Physical Culture, Power, and the Body

Patricia Vertinsky, Jennifer Hargreaves, Patricia Vertinsky, Jennifer Hargreaves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134227044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Danse

During the past decade, there has been an outpouring of books on 'the body' in society, but none has focused as specifically on physical culture - that is, cultural practices such as sport and dance within which the moving physical body is central.

Questions are raised about the character of the body, specifically the relation between the 'natural' body, the 'constructed' body and the 'alien' or 'virtual' body. The themes of the book are wide in scope, including:

• physical culture and the fascist body
• sport and the racialised body
• sport medicine, health and the culture of risk
• the female Muslim sporting body, power, and politics
• experiencing the disabled sporting body
• embodied exhibitions of striptease and sport
• the social logic of sparring
• sport, girls and the neoliberal body.

Physical Culture, Power, and the Body aims to break down disciplinary boundaries in its theoretical approaches and its readership. The author's muli-disciplinary backgrounds, demonstrate the widespread topicality of physical culture and the body.

1
Introduction

Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky

In October 2004, contributors to this book met together in the beautiful surroundings of the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.¹ As news of the meeting and the topic spread around the university, what was initially conceived of as a closed event blossomed into a conference with the same title as the book – Physical Culture, Power, and the Body – that included faculty and graduate students as well as some outsiders from other local universities. The attraction was ‘the body’.

Except for the work of anthropologists, where the body has been prominent since the nineteenth century, very few academics from other fields have shown an interest in the significance of the body and embodiment until recent years. Sport historians and sociologists were some of the first, writing about the sporting body since the 1970s,² but it was Bryan Turner who first showed a concern to develop ‘a genuine sociology of the body’ when he wrote The Body and Society in 1984. During the decade that followed, leading up to the publication of the second edition of The Body in Society in 1996, Turner claimed that there had been ‘a flood of publications concerned with the relationship between the body and society, the issue of embodiment with relation to theories of social action, the body and feminist theory, and the body and consumer culture’ (p. 1). And now, another decade later, there is a generalized and enthusiastic recognition of the cultural and social significance of embodiment in every aspect of life and culture among scholars throughout the humanities and the social sciences, as well as in areas of science and technology (Featherstone and Turner 1995:2; Shilling 1993, 2005), paralleled by an explosion of interest in the body in popular culture. Interest in the body is everywhere. The body matters.

This collection is part of this trend, but it has a particular orientation that sets it apart from other publications for it focuses upon the neglected issue of the body-in-movement. The outpouring of writings on the body has had little to say specifically about physical culture (Kirk 1999), which is the focus of this book. By physical culture we are referring to those activities where the body itself – its anatomy, its physicality, and importantly its forms of movement – is the very purpose, the raison d’être, of the activity. The chapters in this book are concerned with a preoccupation with the body, a cultivation of the body by means of motor activity – in other words, our focus is on the active body; in the case of disability, the body that once was active (Chapter 8), and in the case of the technologized body, one that suggests humanity and immanent movement (Chapter 12). The book makes reference to a range of activities, including dance (Chapter 2), female striptease (Chapter 6), and various sports and other forms of physical recreation and exercise.

The different chapters cover different historical periods and social contexts, but a key feature of them all is the relation between the personal and the social body. This is fundamentally a relation of power linked to other key people, ethnicities, genders, histories, ideologies, religions, institutions, and politics. Taking account of the personal and the social derives from social constructionism, an approach which ‘interprets the human body as a system of signs which stand for and express relations of power’ (B. Turner 1996:27) and uses deconstructivist techniques – essentially the techniques of questioning and critiquing the taken-for-granted in order to uncover mythologies and conflicts. B. Turner (ibid.) argues that, ‘Deconstructivist techniques, anti-foundationalist epistemology and feminist theory have provided powerful tools for treating the body as a problematic text, that is as a fleshly discourse within which power relations in society can be interpreted and sustained. The critique of the text of the body therefore leads into a critique of power relations within society.’

In each of the chapters of this book, it is clear that the particular body in question is socially constructed – influenced, changed, adapted, reproduced according to social relations and social structures – and that integral to these processes are unequal relations of power. Even in the case of the paralyzed body which is physically unable to move and therefore appears to be resistant to social constructionism, in the very personal accounts of disabled ex-rugby players in Chapter 8, we can see how their experiences of bodily impairment are part of culture, how they are linked to the world outside their bodies by the immediacy of physiological and practical needs, and how their sense of time and feelings of loss are mediated by personal circumstances as well as the wider politics of disability. This relation between individual body processes and social processes has influenced the writing of each of the chapters in the book.

The nexus between the personal, the social, and relations of power is integral to the argument in Chapter 10 that the character of postmodern sport spills over into other aspects of personal and social life in society, described for this reason as a ‘sportocracy’. The personal–social–power link is also very obvious in the case of embodiment and political interventions – such as in Nazi Germany, referred to in Chapters 2 and 3 – in the context of which two individuals, Rudolph Laban and Max Schmeling, negotiate political strictures and construct the dancing body and the boxing body, respectively. In the context of Islam (discussed in Chapter 4), politico-religious ideologies, tied to patriarchal domination, ensure that the personal lives and bodies of Muslim women are circumscribed by political and social structures of power; and in Chapter 11 the discussion focuses on how the concrete force of racist ideology is a major influence on the individual sporting careers of black athletes. The link between the personal and the social in the other chapters is made through examining: (i) the political and social processes that enable sport medicine to claim the athletic body as an object of practice and how medicalization is implicated in the construction of athletic identities (Chapter 9); (ii) the way in which the individual bodies of young women in the USA are represented in the publicity material of the Women’s Sports Foundation (Chapter 5); (iii) the social and cultural milieu of post-war Canada that was the location for commercialized female striptease artists and elite sportswomen (Chapter 6); (iv) the ways in which technologies are intertwined with physical bodies by means of visual digital culture (Chapter 12); and, finally, (v) the experiences and attitudes of prize fighters in the USA – especially those concerning the boxer’s body – that are influenced by the different dimensions of the boxing subculture and the social world outside (Chapter 7).

The examples of the body in physical culture outlined above are wide ranging. Each of the chapters confirms for us that the body has undeniable biological and physiological characteristics that appear as ‘natural’ and indisputable in commonsense thinking, but that these very personal and personalized beliefs are only experienced and understood within a social context. In other words, there is a clear relationship between the anatomy of the body and social roles, so that our bodies are at the same time part of nature and part of culture.

The concept of the ‘natural’ body is deconstructed throughout the book. In some of the chapters there is a very real sense in which the ‘original’ body is manipulated. Elite sport provides a context in which, through numerous performance-enhancing techniques, the character of the body is dramatically altered, appearing to be inauthentic and ‘unnatural’. The most extreme examples of such bodily alienation took place in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the cold war, when a systematic hormonal high-dosage doping programme was promoted by the government. Women and adolescent girls were targeted because the amazing improvements in their sport performances greatly increased the medal count and national prestige. But very damaging side effects were widespread, grossly and often irreversibly changing body morphology and function. Girls experienced strong virilizing side effects, induced ambiguous sex characteristics, including androgenous facial features, excessive chest and pubic hair growth, lowering of the voice, and disturbances in libido. Liver damage, long-term amenorrhea, acne, and severe gynaecological disorders were regular occurrences (Franke and Berendonk 1997). The case of the GDR athletes is extreme, but other less damaging body-changing and performance-enhancing techniques remain endemic in elite sport. Although the medicalization of Canadian elite athletes, described in Chapter 9, is a far less dramatic and more ‘humane’ example of intense sport training procedures, claimed to be in keeping with the traditional amateur ideals of fair competition between ‘natural’ athletes, it is another level of the same ‘culture of risk’ based on body modification. Grosz (1994: x) claims that, ‘The body has … remained colonized through the discursive practices of the natural sciences, particularly the discourses of biology and medicine.’ If a continuum were drawn between the idealized ‘natural’ body at one end and the most extreme form of constructed body, then the technologized, virtual, alien body described in Chapter 12, would be at the latter end. Even in the case of cyborg bodies, there is a sense in which they are ‘flesh and blood bodies’ because they are imbued with human-like features, poses, clothes, and actions, so that there is confusion about what is ‘real’ and what is imaginery. Advances in technology have blurred the boundaries between body and machine. For example, in the case of amputee athletes with prosthetic legs, there is further confusion about authenticity and ownership of the body. The issue of body modification is not insular to physical culture and sport – society would be unrecognisable without the constant and systematic application of technology to bodies of all types and backgrounds and in all contexts. Shilling (2005:173) argues that:

The idea of ‘technological bodies’ … suggests not only that the work-based and other contexts in which we live have become more technologically dominated than ever before, but that productive techniques and knowledge have moved inwards, to invade, reconstruct and increasingly dominate the very contents of the body. This raises the possibility that the spatial and functional arrangements of the organic properties of our bodies have been altered in line with the structures of society, and to an extent which challenges conventional notions of what it is to be and to have a body.

The idea of the ‘natural’ body is a mythology, but it is an idea that is hung onto and reproduced, especially in contexts where the biological is used as an explanation for cultural inequalities and discrimination. Defined as biological determinism, this is a process that occurs in relation to gender and ‘race’ differences. In spite of evidence to the contrary, and for different reasons, both women and black Afro-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans are considered to be close to ‘nature’. Over the years, their bodies have become the properties of science and medicine, tied to the idea of a ‘fixed’ ‘natural’ state whose sporting and exercising activities have been understood in terms of causal biological explanations. The female body has been conceptualized and represented as ‘natural’ flesh embued with a caring, maternal, and gentle character, an identification that is used to restrict women’s cultural roles. For example, Chapter 4 illustrates how in establishment male discourse, the association of Muslim women with nature is used to control their bodies and limit women’s involvement in sport and exercise. The black male body has also been aligned with nature, but differently, through its association with brute strength, physicality, and innate athletic superiority, doubled with an implied intellectual inferiority. Examples of racial discrimination based on stereotypes of black male bodies in sport and the ideology of ‘natural’ superior black athletic prowess are explored in Chapter 11. There are similarities about the naturalizing of bodies in Chapter 10, where the commodification of the black body and black culture are explored as intrinsic to the idea of a ‘sportocracy’, characterized as a ‘raciological’ str...