Abstract

This thesis questions how bodies in movement might be written into academic scholarship in a more vital and thought-provoking way. Taking as its central figure the swaggering midlife female trick skater and focusing in on dynamics characterising the public recreational ice skating scene at Montréal's Atrium le 1000 , it draws on informal conversations conducted with skaters to create writing that skates, and develop an understanding of where communicating (through language) and skating (as and beyond writing) intersect. Adopting a visceral and sentient approach to researching, analysing and writing up the body, this thesis challenges the paradoxical absence of 'the corporeal' in the scholarly corpus, and embraces a researcher positioning which, while investigating the felt intensities of passion and pleasure, makes no apologies for its own excessiveness. Informed by poststructuralist thinking around affect and by feminist explorations of the gendered body, this thesis points to how the introduction of a truly 'alternative' sporting body into a 'disorganised' sporting environment can significantly impact how moments of self-actualisation as realised through participating in an activity like skating unfold, and how the communicatory relationships that come of joining the rink's communal flow materialise and evolve. In drawing attention to the liberatory potential opened up by this new conception of 'alternative,' this thesis raises our awareness both of the limitations inherent in those scholarly approaches that try to 'capture' moving bodies and motile activities within meaning and representation, and in those sporting and communicatory regimes that seek to 'pin down' aging female bodies.