Jim McKay

Beyond the Limits of Technocratic Physical Education

As part of their quest to secure academic credibility, physical educators in Australia, Canada, Britain, and the United States have increasingly privileged empirical–analytical forms of research. We argue that this strategy has resulted in a montage of professional values and practices that we term technocratic physical education (TPE). We contend that TPE is based on ideologies of professionalism, scientism, and instrumental rationality, which articulate one-dimensional definitions of excellence in teaching, the body, and sport and also marginalize issues related to political and moral ends. By drawing on the traditions of critical pedagogy and reflective teaching, we suggest some ways in which the limits of TPE can be transcended in pre- and inservice teacher education curricula.

Suffragettes in satin shorts? Gender and competitive boxing

This study is an empirical and theoretical contribution to the burgeoning literature on gender and competitive boxing. By using Connells concepts of labor, power, cathexis, and representation and a combination of content and semiotic analysis, interviews, and observations, we argue that competitive boxing can be studied productively as a paradoxical gender regime that simultaneously enables and constrains how women “do” gender. On one hand, the sport encourages individual women to display physical aggression when such behavior traditionally has been deemed the antithesis of femininity. Some feminists argue that this form of physical feminism enables women to transcend essentialist discourses that restrict their corporeal power. On the other hand, women boxers in general also encounter resistance to their aspirations. For example, they are still positioned by essentialist discourses about both their bodies and capacity to develop the requisite form of controlled aggression. Strongly gendered links between bodily labor and bodily capital also mean that women have less access to resources than do men and, consequently, fewer opportunities to develop their pugilistic capital. We also maintain that competitive women boxers are implicated in a body project that tends to replicate sporting practices that some feminists and pro-feminists argue are damaging to both men and women.

Global sport? Core concern and peripheral vision

Late twentieth-century political debate has been much devoted to what Philip Schlesinger (1991: 137-8) describes as ‘the current talk of “cultural identity”, “audiovisual space” [and] “the defence of the national culture” . . .’. In broad terms, there is concern about the erosion or obliteration of national political sovereignty, of economic independence and cultural distinctiveness. The term ‘globalization’ is usually employed to characterize this process, often in a form indistinguishable from that of ‘Americanization’. This article addresses the interrelated politics, economics and cultural dynamics of one prominent component of local, regional, national and international social life sport, with particular reference to soccer. The development of international sporting competition and its concomitant global relay by the mass media highlight the conflict between intensely particular/parochial elements of sporting culture and the necessarily universalizing pressures of international sports governance and media representation. Australia, a former white colony located in the AsianPacific region, is the ground on which this analysis of globalization is undertaken.

Pornographic eroticism and sexual grotesquerie in representations of African American sportswomen

Sport is used as a lens through which ‘white’ people are encouraged to analyse how they construct and view ‘black’ people. Sport is linked to an analysis of the ways that sections of the media have framed tennis champions Serena and Venus Williams as threats. This article examines how key media spokespeople use disparaging racist and sexist stereotypes that no longer focus on female passivity and weakness to denigrate their physical power and mental strength. It argues for a new critical race consciousness that can inform sporting commentary and media narratives to enable African American women and men to envision and achieve equality within a broader framework of social justice.

THE OVER-PRODUCTION OF US SPORTS AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF CULTURAL LABOR

This article focuses on how US professional sports utilize the New International Division of Cultural Labor to supplement an overly costly local labor pool and over-supplied local market. We argue that while the classic problem of over-production is slowly eroding the sealed-off nature of US culture, the forces of its hyper-protectionist capitalism continue to characterize sports, precluding equal exchange.

“YOU LEAVE YOUR TROUBLES AT THE GATE” A Case Study of the Exploitation of Older Women's Labor and “Leisure” in Sport

Using Connells theory of gender and power, this article explores the gender regime of lawn bowls, which is played predominantly by older people. The sport is characterized by mens exploitation of womens labor, heterosexual coupledom, and the desexualization of women. A “womans place” both on and off the playing field is clearly delineated in terms of otherness, especially as an altruistic wife, mother, and grandmother; consequently, men can bowl relatively freely, whereas womens leisure is constrained by their facilitation of mens interests.

Playing the world

Hockey equipment is designed in Sweden, financed from Canada, manufactured in Denmark, Japan, and the U.S., and distributed across North America and northern Europe. Nike has transformed itself from an Oregon distributor of Japanese shoes, and then an offshore manufacturer in Taiwan, the Peoples Republic of China, and Korea for shoes sold in the U.S., into a company with vast international sales and half a million workers earning under U.S.

Intimations of postmodernity in sports tourism at the Tour de France

1.50 a day. Phil Knights mavins have sought to stem a backlash at home by encouraging U.S. runners to see themselves as consumers rather than citizens. The firms desire to buy all conceivable social relations of use to it took a new turn at the 1999 Australian Open tennis competition, where college students were paid to occupy key seats in view of television cameras while dressed up as clones of Nike‐sponsored players and act out between points. It is hardly surprising then that the companys 1997 annual report boasts that “The ‘swooshification of the world’ should ...

Masculine hegemony, the state and the incorporation of gender equity discourse: The case of Australian sport

Despite the burgeoning literature on sports tourism research the area is dominated by descriptive and anachronistic typologies. Consequently, some scholars have called for greater connectivities between sports tourism and related academic specialities. Accordingly, this article uses a case study of the 2011 Tour de France to suggest how sports tourism research can benefit from the sociological perspective of postmodernism. We support our argument by focusing on processes of mobile subjectivities and perceived authenticity among members of a commercially organised cycling and spectating trip.

Anchoring media images of technology and sport

Although the impact of affirmative action, equal opportunity and gender equity programs on the lives of Australian women have been explored in a number of areas, state interventions related to sport have received scant attention from public policy analysts. This paper examines how the Australian Sports Commission has framed its gender equity policy in the mutually reinforcing hegemonic discourses of masculinity and corporate managerialism. It is argued that the Commissions articulation of gender equity policy in terms of ‘market‐oriented individualism’ is both constituted by, and constitutive of, the shift from a ‘patriarchal‐welfare state’ to a ‘patriarchal‐managerial state’ in Australia. The paper also provides an example of the tensions between bureaucratic and feminist discourses in the state sphere.