Friday, September 26, 2008

Week 3: Sport

Ingham, Alan G. “The Sportification Process: A Biographical Analysis Framed by the Work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Freud.” in R. Giulianotti (ed.), Sport and Modern Social Theorists, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. pp. 11-32.

Hargreaves, J. “The body, sport and power relations.” In J. Horne, D. Jary, & A Tomlinson (Eds.), Sport, Leisure and Social Relations. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1987. pp. 139-159
King, Samantha and Mary G. McDonlad. “(Post)Identity and Sporting Cultures: An Introduction and Overview,” in Sociology of Sport Journal, 24 (1). pp. 1-19.

King and McDonald’s intro to the 2007 special symposium issue for the Sociology of Sport Journal grew out of a 2004 NASSS conference panel that addressed the topic of (post)identity and sporting cultures because questions of identity and inequality remained at the center of debates in social theory since the founding of NASSS 25 years earlier. The authors outline three basic theoretical and methodological approaches to research within the sociology of sport: an “identity politics” framework that seeks to discern injustices done through sport to particular groups based on their identities; a Marxist or Neo-Marxist approach; and a hybrid approach that seeks to combine the two previous approaches. Within each approach are post-modernists who question the notion of a self-identical sporting subject as well as modernists who see agency and resistance possibilities in a politicized identity. Their own article attempts to identify and examine some key moments in the identity debate through the lens of feminist theory while focusing on sporting culture.
King and McDonald identify that feminists examined identity and inequality through a Marxist lens, investigating the sexual division of labour. Standpoint epistemology proposed to wed Marxism to feminism by understanding how women are constructed as subordinate, but also how male sport structures operate to keep them that way. Feminist thinkers were also influenced by the politics of antiracism and identity that championed personal experience. This led to intersectional analysis that investigated how subjectivities are produced within intersecting matrices of domination and subordination, inclusion and exclusion, etc. The authors show the small influence of psychoanalysis on feminist conceptions of sport before moving on to queer theory. Queer theory was heavily influenced by Foucault who thought that power should be understood as the mechanism that produces identities, both normal and deviant.
In their short concluding section King and McDonald state that their intention was not to declare a winner in the debate on the place of identity within feminist theory. But, for our own fun, can we declare any winners? I can’t help but think that issues surrounding identity or (post)identity serve only to confuse the main problem of capitalism – that it functions by constructing and re-inforcing inequalities. I think capitalism is instrumental in creating identities. Marx showed us that 150 years ago and perhaps we have muddied the waters ever since. Feminist theory, whether influenced by queer theory (or vice versa), insectionality, critical race theory, etc., has helped us understand identity, but I still struggle to understand the connection between identity politics and the inequalities within capitalism. I believe that everything is reducible to money and material, and creating divisions in society based on identity just gives those with money and material (capital) the ability to hang on to that capital based on racism, sexism, etc. I would love to hear what others think about this.
Hargreaves starts with a familiar problem to this class so far, the dualism of mind and body that has served to eliminate the body from the social sciences. He discusses the body’s relationship to power in the modern era to show that the dominant form of control is an expansive system of self discipline and surveillance based on stimulation and satisfaction of desire that is clearly identifiable in the way the body is deployed in consumer culture. Hargreaves seeks to show how the body, deployed in sporting activity and physical recreation, relates to this transformation towards a consumer culture. He traces the historical connections between the body, sport and power to show a developing tension between how the body was deployed in a repressive disciplinary mode epitomized by athleticism, the philanthropic strategy, and respectable sport activity on the one hand, and the hedonistic, disorderly deployment of the body epitomized by disreputable sports and sport as commercialized entertainment on the other. According to Hargreaves, this tension was resolved in favour of deploying the body in sport as a means of individual expression. Consumer culture and sport have a rosy relationship because they are both concerned with using the body in the constitution of the normal individual.
Hargreaves states that “the image of the body in sport does not coincide in every respect with those circulating in consumer culture.” (p. 152) He goes on to add that sports culture is enabled to articulate with consumer culture precisely because as an “autonomous cultural formation” it can make a unique contribution to cultural production in general. Is categorizing sports culture as “autonomous” problematic? Does it not assume that all sport can be seen as “purely sport” and separate from all other forms of cultural production? Is it? I think that sport is connected to so many other areas of culture and studying it as something separate, something that exists on its own, is problematic.
Ingham engages in a “synthetic exercise” in which he takes one key theme from Marx (valorization), Weber (rationalization), Durkheim (collective representation), and Freud (repression) to explain the sportification of play and agonal games as they intersect our biographies. (Not 100% sure what he means by “biographies” here) According to Ingham, this exercise will help us understand social relations in the contemporary institution of sport. The institution of sport offers particular resolutions to the contradictory relations between our selves and the broader social order. After initially disliking this article because I did not understand what he was really trying to do as I read, I came to enjoy it by the end of the reading (especially the Durkheim section in relation to my own research and writing). In the conclusion he indicates that he sought to demonstrate that these classic social theorists have gone unsurpassed in theorizing social development. I think he hits the nail on the head here, sort of. But what do we think about his insistence on reading the classics and using them in your own work? I tend to think that going back to these theorist’s original texts and thinking that the answers somehow lie in their work is somewhat dangerous. Freud, Marx, Durkheim, etc, were all people just like everyone else, as opposed to the gods that Ingham tends to say that they were. I see no harm in reading updated versions of their work by modern theorists. I’m curious to know what others think of his idea on that.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Week 2 Health

Foucault, M. (1978). Right of death and power over life. History of sexuality, vol 1 (pp. 135-159). New York: Vintage.

Crawford, R. (2006). Health as a meaningful social practice. Health, 10, 401-420.

Klawiter, M. (2008). Selections from The biopolitics of breast cancer: Changing cultures of disease and activism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault asserts that the beginning of the seventeenth century was marked by the replacement of the ‘ancient right to take life or let life’ with a power that fosters life or disallows it to the point of death. According to Foucault this power over life evolved in two basic forms: an anatomo-politics of the body and a bio-politics or regulatory controls of the population. The disciplines of the body and the regulation of society are the two poles in which the power over life was now organized. Sex provided an avenue to both the ‘life of the body’ and the ‘life of the population’. The politics of sex revolved around junctures of the ''body'' and the ''population.'' Sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the threat of death. The main power mechanism of blood lineage was replaced with an ‘analytics of sexuality’. The anatomo-politics and bio-politics are made up of technologies and knowledge of the body that extends power beyond the state to the fields of medicine, education and the state. The mechanisms of power are now addressed to the body and to life instead of its preceding preoccupation with death and sanguinity.

Foucault describes power as being decentralized, that is, power is everywhere and nowhere. With a federal election in both the U.S.A. and Canada I am reminded of the question, “who’s in power”? In other words, what political party is in power? Have we ‘still not cut the head off the king’?

Crawford’s article illustrates the recent emphasis that has been placed on ones life or this life (as opposed to the afterlife). He provides a historical analysis of the health (healthism) movement. One of Crawford’s main points is the multiple meanings and metaphors ‘health’ has come to encompass, namely, health as a symbol of control, health as individual responsibility and health as a stratifying or ‘othering’ mechanism. Linkages between the development of health as a personal responsibility, neo-liberal ideology and middleclassness are discussed. The paradox of individualizing the responsibility of health and the proliferation of health based risks that are beyond the individual such as environmental issues is examined.

What is Crawford saying about health practices in the 21st century? The movement toward contemporary health practices involved neo-liberal ideology and the emergence of the professional middle class. Crawford states a wall has been built based on the symbol of individual control that cannot be breached. Does this mean Crawford thinks there will never be a socialist or democratic perspective on public health?

The biopolitics of breast cancer: Changing cultures of disease and activism is a study of the breast cancer movement that looks beyond the state as the key ‘mobilizer’ of social movements in response to poststructuralist and feminist critiques. Using Foucault’s conceptualization of power and ‘social movements without a sovereign’, Klawiter provides an alternative analysis of the breast cancer movement in the San Francisco Bay area during the 1990s. Klawiter discusses her approach by first discrediting previously popular methods of analyzing social movements for their fixed attention to the role of the state. Klawiter takes her analysis beyond the state and acknowledges the dynamic participation of various social actors and institutions in the Bay area breast cancer movement. Questions of how and why the breast cancer movement occurred are contributed to changes in the anatomo-politics and bio-politics of breast cancer.

How has Klawiter used the concept of a social movement without a sovereign? Is she simply referring to a decentralized and diverse concept of power in the Bay area breast cancer movement?

A common thread of technologies of the body, power and health wove through this week’s readings. However I am not entirely sure how to take them up as a package. It was helpful to see some modern application of Foucault’s concepts clearly in the Klawiter article and somewhat discernable in Crawford’s piece. There was a lot going on in all the articles, I am looking forward to reading your responses.

Friday, September 12, 2008

Week 1 - The Body

Welcome to the first blog entry for Sport in Theory.

Freund, P. (1988). Bringing society into the body: Understanding socialized human nature. Theory and Society, 17, 839-864.

Bynum, C. (1995). Why all the fuss about the body: A Medievalist’s perspective. Critical Inquiry, 22, 1-33.

Fanon, F. (1967). The fact of blackness. Black skin, white masks (pp. 109-140). New York: Grove Press.

Freund addresses social science’s “disembodied” view of human beings. In dualistic thinking so typical of Western thought, he states, the social sciences assign mind priority over the body, removing it from its embodied form. Within this approach mind and body do not interpenetrate each other, and thus persons stand in opposition to the environment of which they are a part. Although some sociologists are beginning to understand that social actors have bodies that are integral to human existence, Freund argues that they still gloss over important aspects in the interplay between mind, body, and society. Basically, he stresses the need to consider the social construction of the body. In doing so, he attempts to “bring society into the body” by giving the body it deserved place in sociological theory.

Freund suggests that the mind, society, and the body dynamically interpenetrate each other. I find this idea fascinating, especially when he talks about socially constructed bodies acting as “concrete manifestation and prototypes” that relay ideas about what a socially appropriate body should be and how this is a mechanism of social control. To relay this point he points to gender and how women’s bodies are socially constructed as weak, and in turn weak women’s bodies are held up as the prototypical (or normal) woman’s body. I liked this article because it provided some background into how the body has been theorized in the past, but it seems to narrowly argue one simple idea – the physical body has a profound effect on society, and vice versa. Is the main argument really that simple? Is Freund really just trying to ensure that the body has its deserved place in sociological theory? On the surface that seems like an attainable and rather easy task.

Bynum’s article is an attempt to bring out the body that eats, that works, that dies, that is afraid into recent writings on the body. She starts by examining the definition of “body” to find that the term can refer to different things. She makes three general observations about writings on the body: discussion on the body has typically focussed on sex and gender; current sets of understandings of the body seem characterized by discomfort or uneasiness with the subject matter; many current analyses are dualist in nature, identifying the body with nature and the female. Bynum wants to get past those observations and investigate issues relating to bodies and embodiment that are missing in current studies of the body. She does this by discussing her own research on the European Middle Ages and the widespread medieval concern about “the body that dies.” According to Bynum, contemporary academics have tended to overlook questions of identity and death, questions that today’s popular culture have been asking all along. Theorists of the body do not look at what our popular culture indicates we are actually worrying about (survival, bodily stuff, desire), issues people worried about in the European past as well. Medieval theories about the body that dies addressed issues of identity and individuality, physicality and desire.

Bynum talks about a her friend who is starting a women’s studies program in Europe that suspected that a conversation between medieval ideas and modern ones might reintroduce into her classroom something of the stuffness of body that she found missing in contemporary literary and feminist theory. This friend mentions that so much written about the body dissolves into language. To me this simply means that ideas of the body get lost in language, that the body becomes an abstract concept. However, in reality the body is something that we can touch, experience, see – a physical reality. What is your take on the body dissolving into language?

Franz Fanon’s chapter titled “The Fact of Blackness” from Black Skin, White Masks situates the black body as the main reason for black marginalization at the hands of white men. In it, Fanon comes to grips with his body, his black body. “In the white world,” he states, “the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness.” (p. 110) What Fanon is saying is that his body predetermines his identity in the world. Despite his intelligence, despite his hard work, despite his education, he is first and foremost a black man. At one point he notes that “the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema.” (p. 112) I think he means that what he actually is, his flesh and blood, the person that he knows himself to be crumbles away in the face of what others think of him, the racial idea that white people hold towards black men.

What do we think of Fanon’s treatment of black women, or lack of attention to issues surrounding black femininity? I find it a little strange that Fanon sees the marginalization of black people as the oppression of black men at the hands of white men. Furthermore, I would imagine that Fanon thought the struggle for black rights was a war to be fought by black men. I don’t know? Perhaps for the benefit of black women, but still, it appears that the actors here are male. Should this matter? Can we fault him for such a misogynist approach when it is obvious that his ideas of the body and race were revolutionary?