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Table of contents
No. 3 - Volume 2 (2014)
Sport
Edited by Henriette Gunkel / Olaf Stieglitz
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Henriette Gunkel / Olaf Stieglitz: Verqueerte Laufwege – Sport & Körper in Geschichtswissenschaften und Cultural Studies.
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Starting with the observation that contemporary media coverage of sports events and athletes is clearly influenced by critical scholarship on the body in the humanities, this editorial outlines the different ways sporting bodies over the last decades have moved into the focus of scholarly attention in Sports History and in Cultural Studies. The authors argue that although trendsetting developments in Cultural Studies were adopted by historians only reluctantly and belatedly, the history of ‘bodies in motion’ has now flourished into a significant subfield of Sports History in general. In order to facilitate the ongoing dialogue between different academic traditions the editorial suggest three areas for further research from which Sports History might benefit in future: the integration of Queer Theories, an increased attention to cultural and technological borders of human bodies, and matters of doping. Finally the authors introduce the essays of this issue of Body Politics and underline their contributions to a history of ‘bodies in motion.’
Perspectives
Synthia Sydnor: A History of Synchronized Swimming .
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In writing my history of synchronized swimming, I was loyal to the canon of historical methodology and theory, I was true to my grounding in classical source use, I was faithful to observing continuity and change, I was conscious of the complex problems concerning truth, relativism, and representation that are entangled in the practices of being an historian. And out of my allegiance to these things, I re-membered synchronized swimming, producing what I believe is my finest work in the twentieth century discipline-genre known as “sport history.”
Karin Harrasser / Henriette Gunkel / Olaf Stieglitz: Wieviel Technology ist im Laufschuh? – Ein Gespräch mit Karin Harrasser an der Schnittstelle von Kulturwissenschaft und Sportgeschichte.
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In this interview Karin Harrasser, author of a recently published book, entitled ‘The Body 2.0’, discusses the relationship between sports, technology, and notions of body enhancement. Focusing on how the Paralympic Games in London 2012 were staged and on the debate around the prostheses (cheetas) of sprinter Oscar Pistorius, Harrasser emphasizes her notion that sports produce ‘superhumans’ that challenge the established ideology of fairness which forms the base of classifying different bodies in sports. Moreover, Harrasser stresses the necessity of dialogue between Cultural Studies and Sports History when dealing with issues of bodies and technologies in sports.
Analysis
Jörn Eiben: Ist der Fußballer im Bilde? Körpergeschichte und Bildquellen.
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This article focuses the visual distribution of football-players' bodies in the German Kaiserreich between 1898 and 1907. It is not an appeal to historians, targeted to raise an awareness for visual sources, but a case study following two distinct aspects. The first aspect concerns the visual mediation of a certain knowledge about the body. This mediation will be analysed following the visual representations of the goalkeeper taking up the ball from four German handbooks on football. The second aspect is targeted at the coeval reception of football-players' bodies. In the Kaiserreich several critical and polemic essays were published, in which the (alleged) negative effects of football on the individual's body and mind were discussed. These ‘accusations‘ did not remain on textual level, but were also visually condensed. One of these, i.e. the caricature on the frontispiece of the most prominent polemic on football, which was modelled on a photograph depicting a certain, football-specific “technique of the body” (Mauss), will be analysed.
Christian Orban: Body Work – Körperpraxis und Selbstverhältnis afroamerikanischer Leichtathletinnen in den 1930er und 1940er Jahren.
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In the 1930s and 1940s an all-black team from the segregated rural South dominated American women’s track and field. Representing Tuskegee Institute (Alabama), a renowned historically black college, the female student-athletes captured multiple championship titles and trophies. Their sporting success story culminated in Alice Coachman’s performance at the 1948 Olympic Games when she became the first black woman to win a gold medal. The article decenters and deconstructs this impressive track record. In so doing, sport history is linked to the history of the body and the self. It therefore explores a multilayered regime of embodied work that was designed to regulate black female bodies to engender socially responsible selves. At the same time, it perceives bodily practices as techniques of the self and emphasizes the agency of black sportswomen. Analyzing a particular historical configuration the article shines a light on the nexus of modern sport and embodied subject formation.
Markus Stauff: The Accountability of Performance in Media Sports – Slow-Motion Replay, the “Phantom Punch”, and the Mediated Body.
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Research to date has primarily investigated the formation and the ideological construction of the body in sport. In contrast, the pivotal question here is how media technologies address the body in modern sports in order to make performance comparable and verifiable, i.e. accountable. In the first part, a historical review shows how since the 19th century modern competitive sport have increasingly incorporated new technologies in order to make different aspects of athletic performance accessible. In this process, the body is fragmented and abstracted (as in statistics), yet it is also complemented by nonphysical aspects of performance (tactics, mental states, etc.). The second part analyses this assemblage of different forms of knowledge in relation to slow-motion replays. Both the technical development of slow-motion as well as its first spectacular application (as on Mohammed Ali’s “phantom punch”) demonstrate how, in the endeavour of making sports more transparent via media technology, the body becomes only one of many elements at play.
Kathrin Zehnder: Man rennt ja nicht mit dem Penis – Eine Analyse medizinisch vergeschlechtlichter Frauenkörper im Sport.
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Even if women historically have increasingly entered into the maledominated sphere of, the strict gender segregation remains unquestioned. Gender appears to be 'natural' due to the lower performance of the female body. The question to which category an athlete belongs to is not always easy to answer though and criteria to determine the sex of an athlete must be found. The so-called 'sex tests' often concern persons with intersex conditions or "differences of sexual development (DSD) syndromes". In this article I will examine, from different theoretical perspectives, how women's bodies are negotiated in sports. I outline how a woman's body in sports generally questions femininity and heteronormativity and how gender segregation reproduces certain norms. It is the field of medicine, as will be shown, which transforms the sports body (which simply has a gender) into a 'sex body ' (which is a gender itself).
Friederike Faust / Corinna Assmann : Queering Football – Körperpraktiken im Frauenfußball zwischen Normierung und Destabilisierung der Geschlechterordnung.
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In preparation of the FIFA World Cup 2011, German football officials used a strategy to feminize and heterosexualize women footballers in the media. In doing so they attempted to raise the sport’s popularity, which afterwards has led to the widely acknow-ledged thesis of the ‘feminization of women’s football.’ In this article, we argue that the at-tempts made by marketing and media experts to undo the non-conforming gender performance of female athletes are limited to the marketing body of the players. The athletic body of the players, by contrast, is widely neglected in the ‘feminizationthesis.’ With this distinction between a marketing and an athletic body, we aim to illustrate the simultan-eity of affirmative body practices as well as subversive practices of queering in order to do justice to the complexity and contingency of the mediated subject in football. Based on a qualitative analysis of sport photographs taken during a women´s football tournament, we identify the athletic body’s potential to destabilize the heteronormative gender order.
Open Section
Peter-Paul Bänziger: Vom Seuchen- zum Präventionskörper? Aids und Körperpolitik in der BRD und der Schweiz in den 1980er Jahren.
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Based on popular media and AIDS education posters from Germany and Switzerland I distinguish two main phases within the history of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. The first of them comprises the period from the beginning of the so-called »AIDS crisis« to the mid-1980s, during which AIDS was constructed as a disease of the (sexual) other. In this context of sexist, racist, and classist discourses about »the plague«, a connection of AIDS and male homosexuality came to the fore that was unknown in the 1970s debate on the recurrence of infectious diseases. The second phase began around 1985 when the focus of the AIDS prevention programs was gradually shifted from »risk groups« to »risk behavior« – not least in response to the harsh criticism raised by grassroots groups. This transformation, I argue, came along with a re-subjectivation of the sexually active individual as self-reliant and socially responsible. Furthermore, the emergence of the risk discourse was accompanied by an iconography of a healthy and athletic »prevention body«. Since the early 1990s it increasingly replaced the haggard and diseased »AIDS body« that had dominated the iconography of AIDS throughout the previous decade.
Nina Mackert: “I want to be a fat man / and with the fat men stand”. US-amerikanische Fat Men’s Clubs und die Bedeutungen von Körperfett in den Dekaden um 1900.
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This article picks up the history of US-American Fat Men’s Clubs to analyze ambivalent meanings of body fat in the decades around 1900. These clubs – and the newspaper reports about them – are remarkable because they operated in an historical period in which the meaning of body fat changed. At that time, fatness came to symbolize excessive consumption and sickness. However, it could nevertheless point to success and efficiency. Body fat was highly contested and fluid – and with it were understandings of ability and capable selves. From the perspective of critical ability studies, the article explores how fatness served as a site of conflicts over modernity and progress, consumption, productivity and health.