Becoming Rower: Male Embodiment and Intimacy in an Inner West Rowing Club

Abstract

While sociological analyses of masculine sporting cultures have provided us with adept explorations of discursive practices in the field, I suggest that there are deeper modalities of communication in which athlete’s intentions are expressed and understood through inter-corporeal and non-cognitive processes. This transdisciplinary thesis supplements sociological analysis with a participant observational approach to explore both verbal and corporeal communication between men within the sport of rowing. I conduct ethnographic fieldwork at Kenswick, a rowing club located within Sydney’s inner suburbs that was first established in 1879. Following its reincarnation after a fire in the late 1990’s, the club developed a new membership demographic that now reflects that of inner Sydney more broadly. Close to half of the club’s members are gay-identifying with varying degrees of sexual openness relating to the various and overlapping social and sporting circuits operating within the club. Over four months I was embedded within the elite competitive men’s rowing squad across which time I observed that the combination of open and ambiguous sexual orientations resulted in tacit but strict protocols on and off the water. In line with Latour's argument that the social researcher should ‘follow’ (2005: 69) the interplay between human and non-human actants, I attended to the various machines engaged in the different zones of training both on and off the water. Using a combination of auto-ethnographic reflection and new materialist studies I explore how the material actants engaged in the sport of rowing engender varying inter-corporeal collaborations between men. As a result, I argue that masculine intimacy, discomfort and power must be understood on a corporeal level as well as the discursive level, with which we normally associate gender politics.