that I espouse a minoritarian view of race, gender, and sexuality from a majoritarian position. Consistent with the work of Rosiek et al. (2020), I apprehend how Indigenous studies deploy agent ontologies with considerable explanatory power in areas where assemblage thinking and other new materialist and posthumanist theories have identified limitations. Thus, I must constantly reflect on how my embodied/emplaced experiences (or lack thereof) animate and restrict my sense-making efforts.

I also recognise the ontological tension of situating my “self” in an identarian position in a paper in which I propose a move away from fixed identities. I nonetheless do so given that assemblage ideals of becoming and transformation have historically been unevenly distributed (Kinkaid, 2020b). As Braidotti (1996) stated, many oppressed groups have long fought and continue to fight to gain symbolic presence they may not wish to relinquish in the ethos of assemblage thinking that eschews identities. I must therefore acknowledge how my identarian position affords me the privileges to engage in philosophical/theoretical wanderings. In sum, I recognise my privileged position and accept the responsibility to situate with critical capacity assemblage thinking in attuning to race, gender, and sexuality. This responsibility is enacted with genuine efforts to deploy assemblage thinking as a transversal relational ethics (Braidotti, 2020).

What Assemblage Thinking Is

The concept of assemblage was initially theorised by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and has since been deployed by scholars in a variety of fields, some of which adhere to the original principles (e.g., Buchanan, 2021) while others diverge in somewhat different directions (e.g., Delanda, 2016). In the present paper, assemblage thinking is situated within Deleuze and Guattari's original formulation of agencement, the French to English translation of assemblage that denotes “to piece together” (Nail, 2017). To build arguments for assemblage thinking, the paper pieces together ideas from the sport sciences (e.g., Markula, 2019), human geography (e.g., Kinkaid, 2020a; Saldanha, 2012), critical feminism (Puar, 2012), sociology (e.g., Fox & Alldred, 2013), and policy studies (e.g., Savage, 2020) that have deployed the concept of assemblage in various manners to situate race, gender, and sexuality beyond conventional humanist positionings. Given the eclectic origins of these ideas, it should be noted that assemblage thinking is utilised as an umbrella concept casting a wide lens on how bodies assemble in ongoing repatternings and how life comes into existence through relations. Three key tenets of assemblage thinking are explained (i.e., relationality, immanence, materiality), building a rationale for an ontological shift in youth sport research.

What Assemblage Thinking Can Do

Due to its distinct deployment of relationality, immanence, and materiality, assemblage thinking offers researchers a lens for rethinking what youth sport can become beyond its humanist boundaries. Assemblage thinking provides a lexicon enabling researchers to articulate youth sport as a material-semiotic arrangement in ongoing composition, breaking from network/system logics focused on essence and identities (Anderson et al., 2012; Dewsbury, 2012). The engineering of fixed identities circumscribes what can actualise from youth sport research, propagating a limited imaginary depotentialising change. Grosz et al. (2017) urged researchers to create spaces where novel thinking can arise and invent new collective life.

Assemblage thinking can contribute to the study of race, gender, and sexuality in youth sport by moving from humanist notions of self-contained subjects with fixed identities to identities being performatively produced by discontinuous and non-totalised selves (Benozzo et al., 2019). The intersectional identarian approach is thus questioned, whereby “intersectionality as an intellectual rubric and a tool for political intervention must be supplemented – if not complicated and reconceptualized – by a notion of assemblage” (Puar, 2012, p. 50). According to Grosz (1994b), intersectional subject positionings reinforce notions of static identity and do not account for the relational, immanent, and material configurations of race, gender, and sexuality. Hence, the retrospective ordering of intersectional identities creates problematic investments in the subject as the continued preferred site for political intervention (Puar, 2012). Ultimately, the multiplying categorisations of intersectional identarian politics have led to the “exhaustion of the subject through ever-more-intricate social positioning, [which] is thus one justification offered for a move to assemblage thinking” (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2017, p. 1524). In efforts to address identity politics from an alternate angle, assemblage thinking allows identities to be articulated not as stable properties but as performative doings, providing a lens for how “molecular forces continually upset the topological localizability of a body” (Puar, 2012, p. 62).

By steering away from subjects with stable intersecting identities and instead situating the production of identities as an event-ness (Puar, 2012), researchers can better attune to how actants assemble in youth sport in unequal formations privileging some while marginalising others (Hayhurst et al., 2021a). By escaping binarised corporalities (Grosz, 1994a), assemblage thinking is emancipatory in the sense that it “opens possibilities to invent new ways of relating to the other that do not reduce the other to a form that can be assimilated” (Grove & Pugh, 2015, p. 2). Letting go of binaries enables actants to be assessed on the links they establish, shifting attention from what actants are to what actants do. Such a shift can produce critical accounts of race, gender, and sexuality that attune to agency as a distributive force inducing changes not solely under the purview of human intentionality (Bennett, 2005). Assemblage thinking can thus be mobilised to situate how actants within youth sport assemblages become racialised, gendered, and sexualised, producing different health outcomes for different participants (Kinkaid, 2020a). By being oriented toward inducing difference in kind, not just in degree, assemblage thinking enables youth sport researchers to understand how “the world is now characterised by flows, connections and becomings whose functioning logic is more about folds than structures, more complex than linear, more recursive than dialectical, more emergent than totalising” (Dewsbury, 2012, p. 149). Assemblage thinking thus instigates critically informed prospects for becoming-otherwise by complexifying the field of reality in youth sport research (Grove & Pugh, 2015).

Assemblage Thinking and Race in Youth Sport Research

Humanist considerations of race are situated as discursively practiced by privileged or othered subjects and anchored in identity politics, fixed categorisations, and essentialising discourses (Saldanha, 2006). Alternatively, assemblage thinking situates race ontologically as an emergent performative technology of differentiation ((Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2017; Pugh & Grove, 2017). Where we once saw essence in fixed beings, we should now see performance in temporary becomings, shifting attention in youth sport research from questions of being (i.e., what is race?) to questions of doing (i.e., what does race do?). Given that race “is best captured by the connective, intense, spatiality of an assemblage” (Swanton, 2010, p. 460), assemblage thinking can be deployed to situate race as a performance constantly recomposing youth sport.

In the case of race, this performative doing is conceptualised as racialising assemblages, situated as fluid patterns of meanings and practices producing continuously evolving social orders (Kinkaid, 2020a). Racialising assemblages allow researchers to examine “how fuzzy racial summaries distributed across a whole host of bodies, objects, and spaces become the basis for rapid practices of perception, judgment, and action” (Swanton, 2010, p. 460). Of foremost importance in understanding racialising assemblages is that no body has a race, but that bodies become racialised through racially charged affects producing phenomena that have, over the course of history, reinforced arbitrary racial divisions and upheld the uneven differentiation of bodies (Kinkaid, 2020a). Saldanha (2006, p. 19) stated that the actants within racialising assemblages are ever-changing, but can include DNA, phenotype, discursive practices, clothes, and food, to name a few. Race is thus an unrelenting performative doing mediating encounters in racialising assemblages, inducing racial dispositions (e.g., suspicions, worries, avoidances) and inciting racial actions (e.g., profanities, exclusions, rumours) that stir visceral fears and uphold regimes of dominance (Swanton, 2010). Youth sport assemblages are replete of such dispositions and actions that vilify bodies through a racially charged visual economy. For instance, the banning of head coverings in youth sport (Elassar, 2020) occurs through material-semiotic flows of racialising assemblages, wherein bans are affectively performed through the meshing of colour, culture, rules, athletes, race, religion, power, uniforms, and faith.

In racialising assemblages, racial affects discipline bodies and enact asymmetrical distributions of privilege that are the resultant of what Saldanha (2006) called the stickiness and viscosity of race, a propensity to capture bodies and induce thickenings that segregate. The viscosity of race suppresses mobility, disadvantaging bodies shackled in continuous cycles of oppression all the while advantaging bodies comfortably positioned in havens of privilege. For example, Swanton (2010) argued how criminality often sticks to coloured bodies while Saldanha (2006, p. 18) stated how whiteness “is about the sticky connections between property, privilege, and a paler skin”. These racial edicts coagulate on bodies, stereotyping dispositions and actions. Due to the asymmetrical distribution of the stickiness/viscosity of race (i.e., more fluid in some bodies, more fixing in others), assemblage thinking offers a critical lens for grasping why some bodies are more mobile than others (Kinkaid, 2020a). In youth sport, researchers can deploy assemblage thinking to apprehend how racial inequality sticks to some bodies and how would-be transformations are often diffused by those in power, further cementing their dominance.

Despite its stickiness and historical disciplining, if race is a performative doing, then it can be leveraged to reimagine subjectification (Kinkaid, 2020a). In assemblage thinking, race is a provisional territory that can be reassembled as a performative doing which does not need to be vilified. Instead, it can multiply from the virtual in innumerable messy imaginings, a thousand tiny races becoming beyond current taxonomies through affects that unfix sticky identities. These affects can produce an open-endedness for bodies to relate in manners that break from the antagonising powers of racism (Lim, 2010). As Saldanha (2006, p. 21) explained:

Race should not be eliminated, but proliferated, its many energies directed at multiplying racial differences so as to render them joyfully cacophonic … What is needed is an affirmation of race's creativity and virtuality: what race can be. Race need not be about order and oppression, it can be wild, far-from-equilibrium, liberatory … race exists in its true mode when it is no longer stifled by racism.

Assemblage Thinking, Gender, and Sexuality in Youth Sport Research

Youth sport has long been and continues to be enframed in essentialising binaries that shape participants experiences from an early age (Messner, 2011). Youth sport binaries exclude nonconforming youth who have long been subjected to violence/erasure, their very existence deemed a threat to established categories (e.g., see the case of British Triathlon; Reuters, 2022). To uphold the legitimacy of gender/sexuality divides, devices of bodily surveillance/control help maintain the normative structures of youth sport. Colonial relics and contemporary forces each enact upon youth sport a mooring viscosity that aggregates bodies into strict categories (Fullagar, 2020). An ontological reassessment is needed, given that the social categories of youth sport (i.e., boys’ teams, girls’ teams) tame bodies into subordination through enduring relations of dominance. Hence, efforts of transformative theoretical manoeuvring are needed from researchers to attune to the performative doings of gender/sexuality in youth sport.

Assemblage thinking invokes from the virtual notions of how “there might be a multiplicity of gendered and sexual becomings emergent in various locations, increasingly unbounded from the categorical specificity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and/or sexuality and gender itself” (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2017, p. 1526). Pape (2021), in examining biological variables in animal research, debunked notions of universal male/female phenotypes and instead pointed to the indeterminate multiplicity of gender and sexuality. The context-dependent character of what we call biology generates situational actualisations of gender and sexuality that fundamentally cannot “simply reside perpetually in a cell” (Pape, 2021, p. 287).

In assemblage thinking, gender and sexuality have no essence, eliminating the need for the naturalising narratives and fixed categories permeating youth sport. Rather, gender and sexuality are entangled as performative doings that are elusive in their multiplying enactments. Gender and sexuality are indeterminate embodied variations; they cannot fit neatly in biological classifications because biology “is always already dynamically entangled with social processes” (Pape, 2021, p. 278). Gender and sexuality as performative doings occur through constant changes in the event-ness of identity (Puar, 2012). By transcending humanist identities, assemblage thinking can be deployed to actualise from the virtual a thousand tiny genders and sexualities proliferating unboundedly in their always provisional enactment (Puar, 2015). In moving past fixed identities and their territorialising effects (e.g., bisexuality as an internalisation of binarised sexuality; Grosz, 1994a), affective energies can roam more freely (Puar, 2015). In youth sport assemblages, youth are positioned as lively actants of this performative doing as they experience ever-evolving performances of gender and sexuality. For youth sport researchers, assemblage thinking can induce lines of flight enabling portrayals of youth sport as open-ended and ever-changing rather than categorical and static, thereby producing deterritorialisations of gender and sexuality that can inspire more inclusive practices for all youth sport participants.

Nevertheless, despite its theoretically unbounded potential, it should be noted that sexuality in sport remains highly territorialised due to the continued privileging of the human body as the primary site of sexuality (Fox & Alldred, 2013). This interioristic viewpoint inhibits sexuality's capacity for nomadic wanderings and narrows it to often derogatory depictions. For instance, sexuality in sport most often manifests itself as genitally focused, with sporting bodies and their body parts fetishised. Participants in many sports (e.g., women's beach volleyball, women's beach handball) are forced to wear revealing attire that pornify bodies in the name of financial profit (Gross, 2021). Assemblage thinking can help researchers contest normative territorialised renderings of sexuality in sport and instead produce new becomings enabling sporting bodies to move with greater dignity. Sexuality is everywhere and sexual agency should be decentred from the self-contained genitalised subject and instead be seen as an affective flow producing sexual capacities in a diversity of bodies (Fox & Alldred, 2013). Assemblage thinking moves beyond the subordinating chokehold of identity, instead situating gender and sexuality as performative doings that are rhizomatically dispersed across space and time (Grosz, 1994a).

Assemblage thinking can also be deployed to grasp how sporting bodies are entangled with material forces exuding affects on the performative doings of gender and sexuality in/out of youth sport. As Hayhurst et al. (2021b, p. 147) stated, “there are complex and messy relationships between sport and development, colonialism, gender equality, and environmental sustainability”. For example, while studying a sport for development programme for young Nicaraguan women, Hayhurst et al. (2021b) showed how lengthy rain seasons created landslides that damaged roads, keeping young women at home, away from sport, and instead engaging in domestic labour and enduring domestic violence. Assemblage thinking can help researchers appreciate the material-semiotic meshwork that precipitates climate change, invokes sport (non)participation, and ultimately shapes gender inequalities (Kinkaid, 2020a). Youth sport is not immune to the violences of climate change and youth sport researchers should consider how environmental degradation can essentialise gender roles and exacerbate gendered divisions of labour (Hayhurst et al., 2021b). It is crucial to recognise that gender and sexuality are intertwined with youth sport participants’ racialised experiences and together impact perceptions/treatments of youth in sport informed by histories of asymmetrical power distribution (Saldanha, 2011).

Implications for Youth Sport Research

Participation in society in contemporary times occurs within the constitutive powers of capitalism that ceaselessly produce inequality and oppression (Saldanha, 2015). If researchers are to address youth sport's binaries and normative practices, then new lenses with which to research youth sport should be actualised. Youth sport researchers should make efforts to reflect on their shared responsibility to produce scholarship that creates new horizons for what youth sport can do, differently. As Bennett (2005) stated, assemblage thinking can help generate in researchers an awareness that responsibility lies not in autonomous subjects but rather in the assemblages we find ourselves participating. Thus, researchers who attune to notions of shared agency are best positioned to deploy relational forms of care and have an increased awareness of how development and wellbeing assemble (Gibson et al., 2021). Alternative reframings beyond interioristic psychological approaches are vital, where development and wellbeing are seen as more than just measurable internal attributes housed in subjects. Assemblage thinking can help situate how development and wellbeing are mediated by more-than-human forces that researchers can attune to through performative participation.

Concluding Thoughts

In the present paper, assemblage thinking was deployed to attune to race, gender, and sexuality in youth sport research. Although assemblage thinking offers a lens through which youth sport researchers can eschew boundaries, part with identities, and decentre the subject, we should remain mindful of the biopolitics that have long negated symbolic presence to groups historically prevented from securing emancipatory positions (Braidotti, 1996; Fox & Alldred, 2013). Hence, critical deployments of assemblage thinking are required that attend to its provincial (i.e., founded in regional Eurocentric concerns) and pluriversal (i.e., denoting many co-existing lifeworlds) situatedness (Zembylas, 2018). Seeing assemblage thinking as provincial allows for varied perspectives to be recognised in continued efforts to decolonise thinking in academia. Youth sport researchers should account for how humanist identarian categories remain in the lifeworld of most, yet can be reassessed through assemblage thinking so that one day, race, gender, and sexuality may be set free from racism, genderism, and sexism (Saldanha, 2006).

In sum, readers should treat the present paper as an incomplete experiment intended to illuminate the affects actualising race, gender, and sexuality as performative doings in youth sport assemblages. Although focus was on race, gender, and sexuality, future work is needed to situate how disability, class, religion, and other actants produce privileging/oppressing affects in youth sport assemblages. Assemblage thinking was modestly deployed in hopes that a particular focus on how things assemble can produce fertile ontological alternatives to more territorialised and overworked modes of thinking in youth sport research (Chu & Evans, 2021). The aim is to instigate lines of flight creating more liveable youth sport spaces for all through humility and cooperation (Gibson et al., 2021). As Braidotti (2020, p. 466) optimistically proclaimed, “this is a time to organize, not to a[nta]gonize, we must co-construct different platforms of becoming”.