Pirkko Markula

The Dancing Body without Organs Deleuze, Femininity, and Performing Research

This article deals with the process of using dance performance as a way of representing feminist research. It aims to document this process through the authors own experiences of choreographing and performing a solo contemporary dance piece that embraced feminist agenda of representing a positive feminine identity. The article derives from Gilles Deleuzes theoretical concept of Body without Organs in an attempt to disread the dancing body and inhabit an alternative molecular femininity. The article concludes that a dance performance has potential to succeed as a research presentation. However, the researcher needs to proceed cautiously by retaining a close connection to the audiences experiences yet assuming a clear theoretical vision.

See Spot Run: Movement as an Object of Textual Analysis

As physically active people and researchers of physical activity, the authors have trouble translating their movement experiences into words. To them, words seem inadequate for expressing the physical, therefore, “How does one research movement?” The authors first questioned textual representations of movement and sport in a 1996 conference presentation. This article includes their personal movement experiences as a dancer and a runner, respectively, to discuss the nature of contemporary social science research. The authors demonstrate how any experience, not just movement, is always transferred into an object of textual analysis. This conclusion has led the authors to question the privileged nature of language and written research, which they believe turns movement into a disembodied practice. Furthermore, always representing movement experiences with words may mean failing to ask critical questions concerning what it means to be human.

Introducing Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management

Issues of weight, size and body management have become highly salient for those living in Westernised cultures at the beginning of the 21st century. At this time, one of the most powerful ways in which bodies are given meaning is through the sociocultural significance accorded to body weight. Rather than existing merely as ‘undesirable’ and ‘desirable’ aesthetic forms, fatness, thinness and emaciation are imbued with potent cultural meanings, and personal characteristics are attributed to individuals based upon their physical dimensions. At the height of the so-called worldwide obesity epidemic, it is now generally inconceivable to consider that someone with a body considered fat is also healthy (in either mind or body). Furthermore, adiposity has become associated with being ‘at risk’ for the development of associated health problems regardless of the actual health status of fat bodies. Poor health has been added to the collection of negative associations that cohere around large bodies, including laziness, stupidity, unattractiveness, psychopathology, badness and immorality (Campos, 2004; Gard & Wright, 2005; Joannisse & Synnott, 1999). In contrast, and as many commentators have previously discussed, in Westernised societies the (appropriately) slender body continues to be revered as the sign of a well-regulated life reflective of a multiplicity of individual achievements including, among others, health, normality, sex appeal, success, beauty and control (e.g., Bordo, 1993; Burns, 2004; Lupton, 1996; Malson, 1998).

The Moving Body and Social Change

In this article, I aim to examine the possibilities for transcending neo-liberal individuality and the fixed construction of the feminine identity by engaging the force of the active, moving body. While poststructuralist theory has been helpful in terms of illuminating the problems with current attempts to initiate change, accounting for the body requires an added engagement with the materiality of the body and the mechanics of movement. Drawing from theoretical insights by Foucault, Deleuze, and Latour, I discuss my attempt to develop a movement practice informed both by social theory and the principles of anatomical and biomechanical analysis. Using my experiences as a fitness instructor, I explore if it is possible to practice movement differently beyond the biopolitics of neo-liberalism.

Reading Media Texts in Women’s Sport: Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

This chapter provides a methodological guide for researchers interested in conducting qualitative media analysis in sport studies. Instead of asking each contributor to include a method section in their chapters we have chosen to devote a whole chapter to the methodological aspects of feminist sport media analysis. While there are several qualitative methods that are designed for analysis of language, we have chosen to focus on critical discourse analysis (CDA) developed by Norman Fairclough and a modified form of Foucauldian discourse analysis. Several of the contributors analyse media content through a critical feminist lens and it is, therefore, pertinent to introduce CDA in this chapter. In addition, Barker-Ruchti (chapter 11) uses Foucauldian analysis in her examination of Swiss media coverage of the triathlete Karin Thurig so that the readers can witness a further example of this type of media analysis. Where the contributors use other analytical methods, they introduce their theoretical perspectives in more detail in their chapters. These include Derridean deconstruction (see Markula, chapter 5), psychoanalysis (see MacNeill, chapter 3) and narrative writing (see Martin, chapter 10). As this book intends to celebrate theoretical variety, we do not argue for the ‘best way’ to analyse media, but wish to draw attention to the interconnectedness between theoretical premise and method in feminist sport media analysis.

(Im)Mobile bodies: Contemporary semi-professional dancers’ experiences with injuries

The purpose of this research was to examine semi-professional contemporary dancers’ experiences with injuries. Similar to athletes, dancers are often injured. Much of the previous research on dance injuries, however, has focused on ballet where the professional requirements and high technical level create demanding work conditions. Semi-professional contemporary dance differs from this context due to its technique and work environment. In this study, I investigate how contemporary dancers experience injuries. From a Deleuzian perspective, I examine the connections between the body, injury, and the dancing identity within the culture of contemporary dance. The empirical material from semi-structured interviews revealed that while most participants suffered injuries, they generally ignored their injuries and continued to dance as, they argued, their passion for contemporary dance overrode the need for caring for their injuries. Consequently, the cultural environment for amateur dance facilitated injury experiences similar to professional dance.

Reading Yoga: Changing Discourses of Postural Yoga on the Yoga Journal Covers

Postural yoga has become a very popular physical activity in the United States. In this process, yoga has also transformed into multiple different forms. In this article, I employ Foucault’s theoretical work to understand how yoga has become appropriated in the U.S. media by analyzing the covers of a popular yoga magazine, the Yoga Journal. My Foucauldian discourse analysis indicated that while the Yoga Journal covers have changed quite significantly over 35 years, the magazine appeared to offer a model for “holistic arts of living” for contemporary (middle class) Americans. These “arts” evolved into a simple life of love, joy, and inner strength in the middle of the modern distractions. However, on the Yoga Journal covers, postural yoga also developed into a practice of finding one’s “true self,” creating a lithe yoga body, and becoming a conscious consumer. When read through the covers of a popular magazine, postural yoga Americanized, feminized, and commercialized into a Western fitness practice increasingly governed by the neoliberal rationale.

Critical bodies: discourses of health, gender and consumption

The aim of Critical Bodies has been to demonstrate an understanding of body weight and body management as always political and intertwined with a multiplicity of discourses including health, medicine and identity. Consequently, the meanings attached to weight are dynamic, fluid and context dependent. The authors in this book wanted to challenge conventional understandings about weight and body management as individual problems. The chapters in Critical Bodies showcase work that represents a range of critical, post-structuralist and social constructionist research to examine meaning making around body weight as a social, rather than a private, process.

Poststructuralist Feminism in Sport and Leisure Studies

This chapter highlights how poststructuralist thought can inform feminist research in leisure and physical activity. It first discusses the foundation of poststructuralism, to then focus on the thoughts of three French theorists—Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida—and their strands of poststructuralism. Through the introduction of the main concepts put forward by these scholars, the chapter aims to further emphasize the potential of poststructuralism for feminist analysis of leisure and physical activity.

“Good Athletes Have Fun”: a Foucauldian reading of university coaches’ uses of fun

Abstract Fun is deeply ingrained in the ways we talk about and understand sport: Having fun is what makes sport positive and healthy. Drawing on a Foucauldian perspective, we problematize how fun, a psychological construct, informs coaches’ practices. Interviews with 10 varsity coaches from a Canadian university indicated that the coaches used fun to overcome the ‘grind’ of physical skill training. In addition, fun was used to develop and naturalize a need for athletes’ positive psychological traits and skills. In their training contexts, thus, the coaches clearly employed fun to reinforce their use of a number of dominant disciplinary training practices. As a result, instead of operating as a positive force for athlete engagement, the incorporation of fun further legitimized and perpetuated coaches’ ‘normal’ training practices.