Life in the Huddle: Risk, Representation, and the Labour of Athletic Practice in Sarah DeLappe’s <i>The Wolves</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite being framed by its author as “not really about soccer,” Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-nominated play The Wolves acutely dramatizes the social dynamics that mark the girls’ indoor soccer team at its centre. Sports plays like DeLappe’s are useful contributions to the political discourses on women’s sport because they de-contextualize sportswomen from the prerogative to win, a cultural compulsion that often feeds individualistic “post-feminist” ideologies and perpetuates the dubious supposition that athletic excellence is a pathway to external liberation. Drawing from Holly Thorpe, Marianne Clark, and Julie Brice’s notion of biocultural creativity, this article demonstrates how The Wolves illuminates the performative processes through which sportswomen cultivate their personal and communal bodies, often in response to institutions that exacerbate the risks already inherent in the sport. By holding The Wolves in tension with uncritical presumptions regarding the “transcendency” of sport and in conversation with the well-earned successes of the United States Women’s National Team, this article asserts that the limits of sport’s representational frameworks must be complemented with a nuanced grasp of women’s sporting politics, a politics that requires collective negotiation with vulnerability as it persists in structures within and beyond the elite level.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".