The Development of the City of Ottawa's Girls n' Women and Sport Program0

Abstract

In this thesis by publishable paper I use archival research and semi-structured interviews to examine the development of what eventually became known as the City of Ottawa’s Girls n’ Women and Sport program. In the first paper, I document the development of the GWS program within the broader context of women`s and girls’ sport in Canada. In the second paper, I conduct a Foucauldian discourse analysis of the dominant discourses that shaped the development of the GWS program in order to further our knowledge of feminist sport development and also to better understand the Foucauldian contention that constraints serve to not only inhibit action, but also enable it. Together, these papers comprise a thesis that contributes to better understanding the development of Canadian women’s and girls’ sport, while it simultaneously strengthens our understanding of Foucault’s notion of productive constraints.