‘Being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’: the dancing body-subject and inhabited transcendence

Sports studies is currently dominated by the intellectualist approach to understanding skill and expertise, meaning that questions about the phenomenological nature of skilled performance in sport have generally been overshadowed by the emphasis on the cognitive. By contrast, this article responds to calls for a phenomenology of sporting embodiment by opening up a philosophical exploration of the nature of athletic being-in-the-world. In particular, the paper explores the conceptualisation of immanence and transcendence in relation to the embodied practice of dance, engaging with Merleau-Ponty’s important insight that the body can be a source of transcendence. I also draw on data from in-depth qualitative interviews with professional contemporary dancers to explore dancers’ concepts of ‘being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’, and to suggest that during the actual embodied practice of dance, dancers do not experience transcendence and immanence as they are conceptualised in philosophy. Rather, I argue, dancers experience a third mode of being that is somehow in-between these two binary terms. I have called this ‘inhabited transcendence’.     

‘Let’s work on your weaknesses’: Australian CrossFit coaching,masculinity and neoliberal framings of ‘health’ and ‘fitness’

CrossFit (CF) is one of the fastest growing exercise regimens in the world. However, sociologists have been relatively slow in examining the place of CF coaches in contemporary CF fitness culture. CF coaches are key figures in the production, promotion and consumption of CF fitness services. Therefore, coaches are a sociologically compelling group to examine. Drawing on interviews with male CF coaches in Tasmania, Australia, this paper argues that the way that CF coaches become qualified, interact with clients and understand ‘health’ and ‘fitness’ is shaped by the confluence of masculinity and neoliberalism. As CF grows in Australia alongside other fitness regimens, these findings pose a unique set of concerns for the Australian fitness industry, especially in relation to the ways that CF coaches translate the meaning and practice of ‘health’ and ‘fitness’ to their athletes.     

Mixed messages: pre-service Health and Physical Education teachers’ understandings of health and the body and the expectations of the Australian curriculum

This paper explores how a cohort of pre-service Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers from an Australian university describe and construct their understandings of health and the body. Given that the courses that these undergraduates take in their degree programme present different perspectives on health and the body, a relevant question is to what extent these perspectives adequately equip these future HPE teachers to successfully teach the recently released Australian HPE curriculum. The participants in this study were 14 pre-service teachers, 11 females and 3 males, aged between 18 and 26 at the time of the first interview. The data used for this paper were taken from a larger study and were generated through interviews, the analysis of two undergraduate course profiles and an analysis of the new National HPE curriculum. Results reveal that there are some dominant discourses in health-related courses that may have a significant impact on these students. The purpose of HPE, the role of the HPE teacher and the idea of the HPE teacher as role model are also discussed. The results suggest that pre-service teachers face several challenges and dissonances between what they learn during their undergraduate programme and what the Australian HPE curriculum expects them to teach. How pre-service HPE teachers think about and relate to health and the body is important in terms of how they think about their professional practice and the influence they may have on their future pupils.     

‘Physical Education’s First Lady of the World’: Dorothy Sears Ainsworth and the International Association of Physical Education and Sport for Women and Girls

Abstract

Dorothy Sears Ainsworth has received wide acclaim for her pioneering efforts in international relations that enhanced collaboration among female physical educators in the decades following World War II. As Director of Physical Education for Women at Smith College (1926–1960), Ainsworth became a global figure, traveling extensively and organizing the first international conference on physical education for women and girls in Copenhagen in 1949. This resulted in the establishment of the International Association of Physical Education and Sport for Girls and Women (IAPESGW), today counting over 400 members from 45 different countries. In this paper we (re)consider the largely hagiographical accounts of Ainsworth’s career and re-examine her contributions to the international stage in light of her maternalist views on female sport and physicality. Indeed, women’s difference from men dominated the discourse of many international women’s movements at this time. We consider what IAPESGW’s long-term governance by primarily white and wealthy women may have meant in terms of the organization’s focus and globalizing efforts and conclude that though Ainsworth’s essentialist approach ignored earlier feminist sporting movements, and would not outlast the more progressive winds of change in the 1970s, neither should her early contributions to establishing bonds among female physical educators globally be minimized.     

‘Notwithstanding the Discomfort Involved’: Fordson's Cup Win in 1926 and How ‘the Old Contemptible’ Were Represented in Ireland's Public Sphere During the 1920s

In the new Irish Free State, soccer, a game that had previously been popular mainly in the metropolitan centres of Dublin and Belfast, was growing rapidly in the southern province of Munster. Simultaneously, there was a push among the grass roots of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) to rid itself of the ban on participation in foreign games. Many writing in columns and letters pages of the press at the time felt that this push within the GAA to remove the ban was a sign of a complacency that came from the granting of independence. Throughout the remainder of the decade a continuous debate surrounding Irish national identity and the place of soccer in the new state was played out in the national, provincial and radical presses. All the while, the popularity of soccer in Munster continued apace, and the victory of Fordson FC in the Football Association of the Irish Free State (FAIFS) Senior Challenge Cup final of 1926 cemented the popularity of both that club and the game in Cork for the period. By examining this particular victory and setting it against the wider backdrop of the debate on soccer, it is my contention that it displays strongly the gap between the Irish people's conception of their own sense of ‘Irishness’ and the Irish identity being promoted by many journalists, GAA and Gaelic League enthusiasts and many of the new political élite.     

‘It’s alpha omega for succeeding and thriving’: parents,children and sporting cultivation in Norway

It has become increasingly apparent, internationally, that childhood is a crucial life-stage in the formation of predispositions towards sports participation and that parents are increasingly investing in the sporting capital of their children via a process of ‘concerted cultivation’. It is surprising, therefore, that parents’ involvement in the development of their children's sporting interests has received so little attention in Norway, given that sport is a significant pastime for Norwegians and participation has been steadily increasing – among youngsters, in particular – over the past several decades. Through a qualitative case study of a combined primary and secondary school in a small Norwegian city, this study sought to add to recent explorations of the role of parents in children's sporting involvement in Norway. As expected, it was evident that sport becomes taken for granted and internalised very early on in Norwegian children's lives. Less expected was the recognition that children's nascent sporting interests were often generated by sports clubs via early years schooling and, therefore, that parents played only one (albeit very important) part in the formation of their youngsters’ early sporting habits. Thus, parents, sports clubs and early years schooling appeared to form something akin to a ‘sporting trinity’ in youngsters’ nascent sporting careers. These findings may have implications for policy-makers looking towards Norway for a ‘recipe’ for sports participation.     

Sport and the New Culture of the ‘Second Golden Age’: Amsterdam’s Sporting Entrepreneurs in the 1880s and 1890s

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Amsterdam underwent important changes in its economic, social, and cultural life as the city entered what is often referred to as its ‘Second Golden Age’. Old elites gave way to new and a new more entrepreneurial culture emerged focused on mass, visible, and consumable activities, including sport, in which the body played a central role. This was especially apparent from the late 1870s and 1880s when spatial changes within the city helped to ensure that sport was increasingly the location for new kinds of associational activity and the development of new products, all underpinned by the potential for profit. Entrepreneurs such as Perry & Co., De Gruyter, and the Amsterdamsche Sport-Club were able to effect strategic combinations between the new body culture and consumerism, producing a range of new products and exploiting new technologies to create new markets. In seizing these opportunities, Amsterdam's entrepreneurs were also reproducing the concept of the trainable, measurable, and consumable body.     

‘What an absurdity’: Penny Chuter and the polemics of progress in British rowing during the early 1970s

ABSTRACT

‘What an absurdity’: thus railed ‘P. Barnsby, Male Coach’ in the Letters page of Rowing magazine in August 1973, on the appointment of Penny Chuter as professional rowing coach for the Amateur Rowing Association (ARA). The flurry of responses prompted by his letter suggest that his views were not aligned with the majority of the rowing community; yet women’s role and position in the sport was still highly contested. Chuter’s appointment as an ARA National Coach, an elite level role with responsibility for the national squad as well as coach education in clubs, complicated and extended this polemic. Situated at the intersection of societal fears around female athleticism, employment and leadership – and the ideological conflict within the conservative Amateur Rowing Association about professional coaches regardless of gender – it provoked the rowing community to express some of its most profound uncertainties and anxieties about gender, and about the sport itself and the manner in which it should be undertaken. This paper explores these anxieties within the social context of second wave feminism and related shifts in gender norms, and the sporting context of British amateur rowing in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.     

‘You can tell kind of about the body’: young children,health, fitness and fatness

Fears of an ‘obesity epidemic’ in New Zealand and elsewhere have led to a growing focus on children’s weight, diet and activities. The aim of this research project was to highlight children’s voices, stepping back from obesity interventions to explore how health and obesity discourses are taken up by young primary school children. Nine 6 and 7-year-olds took part in individual semi-structured interviews which involved play and craft activities to focus discussion. Discourse analysis was used to explore how children talked about bodies, health, fitness and fatness. Children primarily drew on a series of clear-cut dichotomies around good foods and bad foods, and being active, able and fit, as well as constructing health in relation to the body in two distinct ways: fat vs. thin, and big-and-strong vs. small-and-weak. These findings support previous research suggesting that children, from a young age, are taking up narrow corporeal constructions of health in relation to food and fitness ‘choices’, and additionally children assume that these constructions can be ‘read’ off the body. On the other hand, children were also often hesitant, and at times resisted or problematised these straight-forward constructions, occasionally drawing on alternate understandings, including notions of pleasure and practicality, moderation, and being happy and healthy. Future research could explore these ideas further, investigating how children and adults utilise alternate meanings to negotiate the complexity of bodies, health, fitness and fatness.     

Major League Baseball and the Dominican Republic: What is in the best interest of the players?

This case is about Major League Baseball and the Dominican Republic. We explore how Major League Baseball has used this Caribbean island as an inexpensive labor market and the social problems of the situation. Specifically, we examine Corporate Social Responsibility, the leadership of Sandy Alderson, ethics and the various stakeholders involved. We also look into possible reform alternatives while addressing the central question: What is in the best interest of the players?     

Reconceptualising elite athlete programmes: ‘undoing’ the politics of labelling in health and physical education

High-performance sport is a big business, with nations such as Australia and New Zealand dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of facilities and in creating sporting centres of excellence. Historically, high-performance sport and elite athlete programmes (EAPs) were regulated to an extra-curricular space in schools or local communities, but over the last couple of decades, schools in Australia and New Zealand have introduced EAPs into health and physical education (PE). Recent work has begun to explore the rationale for these programmes and their educational priorities, but little research has explored how the elite athlete body is being constructed within this curriculum space. In this paper, I consider two interrelated problems. The first concerns the conflicting discourses of winning in high-performance sport versus getting everyone healthy and active in health and PE. The second involves an explanation of how the elite athlete body is being constructed in these programmes. I argue the juxtaposition of the elite athlete body as disciplined, attractive and healthy to other bodies as lazy, unattractive and unhealthy renders the other bodies as pathological or resistant to disciplinary institutions of the school. In particular, I focus on the ways in which young people's bodies are conceptualised within EAPs in relation to recreation, health, PE and other curriculum spaces. Throughout this paper, I provide examples to illustrate how EAPs may perpetuate normative ways of thinking that legitimatise elitism in schools. I propose that under radical reform, EAPs may have the potential to provide educational value and opportunities to students. I conclude by offering the cultural studies curriculum model that retains sport and desirable educational outcomes for health and PE as an alternative to elite athlete or talent development models.     

‘How Steep is Steep?’ The Struggle for Mountaineering in the Canadian Rockies, 1948–65

This essay explores the complex struggles over the reinvention of mountaineering practices and ethics during the postwar period in the Rocky Mountains of Canada between competing interest groups of disparate climbers. Specifically, we focus on the increased challenges to the hegemony of the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) by a wave of young, working-class emigrants, who contentiously broadened the limits and operative goals/meanings of the sport in the range. In doing so, this paper examines the controversy that erupted within the climbing community over first ascent of Brussels Peak in 1948, followed by a discussion of the arrival of renowned climber Hans Gmoser (1932–2006), whose early activities in the Rockies' eastern front irrevocably challenged local tradition and the hegemony of the ACC.     

Black Males in the Stadium: All ‘Bad Niggers’? French Literature,Sport and Masculinity from the 1920s to the 1950s

In the first part of the twentieth century, ‘sports literature’ presented a new form of heroism departing from the traditional models of masculinity. The novels examined the stadiums, the boxing rings or the velodromes and noticed the existence of coloured sportsmen. Black boxers and athletes were considered as original models of manliness competing with the hegemonic masculinity, hitherto written in ‘white’. This essay intends to explore the French ‘sports novels’ published in the first part of the twentieth century. Relying on the history of masculinities and of gender, and on the methodological reflection of ‘race studies’, it examines the meeting between Black identity and athletic masculinity in literature. Thus this articles aims at showing how, through a series of stylistic, narrative and semiotic processes, the fiction essentialized the difference. Both fascinated and scared, the novels stigmatized Black sportsmen and endeavoured to analyse the alterity.     

‘The Master is the Mistress’: women and fox hunting as sports coaching in Britain

This paper explores the relationship between equestrianism and sport coaching at the turn of the twentieth century. Women were avid and admired participants in fox hunting and other mounted field sports by the mid-nineteenth century, and they expanded on this success by attaining positions of leadership in many hunts throughout Britain, specifically as Masters of Hounds. Women thus attained positions of supreme authority over, and therefore equality with, peers of both sexes well before they obtained wartime jobs after 1914 or achieved the vote in 1918. As Masters, women were teachers, trainers, mentors, managers and bosses; they were some of the first female sport coaches, advancing and revolutionising sport in a variety of ways, though such participation has yet to be fully studied or recognised. By examining the position of Master of Hounds and women’s involvement in these leadership roles, we can see how advances in sport shaped changes in social, cultural, and gender perceptions before and after the First World War.     

The Alpine Club of Canada’s ‘Mountain Heritage’: Adventure and Advocacy in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Abstract

Founded in 1906, the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) was a key proponent of mountain adventure and advocacy. This paper examines the club’s annual camps, physical culture, and conservation involvement as indicators to understand the integration of mountaineering and parks in Canada in the twentieth century. It surveys the club’s origins and highlights its shifting agendas. The ACC mountaineering camps and classic alpine ascents invented a tradition for middle-class sport and tourism in mountain parks, particularly in the Rockies and Columbia Mountains. The club advocated for climbers but also for conservation in wild places. It participated in contested debates on parks and resource use as a stakeholder on public lands. The paper argues the ACC was a leading proponent of mountain pursuits, conservation, and tourism in a complex political ecology of engaged land use for sport and recreation intertwined with physical spaces and the social production of mountain parks in Canada. Adventure and advocacy were its legacy as well as education on the land. Based on archives, alpine journals, and other published sources, the paper illustrates an integration of people and places in landscapes of sport as well as contemporary mountain adventure, tourism, and conservation issues in Canada and internationally.     

‘Christian Patriotism’ and Physical Education in Pre-Revolutionary France: The Royal Military School in Sorèze in the Eighteenth Century

The Ecole Royale Militaire of Soreze (Royal Military School) was located in the French province of Languedoc. On the eve of the 1789 Revolution it was still a religious institution run by the Benedictine monks, known for having broken with certain traditional models. The establishment offered special forms of instruction, stressing certain scientific and literary disciplines, and also physical education (fencing, dancing, horse riding, and equestrianism). Pupils’ best results were also recorded in swimming. At the end of every school year, all the results were confirmed by public examinations, labelled Exercices publics, and recorded in the Cahiers d’exercices. These materials enable the reconstruction the evolution of the school’s programmes over a period of more than a century. The incalculable richness of Sorèze’s programmes, by distinguishing the elements already present in the military training of the period from the pedagogical innovations that were introduced, demonstrate the special place that was reserved for physical exercise. This Catholic institution was thus able to develop a total coherence of the scholarly programme, considered as a source of ‘Christian Patriotism’, in pre-Revolutionary France.     

‘It’s like equality now; it’s not as if it’s the old days’: an investigation into gender identity development and football participation of adolescent girls

This article explores the influence participating in football has on the development of adolescent girls’ gender identity, an area which currently lacks academic attention. Data are taken from an ethnographic study with a group of adolescent girls and boys and compared to Jeanes’ research. A social constructionist framework was deployed with links to both critical theory and feminist literature. Qualitative and participatory methods were used to fully engage with the complex issue of gender identity. The girls within this study were aware of the normative gender expectations linked to ‘being a female’ but did not find this restrictive. The girls moved between many changing identities and organized their ‘web of selves’ accordingly. The apparent need to measure success by the parameters of male standards created a barrier to girls’ identity development.