(Re)constructing sport memory with women: From having ‘muscles on your muscles’ to ‘feeling pretty special’ and beyond in early Australian triathlon memory

Abstract

Contributions to Australian triathlon magazines and newsletters of the 1980s evoke competing images of the sport as macho and extreme, and organised and inclusive. Interpreting niche media texts as acts of social memory, this article aims to show that both themes in triathlon memory are discursively characterised by gendered and ageist athletic hierarchies. Positioning contemporary feminist histories by sportswomen as subjective acts that (re)construct networked sport memory with earlier sportswomen across time, this article adapts Frigga Haug’s notion of memory work in search of understanding of the disconnect between traditional notions of sport as immersive experience and the ways in which women subjectively construct themselves as triathletes. Drawing on feminist narrative and discourse analysis methodologies, it interrogates the ways in which many texts, as acts of social memory, contest the meaning of triathlon, including its gendered meaning, with cumulative impacts on triathlon memory and implications for triathlon as a sport.