What counts as safe?: pregnant and mothering elite athletes and the discursive construction of safe sport

Although pregnant and mothering elite athletes (PMEAs) are competing in high-performance sport, they still must navigate discriminatory and exclusionary sport systems. Woven throughout these systems are dominant gender discourses that negatively and inequitably affect their sport careers. Simultaneously, Canadian safe sport policies were recently created to prevent harm to athletes. However, the position of PMEAs within safe sport policies remains unclear and underexamined. As such, we posed the following research question: ‘How do Canadian PMEAs discursively produce their understandings of how safe sport policies apply to them and other PMEAs?’ To answer this question, we used a poststructural feminist theoretical framework, feminist methodologies, and collaborated with a community advisory board of three PMEAs to co-design our study, collect and analyse data, and write this paper. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 former and current athletes who were/are PMEAs while competing on a Canadian National Team. Our feminist poststructural discourse analysis (FPDA) produced three overarching discourses: (i) safe sport policies are meant for serious abuses of power; (ii) participating in an inclusive and supportive environment makes sport safe for PMEAs; and (iii) PMEAs ought to be supported by equitable safe sport policies. Our findings illustrated the importance of using FPDA to expose how dominant safe sport discourses concerning protection and support paradoxically fail to protect and support PMEAs, while dominant gender discourses lead to PMEAs’ gender-based harm in sport. Recognising these elements as safe sport issues highlights the urgent need for supports that consider PMEAs’ unique experiences.