Sports-related Concussion and Gender: Preliminary Thoughts

This chapter responds to a problematic research asymmetry in studies around sports-related injury; specifically, the dominance of scientific knowledge about the experiences of sportsmen, including boys. This problem has been brought into sharper light by the growth in women’s competitive sports. First the chapter sets out relevant aspects of the historical treatment of women’s bodies in medicine as invisible, fragile, and inferior. Then, we describe the growth of women’s rugby in Ireland which was forged in the spotlight of rugby’s existential crisis involving mild traumatic brain injury. This is followed by a deconstruction of the risk-gender-sport nexus and some of the masculinist notions in research which have ramifications for understanding ’true gender differences’ in sports-related concussion (SRC). The chapter also highlights some implications for future research on SRC including: the coupling of physical, psychological and socio-cultural processes in the lived experiences of SRC; a call to avoid any blindness in research associated with the masculine gaze; the need to build an interdisciplinary research framework on embodiment, and the potential utility of Elias’s concept of the hinge to study sportspeople and SRC ‘in the round’.