Abstract

Autoethnography has found purchase in the field of sport in ways that have been particularly useful for female athlete-researchers, offering an opportunity to make visible the overlooked experiences of pleasure and physicality that are conventionally treated as antithetical to femininity. However, it is also a contested method, and accusations of solipsism, self-indulgence and emotionality attach easily to it in profoundly gendered ways. Drawing on a diverse range of women’s autoethnographic writing on sport, this chapter explores the ways in which autoethnography aligns with wider feminist concerns, and addresses some of the many critiques of autoethnography and responses to those challenges. The chapter concludes that autoethnography remains a valuable intellectual and creative resource for the study of women and sport, enabling us to think and speak differently about women’s embodied experiences in a domain so normatively defined by masculinity.