Guest editors
- Prof. Aly Bailey, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, aly.bailey@uwaterloo.ca
- Prof. Kaleigh Pennock, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, kaleigh.pennock@uwaterloo.ca
Bodies are agentic entities that interact with and shape environments (Rice, 2014; Rice et al., 2021), and therefore, bodies have always been a site of protest. Body activism is needed now more than ever; systems of body control and normativity are not easing up, and in fact, are intensifying. Across the globe we bear witness to many body-related harms and acts of violence such as the reversal of queer, trans, disability, and women’s rights (e.g., banning trans athletes in sports, body and gender policing in change rooms, and scaling back disability rights and accessibility protections; Finley, 2023; Nović, 2025); the ongoing exclusion, erasure, and policing of Black, Indigenous, and racialized bodies in sport and movement spaces (e.g., Joseph et al., 2024; Silva et al., 2025); and a rise in fat shaming and fat-related injustice (Gordon, 2023; Monaghan, 2025) via intensified diet culture, increased access to performance enhancing drugs, and weight loss/appetite suppressant medications like GLP-1s (e.g., Ozempic; Craddick et al., 2026; Markey et al., 2025). And, although sport and movement contexts can be opportunities for bodily expression and liberation, those spaces are often rife with body idealization, surveillance, competition, tradition, body shaming, and comparison rooted in racist colonial logics and mythical hierarchies about what it means to be “fully human” (Bailey, Bessey et al., 2024; Bailey et al., 2025; Joseph et al., 2024).
Despite escalating pressures to conform to narrow and oppressive beauty standards, bodies are protesting. In sport and movement spaces, that protest often emerges in direct response to structural safety failures and cultures of bodily control. Radical body activist Da’Shaun Harrison (2021) calls for collective liberation, challenging people to go beyond “loving their bodies” to actively resisting the structures that perpetuate body shame and create inequity. In this way, we invite framings of body image as a site of resistance, reclamation, and celebration of embodied difference and diversity.
We are excited by the notable and commendable increase in scholarship about understanding diverse body image experiences (e.g., The Handbook of Diversity in Body Image; special issues on resisting white supremacy and exploring body image in transgender and gender diverse people; The BPS 2026 Summer Seminar Series on Advancing Antiracism and Intersectionality). This special issue seeks to expand on current framings of body image by foregrounding resistance, collective action, and embodied practices within sport and movement contexts since body image is a dynamic, relational, and socially (re)produced experience, shaped by structural conditions and lived embodiment (Rice et al., 2021; Tylka & Wood-Barcalow, 2015).
To this end, we invite submissions that explore how Black, racialized, Indigenous, two-spirited, LGBTQAI+, disabled, fat, thick/thicc, neurodivergent, (and more) people and communities are reclaiming their bodies and re- imagining body image in sport and movement spaces as an act of protest.
Body and movement reclamation can include the following: jiggling fat, stimming, Black hair practices, styling, and other acts of Black survival, creative, ceremonial, or culturally significant body expressions, non-normative movements and play, dance, burlesque, Drag, and other body-related subversive practices within structured and informal movement contexts (e.g., organized sport, fitness spaces, community programming, movement collectives, play, everyday embodied practices, and rest).
Submissions may be of an empirical or theoretical nature. We encourage authors to consider the ways in which the body—as a site of agentic change making—helps propel the field of body image inquiry forward.
Manuscript submission information
Please email a 250-word abstract with a working title to Aly Bailey (aly.bailey@uwaterloo.ca) and Kaleigh Pennock (kaleigh.pennock@uwaterloo.ca). Abstracts should clearly outline the problem, scholarly gap, and contribution of the proposed manuscript. Abstract deadline is November 1, 2026. Inquiries can be directed to Aly and Kaleigh.
We especially welcome contributions that:
- Offer anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and uncolonial analyses of body image and body reclamation.
- Provide a variety of theories or alternative ways to understand body image, body activism, and resistance.
- Approach ‘movement’ and ‘sport’ in very open and expansive ways.
- Provide Global South perspectives.
- Centre body-mind entanglements, including Mad and neurodiverse experiences.
- Employ diverse methodological approaches, including qualitative, arts-based, and community-engaged methods.
- Provide implications for health, wellbeing, participation, and safety.
Important dates:
- 250-word abstract submission due November 1, 2026
- Decision about invitation to contribute a full manuscript: December 1, 2026
- Manuscript deadline: July 1, 2027
Guest Editors
Aly Bailey works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Her community- and arts-based research centres queer, fat, Mad, and disability justice in the study of aging, fitness, body image, and health. Her ongoing program of work, including a recent project titled ReVisioning Fitness, is about untethering eugenic, colonial, and white supremacist (mythical) ideals of the body/mind from notions of “fitness” and “wellness.”
Kaleigh Pennock is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her research examines how risk, harm, and inequity are socially and structurally (re)produced in youth sport systems. She challenges dominant paradigms in how we understand safety, and well-being in sport and recreation spaces, with particular attention to how some populations are disproportionately impacted by social and structural harms. Her work also explores how athletes cultivate resistance, joy, and community within and beyond these spaces.
References
Bailey, K. A., Bessey, M., Lamarche, L., & Griffin, M. (2025). The body mass index: What’s the use?. Body Image, 54, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2025.101924
Bailey, K. A., Bessey, M., Rice, C., Kelly, E., McHugh, T. L. F., Punjani, S., … & Quest, S. (2024). In the wake of Canada’s violent eugenic legacies: An urgency to ReVision fitness. Leisure/loisir, 48(2), 347-370. https://doi.org/10.1080/14927713.2023.2291033
Bailey, K. A., Griffin, M., Lopez, K. J., Fayyaz, N., Habib, S., & Leighton, J. (2024). (Re)claiming subversive spaces on TikTok: The complexities of body activisms within physical activity cultures. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 16(5), 471-486. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2024.2355128
Craddock, N., & Schneider, J. (2026). Body image in the age of GLP-1s: Emerging questions for research and practice. Body Image, 57, 102095. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2026.102095
Finley, L. (2023). LGBTQ activism to counter “Don’t Say Gay,” trans athlete bans and other attacks on affirming education in US public schools. In Global LGBTQ Activism (pp. 198-214). Routledge.
Gordon, A. (2023). “You just need to lose weight”: And 19 other myths about fat people. Beacon Press.
Harrison, D. L. (2021). Belly of the beast: The politics of anti-fatness as anti-blackness. North Atlantic Books.
Joseph, J., Pennock, K., & Brown, S. (2024). Black hair is a safe sport issue!: Black aesthetics, access, inclusion, and resistance. Sociology of Sport Journal, 42(2), 190-198. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2023-0204
Markey, C. H., August, K. J., Malik, D., & Richeson, A. (2025). Body image and interest in GLP-1 weight loss medications. Body Image, 53, 101890. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2025.101890
Monaghan, L. F. (2025). Degrading bodies in pandemic times: Politicizing cruelty during the COVID-19 and obesity crises. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 49(1), 63-87. https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599211043403
Nović, A. (2025). The US right is coming for disabled people. Here’s why that threatens everyone. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global/2025/mar/27/us-disability-rights-trump
Pennock, K., McKenzie, B., & Estrada, G. (In preparation). Hairstories as Black feminist praxis: Centering Black girls’ hair in sport and recreation. To be submitted to Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health.
Rice, C. (2014). Becoming women: The embodied self in image culture. University of Toronto Press.
Rice, C., Riley, S., LaMarre, A., & Bailey, K. A. (2021). What a body can do: Rethinking body functionality through a feminist materialist disability lens. Body Image, 38, 95-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2021.03.014
Silva, D., Kalman-Lamb, N., Chen, C., Allain, K., Laurendeau, J., Joseph, J., … & de Oca, J. M. (2025). Settler colonialism–genocide–athleticide: The destruction of sport in occupied Palestine. Sociology of Sport Journal, 1(aop), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2024-0269
Tylka, T. L., & Wood-Barcalow, N. L. (2015). What is and what is not positive body image? Conceptual foundations and construct definition. Body Image, 14, 118-129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2015.04.001
