Immanence, Transcendence, and Immersive Practices: Female Athletes in U.S. Neoliberalism

II. “The Non-Negotiable Needs of the Body”: Biological Time and Sport as Immersive Practice

Despite the emphasis on competitive models of sport perpetuated by the dominant sport institutions and media, a different understanding of sport is possible. The biological dimensions of sport experience, as many female athletes have found, can themselves be experienced quite differently from the negative significations that global capitalism and tech time would assign them. Looked at in a different way, the biological becomes something to be embraced rather than transcended or escaped. The position of women in sports is always contradictory, and I have up until this point only emphasized the negative sides of that contradiction. But as “For the Women’s Cross County Team” begins to show, it is evident there is another, more positive potentiality that emerges from the team’s physical training. Looking at the poem and the experience it describes from a slightly different angle, another picture emerges. This picture was there from the beginning but was backgrounded, since, as Mellor shows, the cultural logic of transcendence erases the biological: “the social relations underpinning current patterns of unsustainability” are those that place value on the transcendent/technological at the expense of the immanent/biological. While we experienced that erasure when we constructed our daily practice as a competition between each other leading to the “higher” goal of competing more effectively against opposing teams in meets, something else was happening simultaneously alongside our reckless quest for “perfection” in these terms.

Alongside that desire for transcendence, there is another experiential modality: “5-minute miles/Each mile and not feeling it,/All of us tight in a pack/And breathing one stroke.” In the image of the breathing pack, something other than the relentlessness of individual competition begins to come forward, namely, an embodied collective breathing, each individual woman transformed into something larger than herself, living and existing in that moment in a heightened physical state where activity is effortless, all bodies synchronized to the motion of the pack and handling “5 minute miles/Each mile” without “feeling it.” This is an experience variously represented as “being in the zone,” being outside of the usual sense of time (that is, tech time), or being connected to something larger. That this kind of effortless physical state of extraordinary achievement is gendered as masculine – “Taking the switchbacks/Like pumas, like male big-horn sheep” – says more about the ways achievement is traditionally gendered than anything intrinsic to the experience itself, which takes place outside the boundaries of tech time, more fully linked to the biological world of immanence and the ecological realities that give rise to it. The women’s cross-country team, rising together up the switchbacks of a remote desert trail, our bodies synchronized with each other as the shale and sand our feet fly on, marks a different kind of experience than that measured by the stopwatches and record books of tech time.

What this different kind of experience points to is a crucial doubleness that shapes the athletic experience. Occupying a space neither wholly co-opted nor entirely transformative, the female athlete oscillates between transcendence and immanence, tech time and biological time. If “someone has got to live in biological time,” Atalanta both does and does not live there. Her sporting practice makes her transcendent and immanent simultaneously. A sense of immanence, a reconnection to biological time experienced through physical activity, as outlined above, has been termed by sociologist Nigel Thrift as an “immersive practice.” “Immersive practices” are those that “constitute a ‘background’ within which nature is encountered as a means of gathering stillness, both inside and outside the body. A central component lies in the temporality of the practice.”¹ Sport formulated as an “immersive practice” takes a practitioner out of tech time and into biological time. The immersive is the alternative to the competitive model of sport, with its relentless focus on the bottom line of winning to the exclusion of the athlete’s health, a focus which in turn embodies the dominant neoliberal culture and its own relentless focus on economic growth to the exclusion of other factors such as public health and human welfare. Through her participation in an immersive practice – which is always, if you look for it, an aspect of the athletic experience – Atalanta knows she is immanent, but partakes of the transcendent signifiers neoliberalism offers even as she disavows or accepts them. The female athlete reconfigures the binary between transcendence and immanence, articulating a way to live in tech time and biological time simultaneously. If one shifts the lens away from a bottom-line focus on competition and the zero-sum game of winning, a different experiential model based around the idea of immersive practices begins to emerge within sporting practices that reconnect us with biological time (this is why “being in the zone” is also experienced as being “out of time”).

Empirical studies of the experiences of female athletes show that, regardless of gender inequalities on both material and representational levels, women experience their sports as immersive practices for which they will rearrange their lives to continue having. In a recent article on female surfers, Ceri Pritchard et al. report that “surfing, for many of the women we interviewed, is an integral part of their lives and many would change their life course in order to pursue it.”² Surfing, like other sports that allow direct connection to nature, is a particularly good example of immersive practice, but it is possible to experience this sense of sport anywhere. Robin Janiszeufski, a surfer and cancer survivor, describes just such an experience when she writes that “surfing removes the need to close my eyes and seek the voice inside. The face of the wave defines my being. I hear, see, smell, and taste the ocean. Through surfing, I experience a pure joy and higher-mindedness that has no substitute. Surfing has become the metaphor for how I move through life on land.”³ What Janiszeufski describes is clearly based on being part of something, experiencing the body as connected to rather than separate from the world around it.

1. Macnaghten, “Embodying the Environment,” 75. [↩]
2. Ceri Pritchard, Natalia Quacquarelli, and Christine Saunders, “Women in Surfing: Changing Equalities Over a Life Course,” The University of Liverpool Research Report Series, no. 4 (2004)  http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/undergraduate/fieldclasses/santacruz/SCRS2004/index_page.htm.  [↩]
3. Robin “Zeuf” Janiszeufski, “The Spirit of Rell,” in Girl in the Curl: A Century of Women in Surfing, ed. Andrea Gabbard (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2000), 69. [↩]