“Just tape it up for me, ok?”: Masculinities, injury and embodied emotion

In this autoethnography, I consider the emotionality of sustaining and exacerbating an athletic injury. I interrogate youth sport experiences in which coaches and teammates lauded my willingness to play sport with little regard for my physical well-being, and the anxieties, doubts, and frustrations I experienced through the process of ‘recovering’ from my injury. In the process, I forefront my (athletic) identity, and the embodied emotionality of confronting a ‘failing’ body upon which it rest(s/ed). Additionally, I critically interrogate violence as a thread running through practices and discourses of masculinity, situating my researching body at the “intersecting vectors of power, knowledge and identity” (Giardina and Newman, 2011a: 524).