The Affective Politics of Inclusion in Elite Women’s Hockey

Abstract

This thesis analyzes how inclusion is experienced and policed within elite women's hockey locker rooms in the Netherlands. A mixed-method survey of Hoofdklasse players is used, which combines statistical analysis with qualitative interpretations to study the affective and informal mechanisms that determine belonging in high-performance environments. With the writer's positionality as a trans non-binary athlete in the league as a starting point, the thesis is situated in feminist sport studies and gender theory, as it explores the gap between formal inclusion policies and lived experiences. Results show that inclusion is often conditional, governed less by explicit rules and more through affective norms, social hierarchies, and the policing of emotion. Three interconnected mechanisms are analyzed: humor as affective governance (jokes as tools for disciplining discomfort and reinforcing cohesion), hierarchies of voice (how popularity, charisma, and playing time structure whose speech is valued), and displaced critique (the redirection of criticism away from one’s own team to preserve harmony). Through these dynamics, emotional fluency, adaptability, and conformity to the status quo emerge as currencies of belonging. Building upon a framework of Ahmed’s affective economies, Fricker’s epistemic injustice, Thorpe’s feminist reworking of Bourdieu, Krane’s work on hegemonic femininity, and Puwar’s “space invaders,” this research introduces new conceptual tools, affective endurance, emotional legibility, tolerable difference, affective audibility, emotional displacement, critique leakage, and affective pride, to understand the affective governance of inclusion. This research concludes that inclusion in elite sport cannot be determined only by the absence of overt discrimination. Inclusion must be understood as an unequal, affectively moderated process in which silence, adaptability, and emotional labor maintain surface-level cohesion. The insights of this study extend beyond sport, offering a framework for analyzing inclusion in other high-pressure environments where identity, performance, and emotion intersect.