In this article, I examine the ‘turn to’ post-qualitative inquiry (PQI), new materialism and post-humanist theories to consider the challenges of, and implications for, doing research in sport, health and physical culture. The term ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ indicates a decisive departure from the ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions that have informed the humanist interpretive tradition of qualitative research. Moving beyond a theory/method divide, PQI draws its methodological inspiration from critical post-humanist debates concerned with how ‘matter’ is thought and constituted through entanglements of human and non-human bodies, affects, objects and practices. Such a shift reorients thinking around relational questions about the material-discursive forces co-implicated in what bodies can ‘do’ and how matter ‘acts’, rather than a concern with what ‘is’ a body or the agentic meaning of experience. I discuss how these new styles of thought reorient our onto-epistemological assumptions and theory–method approaches through engagement with PQI within (and beyond) sport, health and physical culture scholarship.

This paper draws on post-structural feminist theories of emotion to explore the significance of leisure within women's narratives of recovery from depression. I engage with the stories of 48 women in rural and urban Australia to identify the gendered discourses governing depression and recovery. Leisure figured as a site of identity transformation where women enacted creative, embodied, and connected subjectivities. The performance of gender through leisure enabled women to practice a different ethic of care for self and, hence, different relations of care for others. These stories make visible the cost of women's emotion work by identifying how negotiations over leisure and the embodiment of emotion play can facilitate recovery in ways that biomedical treatments cannot.

In the past 30 years there have been significant shifts in the way Australian public health policy has problematized the role of leisure, recreation and physical activity in relation to the WHO identification of lifestyle disease risks to individual and social wellbeing. This article offers a cultural analysis of the way discourses of leisure and healthy lifestyles have been produced through the governmental objectives of health policy and promotion aimed at the body (Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1999). Two campaigns (1970’s Life be in it! and 1990’s Active Australia) are examined in relation to the rationalities and ethics through which individuals are encouraged to govern their own healthy lifestyle practices in the name of freedom.