Human Bodies in Motion: The Performative Intra-Actions of Materialization

Abstract

The human body in motion is both a material body and a body inscribed with sociocultural meanings. The new materialist premise of examining phenomena, such as bodies in motion, as hybrids of matter and meaning now offers a pathway to seamlessly bring nature and culture together in a more unified research agenda. Barad’s agentic realism, particularly, presents a promising option to analyze physically active bodies as socio-material practices through both natural science and social constructivist insights. This, however, requires rethinking the nature of natural and social scientific research to more fully comprehend the complexity of physical activity. To illustrate what such research might look like, I first present Barad’s critiques of realist science and social constructivist representationalism to arrive at their suggestion of meeting the universe halfway, performatively, through a relational ontology of the production of material bodies. I conclude with my attempt to think with Barad’s philosophical framework to consider how researchers of the moving human body may meet “halfway” to examine the materiality and mattering of the physically active body.

Following the turn to new materialism, feminist researchers studying exercise and sport have also embraced the possibility to understand, holistically, the physical mattering of these bodies in the world. The new materialist premise of examining phenomena as hybrids of matter and meaning has now offered another promising pathway to advance feminist politics of social change. Some of these researchers take inspiration from Karen Barad’s (2007) proposition for a philosophical framework to understand “the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices” (p. 26). To my reading, this pertains rethinking the nature of natural and social scientific research practices to theorize the natural and social together. Considering natural and social scientific findings in relation to each other assists in more fully comprehending the complexity of the world of physical activity. As Barad (2014) is quick to point out, such an analysis does not mean collapsing the material and the mattering of the body together, but rather to comprehend realism (of science) and social constructivism (of social science) without contradiction—“cutting them together, apart” (p. 176). With this famous statement, Barad provokes me to ask: How is this to be done in feminist research of physical activity? How can I engage with Barad’s work to develop ethical engagement to my feminist work on women’s physical activity?

To answer these questions, I attempt to use Barad’s diffractive methodology to first offer insights from Baradian feminist analyses of the physically active body to look for further differences that may matter (Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012) when researching the mattering of the physically active body. Finally, I attempt to build research that, as Barad (2014) suggests, meets the universe halfway, performatively, through a relational ontology of agentic realism, to understand the production of material, physically active bodies in contemporary society. As a result, I hope that my detailed diffractive reading brings new innovative insights to consider how natural and social scientists may meet “halfway” to examine the materiality and mattering of the physically active body.

Literature Review: Barad and the Physically Active Body

New materialisms are relatively new approaches to studying physical culture (Markula, 2019; Newman et al., 2020). While not unified by a singular theoretical onto-epistemology, Newman et al. (2020) argue that new materialisms have potential “to explicate articulations of the physical (material, physics) and the cultural (political, systems of meaning)” of physical culture (p. 7). In this context, Barad’s work appears to offer a lucrative frame for an analysis of the materiality of physically active bodies. There is, indeed, an emerging body of feminist research (e.g., Baxter, 2020; Brice et al., 2021; Clark, 2020; Fullagar, 2020; Thorpe et al., 2022) applying Barad’s work to expand the previous feminist research on embodiment as a central aspect of empowerment. In this section, I consider their insights through what Barad (in Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012) characterizes as a “deconstructive practice” to read for possible “constitutive exclusions of those ideas we cannot do without” (p. 48). I offer this reading in a series of “inventive provocations”—respectful engagements—to further think with Barad (in Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012), not to dismiss the current feminist research on physical activity. As a result, I hope to suggest additional creative and innovative engagement with Barad’s work. Although a detailed review of the feminist Baradian works on physically active bodies is not possible here, they share several common themes: an addition of objects to the social analysis of meaning making; moving beyond representationalism; using insights from biology, psychology, and sociology; and employing multiple theoretical perspectives and alternative (Deleuzian) inspired social science methodologies. I use these provocations for my continued reading with Barad.

Provocation 1: Inseparability of Objects and Bodies: Entangled Intra-Actions

Baradian engagements with physical activity have inspired feminist researchers to consider how objects become active agents in relation to physically active femininity. They consider the inseparability of objects and physically active subjects to further assign bodies as transformative bodies (Baxter, 2020; Brice et al., 2021; Clark, 2020). This “entangled feminism,” they point out, can bring the material body to the center of feminist inquiry (Baxter, 2020). Using qualitative methods (ethnography, participant observation; Baxter, 2020; Clark, 2020) and innovative analyses (“cutting-together-apart” images collected during the research; Brice et al., 2021), they illustrate how material objects—boxing gloves, ballet shoes, and sport bras—entangle: they turn constitutive active agents in the construction of physically active femininity through intra-action of material and meaning. With these feminist physical activity scholars, I am provoked to think of Barad’s (2003) famous lamentation that “Every ‘thing’—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation” (p. 801) that they find a limiting way of understanding what matters in the world. These qualitative projects, that embrace the objects as active agents constructing normative femininity or alternatively, resisting it, are necessarily embedded in language. Is there a way for qualitative, feminist social science researchers to move beyond language and cultural representation? What further difference may Barad’s agential realism add to qualitative social science analysis?

Provocation 2: Moving Beyond Representationalism

As an answer to moving beyond language, the Baradian feminist researchers of physical activity openly consider shifting away from representationalism. Instead of representationalist knowledge about women, Fullagar (2020) is concerned with how embodied matter troubles gendered practices of othering. Baxter (2020) and Clark (2020) use the concept of intra-action of the material and discursive to avoid making the world merely a mirror image when analyzing participants’ meanings from the world.

Barad (2003), in addition, offers a specific concept, discursive practice, for their nonrepresentational agentic realism. To challenge the excessive power of language (and thus, representationalism), Barad (2003) suggests a performative understanding of discursive practices that shifts mirroring the culture “to matters of practices/ doings/actions” (p. 802). A performative position adheres to Barad’s main critique of representationalism: “that there are representations on the one hand and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other” (Barad, 2008, p. 126). For example, language can be understood more performatively as discourse, not simply as a signification of the pre-existing nature. According to Barad (2003), a performative understanding of a body requires engagement with both “the formation of the subject” and “the production of the matter of bodies” (p. 808). To include both elements, Barad (2003) borrows Foucault’s term discourse that links discursive practice (language use, signifying systems, grammars, speech acts, or conversations that are produced in historically situated social conditions) with the material body. Barad defines discursive practices as “the local sociohistorical material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices such as speaking, writing, thinking, calculating, measuring, filtering, and concentrating” (p. 819). This suggests an attention to both material and discursive forces of the entangled process of materialization of both nonhuman and human forms of agency that they found missing in Foucault’s original concept. From Barad’s point of view, Foucault “does not tell us in what way the biological and the historical are ‘bound together’” (Barad, 2003, p. 809), simultaneously, and thus, fails to account matter as an active force in the world. This critique is taken aboard by Clark (2020) who also reread her previous Foucauldian research through Barad’s work to consider non-discursive elements (ballet shoes, hair) together with the discursive construction of the feminine ballet body.

While Barad’s critique of Foucault’s (and Butler’s) “humanist blind spot” with its focus on human sciences, human action, and “the discursive” in favor of the passive “non-discursive” (e.g., Barad, 2003, 2007, 2008) is insightful, there are also diffractions of Barad’s reading of Foucault. These demonstrate Foucault’s much deeper engagement with “things” and “words,” discursive and non-discursive elements, than allowed by Barad. In his recent “diffraction” of Foucault’s texts, Lemke (2015), contrary to Barad’s interpretation, demonstrates how Foucault’s conceptualization of “government of things” concerns multiple human and non-human elements that are stabilized, enacted, and negotiated in different milieus into different structures. When Foucault talks about “a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live” (cited in Lemke, 2015, p. 13), Lemke reminds us, “neither nature nor life is a self-evident and stable entity or property” (p. 13). I am now provoked to ask: If it is possible to employ Foucault’s theory of discursive and non-discursive elements to look at the reciprocal relationship of meaning and matter in physical activity in social science research, what difference does Barad’s discursive practice make to account for matter as an active force in the world?

Provocation 3: Combining Insights From Natural and Social Sciences

To consider a type of discursive practice, some feminist researchers of physical activity have included insights from natural sciences to move beyond the dominance of language in social science. For example, Fullagar (2020) employs Barad’s concept of diffraction as a way to erase the boundaries between biological, psychological, and sociological knowledge to consider depression as a gendered phenomenon produced as a combination of these knowledges. Thinking of recovery from mental illness as an “assemblage of meaning” can result in new forms of feminist praxis that take into account women’s multiple experiences in the gendered social world. Thorpe et al. (2022) also engage diffraction to consider different knowledges as mutually constitutive and intra-acting in a transdisciplinary project where they studied, using social science methods (survey and semi-structured interviews) and physical measures (resting metabolic rate, a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, baseline blood work), sport women’s low energy availability. Although the methods followed the respective physiological and sociological disciplinary onto-epistemologies, the researchers aimed to reduce these boundaries by “small acts” such as reading data sets together, sitting in on different data collation techniques, traveling together and discussing different aspects of the data gathering process, meeting regularly to share literature, co-supervising PhD students, co-writing grant applications and reports, co-convening and co-presenting at national and international conferences. In addition, they considered indigenous women athletes’ voices as “nodal points” to further think the boundaries of the westernized knowledge production.

It makes definite sense to consider different knowledges as co-constitutive of human experiences. Barad (2014), indeed, finds separating research into natural and social science polarizing matter and meaning into knowledge where language (and meaning making) currently dominates with matter left as a rather passive component of investigation. At the same time, dividing knowledge on issues regarding nature (investigated by biological measures) and issues regarding society (investigated by social science methods), Barad suspects, does not make a difference in world affairs. For Barad (2007), “matter and meaning are not separate elements” (p. 4), but are necessarily intertwined in all “matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value” (p. 4). Inspired by Latour, Barad (in Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012) does not see academic disciplinary division into natural sciences and social sciences useful, because it is difficult to identify “the patterns of difference that make a difference “ (p. 49)—“diffraction”—in this manner. If Barad advocates reading for patterns of difference through science and social science insights together, how do we move further toward agentic realist examinations that simultaneously include matter and meaning?

Provocation 4: Multiple Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives

Although having a clear focus on Barad’s work, the feminist researchers of physical activity supplement their readings of embodied empowerment with other theoretical perspectives (e.g., phenomenologists, Haraway, Ahmed, poststructuralists Braidotti, Grosz, Butler, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari). While they employ such “traditional” qualitative methods as ethnography or interviews, Clark (2020), Fullagar (2020), and Brice et al. (2021) also engage “postqualitative” methodologies (St. Pierre, 2019) often inspired by Deleuzian methodologies in education by MacLure (2013), Ringrose and Renold (2014), or Taguchi (2012) whose qualitative data analysis technique combines Barad’s diffraction with Deleuze and Guattari’s “positive difference” of becoming minoritarian.

Barad (in Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012) also reads many theorists “diffractively,” interpreting their insights through one another, in an attentive, detailed, and careful reading to build new insights. Barad (in Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012), however, did not intend agentic realism and its “practice of diffraction” as “an additive notion” to already existing social science approaches, but rather leading to new creative ways of practicing research. If this is the case, why are combinations of multiple theoretical and methodologies needed in a Baradian project?

Considering these provocations, are there additional insights into empowerment discourse that can add to the insights offered by feminist physical activity scholars? Can feminist researchers read patterns for difference, diffractively through realism, to further challenge the ontology of knowing based on “mirroring” (Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012)? To my reading, Barad’s move to agentic realism is her unique way of bringing natural science to challenge the representationalism of social science and the simultaneous use of insights from social science to move on the scientific realism. Reading the insights of different knowledges through each other—Barad’s diffractive methodology—(in Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012) is at the heart of agentic realism. As a feminist physicist, they draw on quantum mechanics and feminism to explore differences that matter in the world. As Barad explains, “It seems very important to me to be bringing physics to feminism as well as feminism to physics”—in other words, to meet the universe halfway by engaging both research foundations in informed debate (in Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012, p. 49). Alongside the other feminist physical activity scholars, I draw inspiration from Barad to engage natural scientists who explore the moving, human body. To fully appreciate Barad’s conceptual framework, and thus, its potential further contribution to physical activity research, it is crucial, I believe, also for social scientists, to engage with their diffractive reading of natural science.

Differences That Matter: The Need to Meet Universe Halfway

I have already previously aimed to emphasize the importance of Barad’s reading of natural science for new materialist scholarship in social science of physical activity (Markula, 2019) as I have wondered how the (qualitative) language-based social science methods designed to analyze meanings can capture the materialization of the world. My attempts have often been met with significant resistance by social scientists who do not consider “positivist” natural science their concern and can find such discussions outdated as positivism has already been under severe criticism for a long time. Barad is among these critics and many of their concepts derive from their diffractive reconceptualization of realism (also the foundation of positivism) that supports their challenge of representationalism. Thus, if we as social scientists are, indeed, to take seriously Barad’s advice to engage with the world beyond language, discourse, and meaning, we should further embrace their agentic realist science to think “insights from scientific and social theories through one another” (Barad, 2007, p. 92).

To appreciate Barad’s conceptual schema, it is important to detail their critical move from scientific realism to agentic realism. In a philosophical sense, realism, most typically, refers to a type of ontological view that “a world exists independently of the mind” (Harman, 2016, p. 2). This then means that “reality,” the world, is separate or autonomous from the human mind. ¹ While also a foundation to some social scientific theorizing, in terms of scientific inquiry, realism, typically considered as positivism, extends to the idea that a scientist has direct access to reality through his senses, and thus, this access is unmediated by representations created by the mind (e.g., Hacking, 1983; Harman, 2016). This is also the type of realism that Barad (1996) finds limiting: “Realizing the multiplicity of meanings that realism connotes . . . my discussion of realism . . . is concerned with the sense in which access to the ontology of our world is possible” (pp. 164–165).

Here we return to Barad’s critique of reflection. Barad (2003, 2007) has written lengthily about the problem of reflexivity. As a physicist, they employ the reflection of light from a mirror to explain how this type of metaphor for knowledge accumulation is limiting. When light is reflected in a mirror, the resulting image is considered an accurate representation of culture. The metaphor of reflection separates the researcher from the object: the researcher analyzes the reflection of an image of something held in the distance and light itself is not considered as an active actor. In social constructivist science, reflexivity has turned into “representationalism.” The social scientists who rely on reflections to then discuss social construction of, for example, femininity, do not adequately capture “which differences matter, how they matter, and for whom” (Barad, 2007, p. 90), and thus, fail to make a critical difference in the world. In representationalism, Barad argues, the object of the study, the culture, remains unaffected by the researcher despite all the efforts to acknowledge the subjectivity of the actively involved social science researcher. As Barad (2008) concludes, “even in its attempts to put the investigative subject back into the picture, reflexivity does nothing more than mirror mirroring” (pp. 87–88).

Similar to a representationalist social science, a positivist scientist studies reflections, but these reflect images from the autonomous, authentic world “unmarked by the discoverers” (Barad, 1996, p. 162). When light is reflected in a mirror, the resulting image, instead of culture, is considered an accurate representation of its original object. What reflection is missing, again, is the ontological commitment to the nature of light. When it is simply assumed that it is there, light has no effect on the image or representation itself. Remember that the representational social scientist who reflected images of culture also left it without any trace. In addition, the metaphor of reflection separates natural science and social science researchers from the object: they analyze the reflection of an image of something held in the distance, whether the object of analysis is “things” or meanings. In a natural science orientation, reflection has been translated into the need for objectivity to ensure that there is no distortion of the reflected images by the researcher, and thus, the reflection can be considered original and authentic.

These assumptions have evolved to the point where positivist scientific research is believed to describe the autonomous world independently through accurate measurement. In this view, exemplified by Newtonian physics (e.g., Barad, 2007), the process of measurement has to be transparent and uninfluenced, or external, to theory and language. They involve continuous and determinable, unambiguous interactions between the separate observing knower, the researcher, and a thing to be known, the object. Any concepts resulting from these interactions are abstractable, universal, definite, and context-independent intended to accurately determine and predict the world. This type of realism also defines the “gold standard” of research in such kinesiology science disciplines as exercise physiology, biomechanics, and motor learning that tend to dominate the way we know about the moving body. Social scientists in kinesiology pointed out decades ago similar limitations to positivist science, and consequently, have taken-up a number of diverse quantitative and qualitative examinations to overcome the idea that objective examinations of the essential qualities of things are possible (e.g., Andrews, 2008; Bruce & Greendorfer, 1994; Lawson, 1990; Vertinsky, 2009). From Barad’s view, these examinations, nevertheless, tend to leap into the representationalism that is similarly limited to realism with the primacy of the reflection metaphor still intact. Barad, thus, does not want to replace realism with representationalism, but offers, instead a new version of realism to account for investigations of socionatural phenomena.

Departing from the “positivist” type of realism, agentic realism offers a new form of realism that accounts for the impact of the observer to include scientific “theory” that is no longer located as a separate entity from nature. Agentic realism also opens up the avenue out of representationalism: social scientists are also to embrace the concepts of agentic realism if they are to engage matter and meaning, nature and culture, nondiscursive and discursive in their investigations. Barad developed their conceptual battery of phenomenon, agency, intra-action, and diffraction to counter realist context-dependent experiments of measuring interaction between controllable, independent elements to accurately determine the events in the world. While the feminist researchers of physical activity have already applied these terms in their investigations, I want to re-engage their natural science premise to think with them in conjunction with agentic realism.

Barad (2003, 2007), following Bohr, conceptualizes phenomenon as the unit under analysis. Instead of independent objects whose essence is to be discovered, phenomena are primitive relations or in Barad’s (2008) words “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components’” (p. 133, italics original). They, Barad (2003) maintains, “are constitutive of reality” (p. 817). Locally based, contextual knowledge is gained through examining phenomena that have clearly enough defined boundaries to be investigated in the experimental conditions, or apparatuses, of agentic realism. As material-cultural, natural-theoretical, objective-subjective, the phenomena can be reproduced: “it is the fact that scientific knowledge is socially constructed that leads to reliable knowledges about reproducible phenomena—which is just what we are interested in” (Barad, 1996, p. 186 italics original).

Scientists and social scientists, thus, are active parts of the phenomena when they design and execute their experiments or apparatuses that Barad defines as “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted” (p. 134, italics original). This does not mean that agentic realist research is subjective. Making knowledge “as part of world,” they argue, “does not mean that knowledge is necessarily subjective,” because this claim already assumes “the preexisting distinction between object and subject that feeds representationalist thinking” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). Therefore, it must be kept in mind that agentic realism is objective, but not in the sense of producing “undistorted representations from afar,” but objective in the sense of “being accountable to the specific materializations of which we are a part” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). As Barad (2014) summarizes, “Subjectivity and objectivity are not opposed to one another; objectivity is not not-subjectivity” (p. 175). Instead, the bodies that are present in the experimental conditions “serve as both the endpoint and the starting point for objective accounts of our intra-actions” (Barad, 1996, p. 180). It follows then that “objectivity is literally embodied. According to agential realism, knowledge is always a view from somewhere—objective knowledge is situated knowledge” (p. 180, italics original). It is important to keep in mind that Barad is still promoting realism as a necessary move, also for social scientists, away from representationalism. Therefore, while poststructuralism also rejects representationalism as a foundation to advocate relationality between structures, it does not appear appropriate in an Baradian project because it does not rely on realism as its foundation (e.g., Williams, 2014). ² Agentic realist social science projects should also adhere to a type of objectivity if we are to account for all bodies intra-acting within the phenomenon.

Agency is the central element for Barad’s approach that specifies their version of realism. Agency verifies Barad’s contention that the researcher/knower/subject actively participates in the knowledge production process. Agency, in this sense, is the capacity to create relations. In Barad’s thought, agency is closely connected to the idea of intra-acting elements that exist in relation to each other. “Agency is a matter of intra-acting,” Barad (2003) explains, “agency is an enactment, it is not something someone has” (p. 183). The dynamism of intra-acting “is agency” (Barad, 2003, p. 818, emphasis original). The material-cultural components emerge through their intra-action, not as predetermined objects. The intra-acting elements also enact “a local causal structure” of a phenomenon to reveal causality between “measuring agencies” (“effect”) and the “measured object” (“cause”) (Barad, 2003, p. 815). The elements act and then have effects that cause a phenomenon that cannot be determined in advance. Considering agentic realism, predetermined humanist concepts of empowerment and innate agentic human self are not necessarily fruitful starting points for a Baradian project in which all elements in the knowledge production become meaningful through their relations, their acting on each other. Barad (in Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012) contends that “agency is not about choice in any liberal humanist sense” (e.g., women’s choice to resist oppressive femininity) but “the possibilities and accountability entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production” (p. 50). Also the scientific experimental situation, as enacted by the researcher(s), has agency or in Baradian terms, is “the agency of observation” (Barad, 1996, p. 184). Research concepts, then, obtain meaning constructed in the specific localized context of an experiment (apparatus) or as Barad puts it, between “an agentially constructed cut between the ‘object’ and the ‘agencies of observation’” (p. 184). Through these concepts Barad also arrives at her solution to the problem of reflection (the separation of the researcher—the mind—from the reality or culture) while sustaining objectivity through agentic realism. Instead of reflection that produces patterns of sameness and mirroring by the detached observer, Barad focuses on diffraction that, by distorting the reflection, produces patterns of difference.

Diffraction essentially attends to effects of difference (Barad, 2003, 2007). As Barad (2008, 2012) acknowledges, they adapt the term diffraction from Haraway (1992) who proposes it as “a way to figure ‘difference’ as a ‘critical difference within’” (cited in Barad, 2008, p. 147). Diffraction, thus, is not a reflection or critique from outside. Neither does it “map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear. . .interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction” (cited in Barad, 2008, p. 147). Following Haraway, then, diffractive readings of scholarly texts, for example, should not consider reflection of how they may complement or replicate each other, but rather how they interfere or effect how we examine phenomena and what differences are then produced from within the feminist examinations of, for example, the physically active body. In her work, Barad (2007) extends Haraway’s conceptualization of diffraction through insights from quantum physics to consider diffraction, not only as interference, but as an entanglement of nature/culture, object/subject, matter/meaning in phenomena that cannot be examined reflecting upon them outside, from distance. ³ For example, Barad considers insights diffractively—bringing them together by cutting them apart—from feminist theory and quantum physics to seek their entanglements—not to combine them—for an attentive reading of what is excluded and what comes to matter in these ways of knowing the world (in Dolphijn & Van Der Tuin, 2012). Barad’s diffractive reading, then, results in a different way of engaging feminism and physics into agentic realism as an answer to the limitations of representationalism and realism. The differentiating acts as agential separability of knowing entangled meaning and matter. Instead of reflection, diffractive reading reveals that differences exist and that they are separate, but entangled with each other in causal relationships of effects reproducible in phenomena. Barad (2014) summarizes their diffractive methodology: “Entanglements are not unities. They do not erase differences; on the contrary, entanglings entail differentiatings, differentiatings entail entanglings. One move—cutting together-apart” (p. 176, italics original). I take an inspiration from this statement to consider agentic realism of the physically active body evolving both natural and social science together in terms of “cutting” realism and representationalism apart with both contributing to the causality of matter and meaning. Instead of quantum physics, however, I seek to productively engage the positivist research appropriate to an agentic realist project of physical activity phenomena. Diffraction that attends to specific material entanglements provides a nonrepresentationalist, performative mode to examine socionatural practices without privileging culture. In short, diffraction makes the effects of difference evident: it is about how things matter, not as separate passive objects, but “a way of understanding the world from within and as part of it” (Barad, 2007, p. 88), its materialization of which the researchers are, objectively, part.

If diffractive methodology that “makes manifest the extraordinary liveness of the world” provides a methodology for such responsiveness as it engages “the specificity of material entanglements in their agential becoming” (Barad, 2007, p. 91), I now ask how to use this methodology, specifically, in examinations of the physically active body. How can I objectively analyze, through different modes of research, how matter comes to matter, its performativity, without a social constructivist reflexive engagement in the research process? How can I, diffractively, entangle feminist social science and positivist natural science into an agentic realist project of physical activity?

The Entangling Social Science and Natural Science: Physical Activity As Material-Discursive in Performative Intra-Action?

I begin this section by reviewing some of the main tenets of Barad’s agentic realism to consider, more clearly, how the researchers of a moving body may engage in diffractive methodology. First, it is clear that diffraction refers to the ways of examining differences, not as oppositions, but rather, inseparate in their difference. Baradian diffraction further assumes agentic realism that entangles realism and social constructivism cut apart together, different but inseparable, as foundations for researching phenomena. Consequently, a project on the moving human body would need to begin by developing a methodological approach that diffracts the binaries (oppositions) of natural/social, objective/subjective, matter/meaning, not to get rid of these differences, but to think with them together. I, like Barad and other Baradian feminist researchers of the physically active body, acknowledge that the human body in motion is surely not only a physical, natural body as little as it is merely a body inscribed with sociocultural meanings. Inspired by my reading of Barad’s agentic realism of entangling the social with the natural science, I want to move beyond a feminist social science examination involving objects, multiple knowledges without a diffractive reading, or (post)qualitative social constructivist methodologies to find creative ways to apply diffractive methodology to socionatural analysis of the moving body.

To consider possibilities for such projects, I organized a three-day virtual seminar on Barad’s agentic realism with exercise physiologists, motor learning scholars, phenomenologists, critical feminists as well poststructuralist scholars and graduate students interested in physical activity research. This was an international seminar with physical activity researchers from Europe and North America some of whom had previous knowledge while others considered themselves as neophytes on Barad’s work. After sharing our insights in Barad’s concepts, we began to think of actual possibilities for agentic realist research. Some participants were already involved in projects that included both natural scientists and social scientists to examine, for example, effective training in sport. It was quickly concluded that such research, while interesting and useful, was multidisciplinary work divided between the familiar realist (experiments) and representational (qualitative methods such as interviews) methodologies with separate ontologies. A Baradian agentic realist project had to move beyond multidisciplinarity to challenge both social scientists and natural scientists to question their ontologies instead of each group of researchers adhering to their own sides of the projects. The social scientists in the group first considered how to use Barad’s concepts to include objects or the moving bodies into the exiting research projects, but then pondered how such additive approach may contradict with the current onto-epistemologies behind their research designs. For example, the phenomenological focus on how humans make meanings through embodied experiences would still be representationalist and simply considering objects as parts of such a project would not be a turn to agentic realism. Neither did Barad’s agentic realism appear to align with poststructuralism that does not ground itself on realist foundationalism. We then abandoned the idea of using, for example, Deleuze’s work to complement Barad’s diffractive methodology that has a coherent onto-epistemology quite different from poststructuralist onto-epistemology. With an agentic cut, we decided to leave the existing research approaches aside to think with Barad and engage in a creative process of applying agentic realism to physical activity research.

Based on our reading of agentic realism, we conceptualized “natural” science and social science as separate, yet entangled in socionatural knowledge production of physical activity. We then brainstormed for physical activity phenomena with clear enough boundaries that could be reproduced in possible research projects. Our examinations of phenomena, then, should not privilege neither material nor discursive elements, but rather let them emerge in their intra-action in our apparatuses. To consider physical activity to include the agency of human body with its physical constitution, individual behavior, and its social context, we believed, needed to include additional “measures” to the body metabolism or neuroactivity in the project. After considering several options, we ended up with “flexibility” and “work” that, as we quickly realized, were used both in natural and social science vocabulary of physical activity. To move from multidisciplinary approach, we then used Barad’s diffractive methodology to first consider the effects of current understandings of each phenomenon to then diffract these understandings to consider how their entanglement may produce different intra-actions, enacted differentially within the phenomena. For example, we considered the binary construction of flexibility and strength in exercise physiology to think how they may entangle, agentically, in actual physical activity performance and then deliberated how to measure these in the actual performance environment. These measurements needed to “capture” the agency of all elements of the apparatus. Entangled with the natural science, we realized, were gendered meanings of flexibility as feminine and strength as masculine constructs. We then pondered how to engage performatively with them as discursive practices without reducing our reading of them to representations of culture. These meanings now needed to be in intra-action in the actual performance environment simultaneously with the flexibility-strength diffraction pattern. Similarly, we considered the binary construction of work as a construct of mechanics (W=Fs) to consider it further in terms of quantity of transferred energy entangled with the cultural notions “work hard ethic” as guarantee of success (as opposed to “laziness” resulting to failure) in sport.

We then began to sketch possible agentic realist apparatus in which to involve the material-cultural intra-actions in our phenomena. To transcend the limitation of positive realism, we wanted to locate our knowledge claims in local experiences of experiments with the apparatus involving all researchers. We imagined doing research outside of the laboratory to capture the intra-action of the material and meaning of our phenomena in the “real” contexts and map the agency, the entangled effects, of the elements. The measurements, then, should take place in this context and not afterward to reflect the participants’ experiences, for example, through interviews. To ensure objectivity, not as detached researchers but as active parts of the apparatus leaving traces to the effect, we had to consider experiments that can reproduce the phenomena under investigation.

In summary, we used Barad’s diffractive methodology to reconceptualize both natural and social constructivist science to consider how matter and meaning entangle into an intra-active relationship: our agentic realist projects on physical activity looked at the intra-action of socionatural in phenomena that were possible to observe within apparatus of measurements, possible instruments, the researchers, the participants, the physical bodies, and the environment in actual physical activity contexts. We wanted to entangle the natural and social science knowledges to detect the agency, the effects, of the elements during experiments. These, for us, were the discursive practices: “material (re)configurings” through which “boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted . . . within the phenomena produced” (Barad, 2008, p. 138, italics original). In our projects, we imagined, discursive practices were not simple words or groups of words describing or representing the world, but an ongoing performance of causal inter-activity of various elements of physical activity. The phenomena came to matter when their discursive practices and material elements engaged in the dynamics of intra-activity, the “doing” in a process of intra-activity. In these projects, we aimed to examine physical activity: how human bodies, in the fullness of their physicality (Barad, 2003) became to matter in intra-action with all bodies (e.g., their environment of air, light, flooring/grounding) involved in their performance. The physical activity as performative had to turn into a discursive-material phenomenon not limited to a pregiven notion as physical body or inscribed meanings, yet identifiable with clear boundaries for measurement instead of “a free-floating ideality” (Barad, 2003, p. 823).

In agentic realism, neither measurement nor language represent, but exist relationally in the world in “a causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world (i.e., discursive practices/(con)figurations rather than ‘words,’) and specific material phenomena (i.e., relations rather than ‘things’)” (Barad, 2008, p. 132, italics original).

Our examination of specific physical activity phenomena, flexibility and work, required, we believed, developing alternative methods to the current natural science experiential design and social science (qualitative) methods to measure the agency, effect and its causality, during the actual discursive practice of the material engagement. We now realized that one innovative aspect of the Baradian approach was using the phenomenon as a starting point, not predictive hypotheses or humanist concepts such as empowerment to mirror our results. It may be, however, that the effects emerging from the apparatus then help us think differently about, for example, gender or success in sport as they intra-act with the material elements in our research. These projects, framed by agentic realism, offered an opportunity, philosophically (objectivity, the nature of measurement, nature, causality, identity, and meaning) and practically, to understand “the relationship between discursive practices and the material world” (Barad, 2007, p. 94) in physical activity.

Conclusion

Barad’s agentic realism, as a deeply philosophical system, can assist in considering how physical activity research can seamlessly bring nature and culture together without conflating them into sameness. It provides an option to modify humanist representationalism to share an ontological move toward agentic realism. Barad’s quantum physics–derived concepts of entanglement, intra-action, and diffraction have helped me to think, practically, how to engage natural scientists in collaboration in projects of physical activity as mattering matter. Their suggestions appear to constructively direct the positivist scientists to consider the human bodies in motion more contextually and holistically. It has also replaced reflections of culture with natural science–inspired diffraction and, as such, paved a way for social constructivism to meet realism half way. I am further intrigued by Barad’s diffractive methodology that reveals realism and representationalism as separate, different, but also similar in their reflective patterns or their ontological orientations. True to her agentic realist philosophy of having these universes meet halfway, Barad draws from both, but in a modified form where the nature is accessible to a researcher who is no longer an objective bystander and culture is no longer a representation by a reflecting researcher. Instead, the focus should be on entangled socionatural, local phenomena of intra-acting elements tapped into by insider, yet objective, researcher.

There have, however, been earlier attempts by social scientists to engage with the problems of realism and representationalism and as Barad (2003) acknowledges, her diffractive reading for agential realism, in addition to quantum physics, takes poststructuralist, feminist, anti-racist, queer, and Marxist insights. Similar to Barad, poststructuralist thinkers strongly advocate moving beyond representationalism (and realism) to affect social change. The feminist researchers of physical activity, indeed, often combine poststructuralism, particularly Deleuze’s work, with the Baradian insights in their new materialists works. However, the poststructuralist tool kits that critique both humanist representationalism and realism do not parallel Barad’s diffractive, agentic realist methodology. ⁴ Although appearing similar to Barad’s philosophical project of rethinking both realism and representationalism, poststructuralist scholarship, instead of having them meet each other halfway, considers realism and representationalism as constructed within certain structures that stabilize to provide conditions for certain knowledge in certain contexts. Poststructuralists, thus, question universal truths and fixed identities to challenge the premise of both realism and humanist representationalism to generate radically different understandings of difference (e.g., Lumsden, 2013; Williams, 2014). Consequently, careful diffraction of how poststructuralism and agentic realism consider their prospective effects of interference on current physical activity research is needed (e.g., see Hein, 2016; Lemke, 2015). Barad, nevertheless, can inspire creative ways to bring the traditionally deeply separated kinesiology research silos together through agentic realism. However, as a poststructuralist, who, rather than bringing realism and representationalism together to consider differences that matter, prefers to leave them behind to think differently with the bodies in motion, I advocate careful attention to onto-epistemology to avoid unproductive mixing (St. Pierre, 2015) of agentic realism and poststructuralism in (post)-qualitative physical activity research.