What is this “Physical” in Physical Cultural Studies

8/10/2019 What is this Physical in Physical Cultural Studies

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Giardina is with the Department of Sport Management, College of Education, Florida State University,

Tallahassee, FL. Newman is with the School of Physical Education, University of Otago, Dunedin,

New Zealand.

Sociology of Sport Journal, 2011, 28, 36-63

2011 Human Kinetics, Inc.

What is this Physicalin Physical Cultural Studies?1

Michael D. Giardina

Florida State University

Joshua I. NewmanUniversity of Otago

In this article, we identify various points of ontological, epistemological, and

methodological intersection from which an embodied, generative Physical Cul-

tural Studies project can emerge. We follow scholars such as Ingham (1997) and

Andrews (2008) in arguing that contemporary body work scholars might benefit

from framing (Butler 2009) embodiment and corporeality within the general

coordinates of 1) cultural studies politics of articulation (as theory and method)

and radical-contextualism and 2) the cultural exigencies of the body (i.e., culturalphysicalities)and in the messy practices of reflexivity, empirical vulnerability,

and writing (as representation and performance) such embodied research as/in

practice demands.

Dans cet article, nous identifions les divers points dintersection ontologique,

pistmologique et mthodologique pouvant merger dun projet dtudes phy-

siques et culturelles gnrateur et incarn. Nous rejoignons la pense de spcialistes

comme Ingham (1997) et Andrew (2008) en soutenant que le travail corporel

contemporain dont les spcialistes pourraient bnficier en articulant (Butler 2009)

la corporalit kinesthtique dans le cadre des prceptes gnraux de 1) la poli-tique darticulation des tudes culturelles (pour ce qui sagit de la thorie et de la

mthode) et les urgences culturelles du corps (comme les physicalits culturelles),

ainsi que les pratiques compliques de reflexivit, de vulnrabilit empirique

et de lcriture (pour ce qui sagit de la reprsentation et de la performance) telle

que le requiert en pratique une telle recherche incarne.

The body cannot remain silent. Felly Simmonds, 1999, p. 237


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The Physical in Physical Cultural Studies 37

Proem

In a recent article addressing the politicized spaces of sport and human movement

sciences within the academy and corporate university alike, David Andrews (2008)cogently laid out the initial imperatives for such a critical investigation of the cul-tures of the body, and in so doing directly called on scholars operating within therealm of physical culture to focus on the moments of practicein which importantcultural physicalities emerge. Drawing from the work of cultural studies scholarsJohn Frow and Meghan Morris, he stated in part:

. . . physical culture represents a pressure point of complex modern societies(Frow & Morris, 2000, p. 352). It is a site or point of intersection, and ofnegotiation of radically different kinds of determination and semiosis, a place

where social forces, discourses, institutions, and processes congregate, congeal,and are contested in a manner which contributes to the shaping of human rela-tions, experiences, and subjectivitiesin particular, contextually contingentways. Physical culture thus incorporates numerous events, the moments ofpractice that crystallize diverse temporal and social trajectories (Frow &Morris, 2000, p. 352) through which individuals negotiate their subjectiveandfor our interests, embodiedidentities and experiences. (Andrews, 2008, p. 56)

Here Andrews reemphasizes the most pertinent of relations of and for the body:that of articulation long held as sacrosanct within the (British) cultural studies

tradition. Physical culture is important, he argues, precisely because it providesmomentary crystallines (Richardson, 1994) that illuminate discursive formations,structural determinacy, economies of power, andembodied human relations; andthus point us toward systems and practices of oppression.2

For us,3and following Andrews (2008), any discussion concerning the impera-tives of, and for, Physical Cultural Studies starts (and perhaps ends) along thearticulatory axes of politics and practice; and, more specifically, the bodyofthe researcher and researched alikeas locus of politics and praxis. Within suchan epistemological frame, we argue that the stakes of our endeavor are high. At amoment when we find ourselves engaged in the academic ritual of charting new

axiological terrain, we simultaneously find our bodies under evermore duress. Thatis to say, the contemporary body has been: 1) assailed by [global] capitals twinlogics of overconsumption (think: genetically modified food in a childs HappyMeal) and overproduction (think: corporate accumulation through the exploita-tion of underprivileged bodies); 2) gradually stripped of its plurality and subjectedto homogenizing strategies of the global popular; 3) discursively confined to theframes of heteronormative, patriarchal, xenophobic, White paranoia; 4) increasinglymediated as both an immanent threat(e.g., as carrier of influenza or of Jihadistintent) and as constantly under threat(e.g., loss of human rights); and 5) forced tobecome a mercenary apparatus forand collateral casualty ofwar and genocide

in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kashmir, Iraq, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere.Indeed, these are tough times for the body, deeply entangled as it is in the now-

banal conditions of (social and material) production and accumulation; confrontedby complex hegemonies and fundamentalist assaults on womens rights, equalrights, and social and economic justice; and enfleshed (McLaren, 1988) by the


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38 Giardina and Newman

spectacle of the fetishized commodity. We need only glimpse at the front pagesof our ever-disappearing newsprint to see headlines heralding the latest legal vic-tory for antichoice advocates or giddily proclaiming increased bodily surveillance

technologies being deployed at our airports (e.g., controversial full-body X-rayscanners), or in advertisements for the latest reality television fare trading in bodymaintenance (e.g., Project Runway), modification (e.g., The Biggest Loser), ormastery (e.g.,Man v. Food).

Put more critically, we live in an epoch in which: the imperatives of economicgrowth and corporate-enfused democracy in many cases supersede societys willto ensure the health of its young, its poor, and its suffering; the laboring and ludicvestiges of the Keynesian welfare state are being slowly eradicated in the pursuitof a pure free-market utopia; access to spaces of bodily play and health havebeen colonized and made exclusionary for the purposes of capital accumulation;

womens bodies, queer bodies, and Othered bodies of difference are still largelymarginalized in most realms of global physical culture; and when now, more thenever, the body is subjected to infantilizing, sexualizing, and objectifying disciplinaryregimes. In total, these shifts have brought about an increasingly complex admixtureof bodily contact and separation, wherein over-consuming bodies of the developedworld perpetually congregate around spectacles of late capitalism, and yet do soin ways that alienate such consumer acts from bodies residing on the other end ofthese exploitative chains of interdependence.4

If the collective task within this special issue of the Sociology of Sport Journalis to push PhysicalCultural Studiesforward to new frontiers, then our contribu-tion seeks to consider the body logics, body pedagogics (Shilling, 2007), and,ultimately, the new body ontologies (as Judith Butler [2009] would have it) ofsuch a project while still in its formative stages. In so doing, we leave the messydebates around the history and necessity of cultural studies writ large in the capablehands of others who have thus far spoken of and for the field (e.g., Brub, 2009;Grossberg, 1997; Hall, 1985; Morris, 1998; McRobbie, 2005; see also Denzin &Giardina, 2006).

As a second point of deference, we acknowledge that a critical, empirically-grounded study of the social and cultural body, such as that which we are proposing

here, is per se nothing new. Admittedly, this is a longstanding vocation shared byscholars in fields as diverse as sport studies, cultural geography, phenomenology,cultural kinesiology, health sciences, dance studies, theater studies, anthropology,critical pedagogy, labor studies, film studies, and sociology (to name but a few).Indeed, much of the critical body work emanating out of these disciplines cor-poreal turnsprovides the foundation for our own intellectual encounters. In each ofthese fields and in many others, the bodyas material form, as semiotic system, asmetabolic vessel, as contested/contestable performative formation, and as effusivefleshis understood to be a productive and significant social and cultural entity.An expanding, interdisciplinary enclave across the academy has in recent years

turned its attention toward the wide range of culture problematics created by andinterceding upon the body. Numerous, frequently cited manuscripts on the bodynow fill most libraries bookshelves and databases, dealing with topics ranging frombiopolitics and care of the self (Braun, 2007; Foucault, 1988; 1993; 2008; Frank,1998; Giroux, 2006; Kent, 2006; Krieger & Fee, 1994; Shiva & Moser, 1996) tothe sociology of mobility (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006; Packer, 2003; Urry,


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2000; 2007); from bioethics and the increasingly medicalized corpus (Foucault,1975; Gimlin, 2007; Hedgecoe, 2004; Murray, 2008; Vertinsky, 1999; Zylinska,2007) to somatic performances and performativities (Butler, 1997; Fensham, 1996;

Lloyd, 1999; Markula, 2006; Miller, 2007; Nash, 2000; Rose, 2001); and rangingacross various contemplations of the [com-]modified body (see Sharp, 2000 orScheper-Hughes, 2001).5

With the cultural bodys renewed relevance within the contemporary academy,one might ask, Is there a need for Physical Cultural Studies? One might also ask,in an era defined by the proliferation of specializations, an explosion of intrade-partmental subdisciplines, an over-abundance of rival research centers, and toomany scholarly journals, Do we really need yet another subfield (or perhaps, in ourcase, subapproach) which focuses on and through the body? To each, we offer acautionary yes. Our justifications, which follow, focus on what we believe to be

the unique epistemological and technicalpossibilitiesfor a Physical Cultural Stud-ies formationone that reemphasizes the bodys emancipatory potential throughbodily praxis. We concede that sport scholars, body sociologists, posthumanistcultural anthropologists, those writing in dance, film, theater, labor, and mediastudies, critical race and feminist scholars, and numerous others will find many ofthe driving precepts of their own intellectual projects in our modest proposal. Andin some ways, this is the point. We propose a Physical Cultural Studies that emergesnot necessarily to fill a disciplinary gap, but rather as an intellectual meeting point.Here we simply chartand in so doing open up for debatewhat we believe arecritical elements that the multifarious and heretofore unimagined contributions tosuch an extradiscplinary study of corporeality should consider.

Corporeal Epistemes6

In light of the historical present described in the proem, we believe the best inqui-ries of the bodythose which intercede on antihumane structures, practices, andsymbolic acts within cultures of the active bodymake use of bothphysical andintellectual praxis to, as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) posit, articulate

the human experience to and with these broader contextual forces. These connec-tions are meant to highlight any practice establishing a relation among elementssuch that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice (Laclau& Mouffe, 1985, p. 105).

So how does this approach differ from other types of body work? Whereasmany sociologists or anthropologists, and particularly positivists,7tend to splice therelational projections of the bodyeliciting the bodys capacity to produce mean-ing, power, physicality (usually under the theoretical guise of embodiment), or as aproduct of microlevel social forceswithin a deeply articulative Physical CulturalStudies, the body, and frames of embodiment, are understood to be dialectically-

contingent. In following Andrews (2008), then, we are notprescribing a study ofthe body whereby social theories are developed for, cast upon, and translated ontothe body. Nor are we calling for a study of the body in which a cultural studiesparadigm is grafted onto the human corpus. Rather, this is a Physical CulturalStudies that in the first and last analysis assumes meaningful, textual, sensual,lived, performative, fleshed bodies can only exist within and through articulations


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of culture(s). In this way, the body is always already entangled in the dialecticsof cultural production. Moreover, the physicalwhere ideological and materialworlds collide on and through the corporealarticulates the body to structures of

power, ideology, and determinism in ways that cannot be abstracted, predicted, ordehistoricized.

As such, we place value on the idea that the cultures of the body are neithernecessarily correspondentto the overdetermining structural realm (much like theeconomic base determining the superstructure) nor necessarily noncorrespon-dent (culture as autonomous from economic relations) (see Hall, 1985; Laclau& Mouffe, 1985). In other words, and rephrasing Andrews (2002), we might saythat the structure and influence of the body in any given conjuncture is a productof intersecting, multidirectional lines of articulation between forces and practicesthat compose social contexts. The very uniqueness of the historical moment, or

conjuncture, means there is a condition of no necessary correspondence, or indeednoncorrespondence, between physical culture and particular forces (i.e., economic).Forces do determine givennessof physical practice; however, their determinacycannot be guaranteed in advance (p. 116). Hence, the body is neither object norabject, but is always dialectic.

Furthermore, our Physical Cultural Studies project is not simply an exercisein context-mapping or abstracted corporeal cartography, but of usingthe politicaland politicized body to directly engage and interact with human activity; that is, anarticulatory praxis that produces, and is produced by, social, political, and economiccontext/s. Such a project is informed by various theoretical and methodologicallegacies; however, this approach does mark a point of departure from dominantstrands of body work being done by our colleagues in sociology, anthropology,education, and the humanitiesmany of whom often focus on the body as artifactor edifice (at once an object of theoretical discovery and empirical deconstruction).While a transnational network of scholars8has provided a substantial foundation forreformulating our critical engagement with the affective, abject(ed), and objectifiedbody (as social organism)along the way introducing a broad overview of thetheories of the body and substantive body issuesmany of these analyses oftenprovide apolitical, de-historicized examinations of the data-generative social body.9

We are not suggesting any grand discomfiture with these bodies of theoryin toto. Rather, we are simply arguing that as with any intellectual project, eachoffers a partial and unfinished perspective through which we might better under-stand movements of the body. As such, we seek out the body not for tautologicalreassurance (i.e., to test or prove theories) but rather in an effort to exact politicalchange. Similarly, we are not interested in the bodys capacity to substantiatemodern social sciences teleological endsfor it is not a site of ontological affirma-tion. And finally, we are in search of an analytical domain that extends beyond theselectively-aesthetic discursivism that has come to define much of the work beingdone in the broader field of cultural studies (a point we return to later). With this

in mind, we [almost fully] agree with sociologists Chris Rojek and Bryan Turners(2000) contention that substantial body work must be empiricaland contextual, andthat the aestheticization of life cannot be a substitute for either thick empiricalencounter or radical political critique. However, unlike Rojek and Turner (2000),whose glance toward cultural studies (and the cultural turn) saw only the aes-thetic or decorative, the [physical] cultural studies we evoke here is necessarily


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political, historical, and articulativein some ways a response to articulations andtheories evolving out of modern sociological conviction.

The key distinction for us, then, is not one of academic territorialism, but one of

metaphysics; in how we epistemologically and ontologically recognize the genera-tive capacities of the body (in producing knowledge, politics, power, etc.). Perhapsmore than post-Soviet-bloc wordplay, physical culture for us is constituted by,and constitutive of, movementsboth in the local bodily kinetic sense and in thebroader political shifts and power relations the human body brings to life. Unlikemost sociological and anthropological analyses of the static, fixed, and [un]stablebody, we see the body as a physical and discursive form, entangled in matrices ofbiopolitical and the geopolitical conflict and negotiation, moving across and withindimensions of space and time. As such, we seek a Physical Cultural Studies thatexposes the politics streaming across spatio-temporal biosociality (Rabinow,

1992); from micromolecular spaces (e.g., the human genome) to performativesomatic spaces (e.g., college rugby players or dancers on So You Think You CanDance) to the macro-flows of bodies across the globe (e.g., the army of global labormigrants building football utopias in South Africa or Qatar). By thinking about andthrough movement, we can perhaps not leave the body stranded.

The study of movement, as scholars of sociological mobilities (Urry, 2007)and anthropological routes (Clifford, 1997; Collinson, 2008) have convincinglyargued, frames the body as a dynamic, intersubjective, free-floating entity with thecapacity to escape the determinist shackles that rendered the body in a conditionof stasis within the writing of many of early-cultural studies structural Marxistforbearers. Unlike much of the work that dominates body sociology, phenomenol-ogy, or sport or exercise sociology, we do not envisage a body of separate andexaminable parts, but as a discursively-anchored physical corpus passing throughconjunctures of time and space, ideas and practice. That being said, the study ofbodily movement allows for heuristic encounters in which the corpus is understoodas a site of passagemoving as it does across temporal, metabolic, spatial, anddiscursive planes.

While there are no necessary guarantees that the moving body will pass throughthese planes in predictable ways, it does so always thrust into multiple biopolitical

formations. As such, and to rework Marx and later C. Wright Mills (1959), individu-als make their own cultural physicalities and navigate their own bodily passages,but not under conditions of their choosing. To ignore this fundamental dialecticis at once to abstract the body and to depoliticize its existence. Amid the tides ofthe academic-industrial-complex, decontextualized or antidialectic analyses of thebody are made political: for to feign political neutrality is itself a political act, onewhich bolsters the hegemony of the dominant formations of contemporary lifeandas the radical historian Howard Zinn (1994) famously reminded us, you cant beneutral on a moving train. In short, every bodily movement is itself created withinand against always jostling corporo-political tectonics.

Building on Richard Johnsons formulation of (British) cultural studies (1987),Andrews (2008) makes this point clear: Physical Cultural Studies researchersmust remain vigilant in their struggle against the disconnection that will surelyoccur if we produc[e] studies in which physical cultural forms are divorced fromcontextual analyses of power and social possibilities (p. 58). In criticallystudying the cultures ofthe body, we seek to better understand context through


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bodily practice, as well as the oppressive and liberatory potential of the humanbody as constrained by contextual forces. As such, we should strive to produceor elicit intellectual projects and public pedagogies that peculiarize the banalities

of otherwise political and politicized bodies (or, if nothing else, attempt to raiseawareness of the body dialectics at work within any given context). Indeed, byrevealing the social constructedness of the historical context acting on cultures ofthe body, those of us working within the spaces of physical culture should fostercritical consciousness among both those individuals whose social, cultural, andeconomic status is inextricably linked to past cultures of alienation and exploita-tion and those individuals whose lives continue to be challenged as a result. In thisway, we follow the Brazilian critical educator Paulo Freire (1970/2006)whosepedagogical method was a mlangeof counter-oppressive politics and emancipa-tory education, of classroom instruction and everyday encountersin cultivating

a form of popular education intended to share in the communal practice of raisingindividual consciousness (conscientization) of the political and oppressive regimesacting against the human condition.10Importantly, as Norman Denzin and MichaelGiardinas recent (2010) Freirean-informed volume on qualitative inquiry andhuman rights helps us to remember, the conduct of critical inquiry is not justabout method or technique, but likewise alsoan inherently political projectthat works toward making the world visible in ways that implement the goals ofsocial justice and radical, progressive democracy (p. 14, emphasis in original).11

In practical terms, this means subscribing to a public pedagogy that is neverneutral, just as it is never free from the influence of language, social, and politicalforces (Giroux, 2000, p. 8). The goal here is to foster an engaged social citizen-ship, in effect a version of what Peter McLaren (2000) refers to as a revolutionarypedagogythat

creates a narrative space set against the naturalized flow of the everyday, againstthe daily poetics of agency, encounter, and conflict, in which subjectivity isconstantly dissolved and reconstructedthat is, in which subjectivity turns-back-on-itself, giving rise to both the affirmation of the world through namingit, and an opposition to the world through unmasking and undoing the practicesof concealment that are latent in the process of naming itself. (p. 185)12

To wit, the fields principal [self-identified] intermediaries have often professedthat only through rigorous, empirical qualitative encounterscan we most criticallyelucidate the complexities of contemporary physical culture (e.g., Andrews, 2008;Hargreaves & Vertinsky, 2006; Ingham, 1985; Markula & Pringle, 2006; Andrews &Silk, 2011; etc.). This much we essentially agree on, with some qualification13. Quitenaturally, we are exceedingly pleased to see that more and more of our colleagueshave seriously turned their foci toward a more nuanced, pluralistic qualitativeengagement with physical culture in recent years (regardless of whatever theoreti-cal or methodological perspective they may write from). And yet, at the same time,

we continue to see within our wider field cultural analyses that too often reducethe bodies that produce physical culture to textual patterns, media representations,and/or grand corporeal narratives, or erase the researchers own body and politicsfrom any empirical discussion (or do some combination of both).

Jacqueline Reichs (2010) work on the mediated dimensions of early 20thcentury American physical culture as embodied by famed fitness guru Charles Atlas


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(born Angelo Siciliano in Calabria, Italy) is one example of the former track, asshe makes meaningful the textual discourses of body building photography andthe creation and marketing of his iconic fitness plan which allowed for his public

transformation from Italian immigrant to pillar of American masculinity (p. 450).As a work of cultural history and media analysis, Reichs article provides a livelyand revealing critical interrogation of a popular historical figure whose successand celebrity was predicated on his physicality, but it does not quite go beyondthe level of the textual, the mediated, to the level of the experiential, the sensual,or the pedagogically performative. In a related fashion, Shari Dworkin and FayeLinda Wachs (2004) contemplate the gendered discourses germane to postindustrialmotherhood in their textual analysis of Shape Fit Pregnancy(a magazine aimed atyoung, intelligent, affluent, and professional middle-class women). Their articleis a tour de forcecommentary on the popular and political forces working to shape

normative ideals of femininity, success, and healthy bodies narratives at the heightof the US health and fitness empowerment boom.14But where do we go beyondthe limits and confines of the textual?

Conversely, Anna Aaltens (2004) traditional ethnography of the balletic bodyis an example of the latter track. She reports in great detail the various aestheticsand cultural practices she observed in a high-performance ballet class, and includesinterview material with numerous dancers to shed light on the feminine embodi-ments enacted by her participants. Yet Aalten is never authorially present as anythingmore than a detached observer. While we do learn numerous insightful detailsabout ballet and its entrenchment within dance and physical culture, especiallyin relationship to the disciplinary gaze, there remains a detachment from not onlycontextual forces and politics, but also her ownbody politics.15In a similar sense,Jan Brace-Govans (2002) qualitative investigation of physically active women inballet, bodybuilding, and weightliftingwhich masterfully weaves a discussionof body work, unequal physicalities, and social power to help us better understandthe effect of the gaze on womens active, agentive bodiesand Susie Scotts(2010) observational ethnographic analysis of the swimmers body and swimmingpool etiquette in the United Kingdom, are both similarly hamstrung by the same(pardon the pun) pull suffered by Aalten.

The question then becomes: is it enough to say that such work operates underthe umbrella of PCS, or flies its proverbial banner? Perhaps in a general sense,yes, but we think the field can be pushed beyond such normative voyeurisms ofthe body. Compare, for example, the above exemplary studies of the physicalwith P. David Howes (2004) examination of the International Paralympic Com-mittees classification process, whereby competitors are classified by their bodysdegree of function (p. 500). Rather than relay a cold or detached observationalreport or constrained textual analysis, Howe uses his own body as a performativeinstrument through which to convey the psychic weight of classification on eachcompetitor, himself included:

It is my turn next after four hours in this sterile room. The wait is over, myclassification begins. To date I have undergone the process of classification threetimes. It is an alienating experience as each time a different team of individualsdetermines whether your body fits into the textbook of carnal typology that isacceptable to those who govern this aspect of Paralympic sport officialdom. My


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body is poked and prodded. It is measured. I am asked to walk, run and jumpin a room that is really not suitable for any physical activity whatsoevertoosmall to build up a head of steam while running and lacking ventilation, so that

I am grateful that I cannot run. Yet, this is unfortunate because my impairmentmeans that I have trouble controlling my muscles and stopping running is astricky as starting it. This is a result of spasticity brought on by my cerebralpalsy. In essence I am a spaz, as the public might colloquially and prejudi-cially refer to my physical state. (p. 502).

What we are writing against (as Howe so clearly does as well) is the abstrac-tion of politically-enfleshed bodies, the disappearance of authorial bodies, and themissing empirical dialectics of the self that have given way to rhetorical bravadoand, in some cases, what reads like educated guesswork. This wide-open array

of material is partially due to the vast definitional net that has been cast on workascribed to be of the PCS vein. Andrews (2008) himself, in his important essay onthe state of the field, specifically lists more than a dozen articles which, he notesin due course, illustrate the diversity of the field and stand as boundary markingexemplars of the PCS project (many of which, from a topical sense, focus on healthand/or bodily movement) (p. 55). Among the diverse repository of studies he citesare ones on transhumanism and posthumanity (Miah, 2004), cardiac rehabilitationand the medicalization of fitness (Wheatley, 2005), and the gendered politics ofcheerleading (Grindstaff & West, 2006). All important studies, in and of themselves,to be sure (as are the works cited above from Reich, Aalten, and so forth). Yet the

only ties that bind them together rest on the premise of a shared focuson thephysical or the body in its various iterations and degrees of progressive politicalintent behind such work, whether presented as a philosophical rumination (Miah)or the reporting of observational data drawn from traditional forms of ethnographicengagement with research participants (Wheatley; Grindstaff & West).

Although the above examples are illuminating pieces of scholarship in theirown right, it makes us wonder: why are they considered as representative of thePCS project or canon beyond that which we have pointed out above?16If PCSis to matter as an intellectual domainor at the least, to push the field forwardwithin the pages of this Special Issuewe believe that it has to be more than anempty metaphor, a bland descriptor of anystudy focused on anyobject residing inthe realm of physical culture: to be frank, we do not think it is not enough to writeand report on bodies and physicality alone as ifwe were in the field of body studieswrit large (or sociology of the body, etc.), or simply apply some form of culturalstudies inheritance to sites and artifacts of physical culture (which we have seenas a growing trend the last decade). What we seek, then, is a PCS project that seeksto move beyond writing and researching about bodies to writing and researchingthrough bodies as a principle force of the research act17.

Put differently, we do not believe PCS should amount only to a discipline of

professional convenience: it has to mean more than simply critically readingphysical culture from a distance(e.g., from our couch or in front of our computers;on ESPN, in Sports Illustrated, or on The New York Timeswebsite; etc.).18

To this end, we cannot allow it to suffer from the same ill-fate of (sadly, muchof) American cultural studies, which Michael Brub (2009) recently argued in asomewhat disheartening but nevertheless appropriate tone, now means everything


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The nature of knowing the body isand always has beenboth a politically-entangled and dialectically-meaningful enterprise. Because of this dynamic, adher-ents to the demands of a radically embodied project such as ours might do well,

after D. Soyini Madison (2009),

to embrace the body not only as the feeling/sensing home of our beingtheharbor of our breathbut the vulnerability of how our body must move throughthe space and time of anothertransporting our very being and breathforthe purpose of knowledge, for the purpose of realization and discovery. Bodyknowledge, knowledge through the body, is evidence of the present. [. . . ] Thisis intersubjective vulnerability in existential and ontological order, becausebodies rub against one another flesh to flesh in a marked present and wherewe live on and between the extremes of life and death. (p. 191).

But such an engaged, interventionist, reflexive, reciprocal, and practicedmethod can sometimes get messy, if not conflicted. For example, Loc Wacquant(2004), in his widely-hailed treatise on boxing culture on the South Side of Chicagoduring the late-1980s and early-1990s,Body & Soul: Notebooks of an ApprenticeBoxer, presents his readership with a carnal sociology that finds his body coordi-nating three points of intersection: his flesh-and-blood bodily actions, his internalstruggles with training, and his interactions with his trainer and fellow boxers.While serving as a notable early entrant into the pantheon of research onphysi-cal cultureand most assuredly utilizes his own researcher body as the primary

source of knowledge productionWacquant ignores the politics of representationgoverning his enfleshed body and the context of his research act/s. In a stingingcritique of Wacquants text, Denzin (2007) reminds us of this failing when hestates: his method presumes a reality that is not shaped by cultural mythology,or self-aggrandizing statements. He wants his embodied method to go directly tothe real, actual world of the boxer. [But his] carnal sociology staysat the level ofthe body, the white/black male body in the dying throes of a violent sport. This isa sociology that is outside of time, a sociology that some say time has passed by(pp. 429430, emphasis ours). By staying wholly at the level of the body, what ismissing from Wacquants narrative is a reflexive language of critique, and praxis,

a way of looking into and beyond the repressive cultural categories of neoliberalcapitalism (p. 430).

Radically embodied cultural studies research, following Gretchen Rossman andSharon Rallis (2003), is thus a complicated mlangerecursive, iterative, messy,tedious, challenging, full of ambiguity, and exciting (p. 4). And as we strive toforge the micro and the macro in a way that does not reduce the local experiencesto props of social theories (Saukko, 2005, p. 345), we must be sensitive to the waysin which our ownbodies, and our ownperformances, shape the research encounter.But we must alsobe sensitive to the ways our research acts reproduce a particularorder of things that is shaped by the racial and cultural politics of neoliberalism

(Denzin, 2007, p. 430), and remain cognizant of the wider conjunctural forcesimpacting the body (from the mediated to the political); it is not an either/or choice.

A new generation of scholars have, to varying degrees, found themselvesaligned with the very philosophical imperatives on offer by Madison and her con-temporaries: They are increasingly confronting the nascent stages of a project which,


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while mindful of the extraordinary venue that cultural studies has provided overthe past few decades for theoretically-, empirically-, and pragmatically-groundedinvestigations into the conditions of production, now more than ever seeks to

both invade and surround cultural studies with the insistent, noisy demands of apolyglot world, putting new voices, new angles of view, new perspectives, newcapacities, needs, interests and desires, and indeed, wholly new research objectsonto the landscape of cultural studies (McCarthy et al., 2007, p. x).

Take the following three exemplars of this direction. Ashley Mears (2008)ethnographic account of the New York fashion industryin which she activelyworked as a model during the course of her researchquite explicitly implicatesher researcher bodyin the process of constructing a critical interrogation of gender,power, and cultural production. Her bodily copresence is necessarily given inthe following extract, in which she describes a model line-up, and the degree to

which the ever-present, critical gaze works between and within models as theycompare their bodies to one another:

In the runway rehearsal line, the model before me comments as another modelwalks past, Her waist is so small! Standing backstage in our first looklittlebikinisthe models scan each other from head to toe, myself included. Afterstanding in line for a while, most of us end up folding our arms across ourstomachs. Perhaps the others are tired, or bored, but I do it to cover up. (p.438, emphases ours).

Research, for Mears, is not solely about the mechanical process of methodologi-cal expression: it is a personal[ized] and internal[ized] journeya complicated,self-inhabiting one aimed at intervening directly into the conditions of productionand consumption that shape, govern, and exploit womens bodies. This is not thework of a casual or detached ethnographer, carefully taking notes so as to catalogand reproduce the social world (as if this can be done!). Rather, through activebodily investment in working within and against the hegemonic spaces of the fash-ion industry, Mears works through her body to better understand the physical andpsychic demands of emotional labor on others in the profession and challenge the

chilling effects it can have on its most vulnerable purveyors (i.e., young women).As Ron Pelias (2005) makes clear, there is a considered recognition in such anapproach that individual bodies provide a potent database for understanding thepolitical and hegemonic systems write on individual bodies (p. 420).

In a related manner, Michael Giardinas (2005, 2009) engaged bodily interroga-tions of transnational movement, power and politics serve as a useful vivisection ofthe complex, conflictual, and continually shifting identity performances revealed inand through our fleeting global experiences with one another. Whether brushing upagainst the hyphenated spatial histories of British colonialism and Asian diaspora inLondon and Manchester or witnessing rampant expressions of xenophobic nation-

alism pervading the US popular public sphere in Yankee Stadium in New York,Michael actively sutured himself and his critique into and through the landscape ofglobal social relations, including his own interpretive bodily interactions of discon-nection and reconnection with place, home, and nation. As he (2009) reflexivelystated at length while writing a stones throw from the Baltic Sea:


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Yet, strangely, here in a country whose native tongue I can barely speakclearly without mistakenly ordering the wrong food off of a menu [I reallythought I said something that came close to sounding like Jag skulle lik en

hamburgaren och en soda, behaga], I ultimately feel oddly connected to theworld. Although writing about someone elsesflexible or hybrid performancesof culture and identity has tended to be easy for me, writing about my own(dis)articulation with nee implication in? such frames generally proves afar different task. But the moment/s are there, in the text, behind the screen,in the performative acts, of coming face to face with my own (trans)nationallyunbounded, floating identity in the performances of others who have been mate-rially and representationally Othered (often revealed unintentionally throughsome form of white privilege, such as passing through an airport securitycheckpoint unassailed by watchful eyes): On my way home from London

once, I caught at my reflection in a duty-free store mirror. I was wearing a darkblue fleece pullover, jeans, and Swiss-made Bally shoes. No one would havemistaken me for being an American unless we spoke to each other ... andI didnt go on advertising that fact But with a few hours to kill before myflight was scheduled to depart, I ate a bacon cheeseburger and drank a CoorsLight at the T.G.I. Fridays restaurant in Heathrows Terminal 3. What couldbe more American than that? (I thought at the time).

Here we see Michael presenting his life as mutually and reciprocally co-articulated to the world and the participants in that world (McCarthy et al., 2007, p.

xx). Not only is his own body implicated in the performance of his research act itself,but through itdoes he expose the inviolable link between researchers identities,experiences in the field, and substantive findings (Joseph & Donnelly, forthcom-ing). This is very much an explicit attempt to reinforce the loss arts of humility,self-questioning, deep reflexivity and conversation in research, re-connectingourselves to the fractured and divided worlds in which we live (McCarthy et al.,pp. xx). An attempt, as Ben Carrington (2008) would say, to develop a reflexiveaccount of the Self that opens up to critical interrogation of both the researchersown biography in relation to those studied and the very act of inscribing or narrat-ing that ethnography, the turning of the analytical gaze back on the researcher inan attempt to dissolve or at least problematize subject/object relations within theresearch process and even that we have a unified, fixed, singular Self (p. 426).To, invoking Minh-ha(1991), interrogate the realities our writing represents, toinvoke the tellers story in the history that is being written and performed (p. 188).

A third example, drawn from Donnellys (2009) work on women onlynessin roller derby, which explicitly ties the notion of placing our bodies within andamong the empirical uncertainties of spatial and corporeal practice(s) discussedabove all together:

When beginning my roller derby research, I was keenly aware of mybody with

respect to impression management. I thought carefully about how to dress, howto speak, how to move, where to be, what to be, etcMore problematically,I was initially apprehensive that my ownperformingbody would not hold upto the demands of a physically-demanding, if not dangerous, sport. Yet theexplicit physical experience of my research act had the unintended consequence


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of visibly transforming my body into that of someone who skates for severalhours every week for a yearImportantly, Coffey (1999) identifies that Incertain places taking part in the physicality of the setting may well be part of

gaining insight or understanding into that setting. As I began to notice changesto mybody, I came to noticeand to better understandcomments I had beenhearing all along from my research participants about a derby body, and,specifically, a derby butt.it was only in and through mybody that I was ableto make sense of those bodies performing around me. (p. 8, emphases ours).

Importantly, Donnelly expresses the thorough-going use of knowledge pro-duced by and through herresearching body to better understand the aperutivebodily interactions, feelings, and physicality experienced by her research par-ticipants. Acting as what Cornel West (1989, 1991) would term a critical moral

agentone who understands that the consequences of his or her interventionsinto the world are exclusively political, judged always in terms of their contribu-tions to a politics of liberation, love, caring and freedom (Denzin & Giardina,2006)Donnelly (and Mears, Howe, Giardina, etc.) is not merely presenting anengaging yet anecdotal look at body politics observed during her accounts of derbylife. Rather, she illustrates how, for critical agents and provocateurs of physicalculture, [t]he body is implicated in the roles and relationships of fieldwork bothin terms of how our body becomes part of our experience of the field and in thenecessity (albeit often implicit) [] to learn the skills and rules of embodiment inthe particular social setting (Coffey, 1999, p. 73), and simultaneously draws with

it the vestiges of a sustained cultural studies critique.22

In sum: by necessarily situating the researchers physical body in and amongbodiessharing experiences of the physical ways in which we experience field-workwe are better able, as the examples above make clear, to elucidate thepolitics of gender, exclusion/inclusion, and corporeality acting upon, and within,these spaces of physical culture.But to do so ultimately means that the researchersbody (and self-perceptions thereof) is made vulnerable to, and by, the politically-iniquitous circumstances into which the body has been thrust. This we address inthe following section.

Critical Reflectionson the Physical (Cultural Studies) Body

As we put forth in the section above, we believe the best critical analyses of thecorporeal are those which envisage the body through both dialectically-imaginativetechniques and a conscientious, often stifling, self-awareness of researcher andresearch act (see Langellier, 1999). As such, to convolute our simple social worldsto excavate the plural dimensions of social lifewe need to both make use of, andalso reflect upon, how our own bodies frame, and are framed by, the critical cultural

analyses we undertake. In other words, we need to locate our vulnerable bodieswithin spatial praxes and be insatiably reflexive in how that [re]location producesnew dimensions, complex relations, and new bodily epistemologies.

Carringtons (2008) work on racialized performativity, reflexivity, and identity isespecially instructive of this position, as he interrogates (his own) black masculinity


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and the differently arrayed and performed iterations of black bodied-ness he expe-rienced during his research on/with a black cricket team in Leeds, England (e.g.,as a black south Londoner being read by his older West Yorkshire teammates

as black British rather than the authentic, Caribbean-based identity they sawthemselves as holding). In moving to problematize the signification of blacknessitself, revealed to us through deeply personal and self-reflexive accounts of hisposition in, but not fully of the particular black cultural space within whichhe was located during his time as a participant-observer of the cricket club, heacknowledges that the crux of the matter was that:

I was coming to terms with my own black Britishness. [] I started to engagethose most personal aspects of my self; that is, I began to think about what itmeant for me to be black. [. . . ] [M]y experiences in the field were proving

difficult as I negotiated field relations in which my blackness was being ques-tioned. The personal diary began to take the form of self-reflexive questions:How black amI? Am I blackenough? What does such a question even mean?(pp. 434435, emphases in original).

Susanne Gannon (2006), invoking the work of Roland Barthes, might say ofCarringtons weighty confessional that his work reveals how the lived body is adiscursive and multiple but very present space where we do not go looking for anysacred originary but for traces and unreliable fragments (p. 483) through whichto foreground the dialogic relationship between the self and his or her tenuous and

particular social/cultural/historical locations (p. 477). Or, as Coffey (1999) wouldsay, he is engaged in a practice of writing and rewritingthe body. This does notonly include the writing of otherbodies, as performers and physical entities of thesocial world. We are also engaged in responding to and writing our ownbodiesaswell or sick or fit or hurting or exposed or performing (p. 131, our emphases).

Carrington is not alone in publicly confronting his intersubjective bodily ten-sions. Turning again to our own work, we have each endeavored to account for, insometimes painstaking (and introspectively painful) detail, how our own situated[researching] bodies have forged new cultural dialectics and conjunctures. Joshuas(forthcoming) self-reflexive account of the rediscovery of his whiteness, his U.S.

Southern-ness, and his masculinity through [auto-] ethnographic engagement withthe New Sporting South, for example, serves as much as an analysis of the seem-ingly banal nature of Southern sporting fixtures like college football and stock carauto racing as it does a critical inspection (and introspection) of the performativepolitics of engaged cultural studies research on the body. As he reflected on hisethnographic fieldwork on the New Sporting South, Joshua became increasinglyconcerned about how his own Southern, white bodyagainst his best intentionswas becoming a site of identity-based power within these spaces.

Consider, then, Joshuas observations concerning the power and politics ofwhiteness experienced in the early morning hours before a University of Memphis/

Ole Miss football game:

The tailgating party to the immediate south of where I was located had begunto fraternize with a group I had joined, telling stories and offering predictionson the upcoming game. On his way back from the pisser, one of the neigh-boring tailgaters, a middle-aged white man, stopped by our area to speak with


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us. He said, in a soft, almost timid voice: Yall mind if I tell yall a niggerjoke? While I wanted to answer in negative, I held my tongue and the all-whitemembers of my group agreed that they did indeed want to hear the joke. So the

man proceeded: There was this nigger who had bought himself a hang glider.He had ordered it customized from the manufacturer in the color black, and sohe had to wait a few days for it to get to him. He kept waiting . . .waiting . . .finally, on the day it arrived he was so excited to use it that he took it straightout of the box and climbed up a nearby hill. In the valley there was a man andhis son hunting for deer. The nigger took off and he was flying high in the sky,when the son said daddy, whats that? The father said, I dont know son, itlooks like a giant bat. Shoot it! So the son took out his rifle and fired a shot.The son asked, did I get him daddy? The daddy said Well, Im not sure ifyou got the bat, but you made it let loose of that nigger it was carrying. And

so my day began. (Fieldnotes, September 4, 2004)

This is but one example of a number of overt racist offerings Joshua notedduring his time at Ole Miss researching Southern whiteness. In this instance,power was productive in the sense that he was able to use it through researchoutcomes to create new pedagogies of sporting whiteness. But to do this, Joshuahad to make himself visibly invisibleusing his body to gain access to researchsites and moments but not forcing his new self onto the lived experiences heencountered. It was through encounters such as these that Joshua came to surmisethat there was a visible center of identity politics at work within these empiricalspaces, one that celebrated hetero-patriarchal Southern whiteness as the dominantcultural corporeality. In addition, and despite his own apprehensions toward thesedominant cultural politics, Joshua found that he himselfwas becoming part of thatvisible center. In short,Joshua was blending his white, Southern, masculine selfin with the crowd. In large part due to his choice of research sitestwo sport-ing spheres most deeply-saturated by neo-Confederate forms of unchallengedwhiteness (college football at Ole Miss [see Newman, 2010] and later NASCAR[see Newman & Giardina, 2008; in press), and dialoging with the white reignthat exists within those spaces (Kincheloe, Steinberg, Rodriguez, & Chennault,

1998)his body became a symbol of conformity among thousands of other similarembodiments of whiteness. Like most spectators at these events, Joshua did notwear a Confederate flag t-shirt or less subtle race-based signifiers, yet his whiteskin was cloaked by the ideological blanket (Baudrillard, 1983) that alreadycovered these Southern sporting spaces.

To put it as explicitly as possible, Joshuas white-skinned bodyand all of itsideological and phenotypical entanglements made meaningful in the contemporarySouthis inextricably (and inevitably) bound to the conduct of his research act/s.And it is because of these entanglements that those of us seeking to do radically-contextual, politically-engaged, rigorously empirical Physical Cultural Studies must

remain cognizant of how our bodies articulate with the formations of power thatexist within the research space. Although this particular encounter above is oneof the more problematic of Joshuas ethnographic experiences within that culturalfield, the politics of inquiry beg questions such as: if Joshua was not identifiedwithin the boundaries of a white, Southern, masculine researcher (i.e., an insider),how would these and other interactions have been different?


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Such deliberations call for and embrace a heightened, reengaged sense ofwhat Merleau-Ponty refers to as corporeal reflexivity: a self-awareness of theresearcher as embodied subject (see Vasterling, 2003), both a discursive property

in the physical world and an agent subjected to the existential structures actingupon those discourses. In reading for the best of the phenomenologists work,23as Stuart Hall (1986) would put it, we can surmise that Merleau-Pontys modelof intercorporealityilluminates the meaning-making processes active within andbetween bodies and the power-knowledge relations produced within the bodilyencounters we seek to better understand (Kelly, 2002). Rosalyn Diproses (2002)synthetic interpretations of Merleau-Pontys imperative for corporeal reflexivityare worth quoting here at length:

and while it may seem as if my corporeal reflexivity is already in place

before the world or the other, which would allow the imaginary in my bodyto dominate, it is also the case that it is the others body entering my field thatmultiplies it from within, and it is through this multiplication, this decen-tering, that as a body, I am exposed to the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1973, p.138). This exposure to the world through the disturbance of the others bodyis not an accident intruding from outside upon a pure cognitive subject . . .or a content of experience among many others but our first insertion into theworld and into truth (ibid., p. 139) (pp. 183-184).

Considering Deleuzes (1988) notion of the double, we might surmise that

discourses of the body produce embodied passages; temporally-flexible and spa-tially-arranged texts projected out of similarity and difference. We are thus remindedof Deleuzes (1988) famous dictum that identification is the interiorization of theoutside (p. 98), the connection between the external discourses of identity and theinternal definitions of the self. And by suturing our researcher-bodies into culturalfields of bodily texts (through adornment, gesticulation, physicality, musculature,deportment, etc.), we must not only remain aware of how our bodies are intrudingupon the bodies of others, but also of how we are engaging and producing variousdifferential processes.

It is at such a moment that we become all the more aware of the dual nature

of subjectivity; at once a subjectwith some agency in shaping various experience(such as those in the research field), and yet subjected tothe structures of poweracting upon our own bodies, and our own performances (of past and present).So we do not offer any answers on this front, but only use these reflections onthe Self, the body, and the politics of reflexivity and articulation to call for amessier, bottom-up qualitative engagement with the body; one that seeks to counterthe nomothetic tendencies and objective mythologies of modern [sociologys]scientific paradigms with a contemplative method of articulation(s). In this regard,we defer to Alan Ingham (1997), who, in laying the groundwork for physical culturalstudies and attending to its embodied-ethnographic imperative, sharply postulated:

In physical culture, all of us share genetically endowed bodies, but to talkabout physical culture requires that we try to understand how the geneticallyendowed is socially constituted or socially constructed, as well as sociallyconstituting and constructing. In this regard, we need to know how socialstructures and cultures impact our social presentation of our em-bodied


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selves and how our embodied selves reproduce and transform structures andcultures; how our attitudes towards our bodies relate to our self- and socialidentities (p. 176).

Make no mistake: while this soulfully naked positionality might bring aboutrisk, discomfort, and uncertainty, that sense of vulnerability and doubt can beempowering (see Stewart, Tracy, Hess, & Goodall, 2009). These uncertainties areproduced out of a sense of belonging, and in this way demand the researcherto reflect upon what constitutes the self; what aesthetic, embodied, performative,[auto-]biographical discourses have come to be intertwined within the research act.Vulnerability provides a lens through which to understand the tenuous body andconditions that make it unsettled. Further, the vulnerable body gives the [auto-]ethnographer perspectivereminding us at once that we inhabit a political body and

that we are in the same instance responsible for, and answerable to, our interpreta-tions and representations of others corporealities (Butler, 2001). Hence, in studyingthe complex relations of the body, the self, and pedagogyand representing theself and the Other in just and reflexive wayswe must be aware of, and limitthe violence created by, our em-bodied selves along the way.

In so doing, and returning to the interventionist-centered signpost guiding oneof the philosophical tracts of this essay, Leslie Bloom and Patricia Swain (2009, pp.338344) have offered an ethically responsible agenda of qualitative inquiry withthe following civic goals derived therefrom (as outlined by Denzin, 2010, p. 103):

1. It places the voices of the oppressed at the center of such inquiry. 2. It uses inquiry to reveal sites for change and activism.

3. It uses inquiry and activism to help people.

4. It affects social policy by getting critiques heard and acted on by policy makers.

5. It effects change in the inquirers life, thereby serving as a model of changefor others.

To put this agenda into practiceto uncover its translational affectivity, ifyou willconsider the work of the South African scholar-activist Anjtie Krog.

Renowned for her analyses of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commis-sion (2000), and her later reinterpretations of its key issues (2009, 2010; see alsoKrog, Mpolweni, & Ratele, 2009), Krog collectively casts critical inquiry as an actof (and active) intervention into the history and politics of race and subalterneityin South Africa both during and after Apartheid. Serving as a sensual, strikinglypersonal, provocatively political example of the paradigm Bloom and Swain (2009)and later Denzin (2010) suggest, Krog inserts her Self and her (white, African/Afrikaan) body into and through the course of history as a critical moral agent(see West, 1991).24Responding to the claims by former South African PresidentF. W. de Klerks attempt to downplay the atrocities of Apartheid, for example, she

writes in Country of my Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in theNew South Africa(2000):

And suddenly it is as if an undertow is taking me out out and out. Andbehind me sinks the country of my skull like a sheet in the dark and I heara thin song, hooves, hedges of venom, fever and destruction fermenting and


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hissing underwater. I shrink and I prickle. Against. Against my blood and theheritage thereof. Will I ever be seen by them recognizing them as I do daily inmy nostrils? Yes. And what we have done will never be undone. It doesnt matter

what we do. What De Klerk does. Until the third and the fourth generations.25

This critical, civic journalism26(Denzin, 2001)represented also in scoresof works ranging from those of Arundhati Roy (2003) to Howard Zinn (1994) toDave Zirin (2005)invites readers to become participants, not mere spectators,in the public dramas that define meaningful, engaged life in society today (p. 9,emphases ours). Thus is this a project, as Bryant K. Alexander (2004) would haveit, that functions as an act of intervention embedded in language, a method ofresistance, a form of criticism, a way of revealing agency.27In this way, critical,interpretive qualitative research creates the power for positive, ethical, communi-

tarian change (Denzin, Lincoln, & Giardina, 2006, p. 779)a cultural studiesproject with performative politics that represents a moral and political practicerather than merely a technical procedure (Giroux, 2001, p. 9).28

CODA: An Inconvenient Physical Cultural Studies

A deeply articulative Physical Cultural Studies, to rephrase Carol Rambo Ronai(1992), should engage in a continuous dialectic of experience (p. 396); experiencethat is both constituent and constitutive of context, and through which we frame

our discursively-constituted selves. Just as we critically interpret the corporeal pas-sages produced by various cultural intermediaries, and even though it could get abit messy, we ourselves must endeavor to locate our selves and our bodies inthe scholarship we produce. Again invoking the work of Ingham (e.g., 1985), wemust therefore make use of our bodies to understand how power operates on thebodies of others. Further, we must avoid the temptation of mobilizing a progressiveaesthetic without fully realizing the potential for interceding through constructiv-ist learning and emancipatory narratives. These are not bodies of society (as somesociologists would lead us to believe), but rather are bodies aboutsociety.

If we do indeed agree that a truly articulative Physical Cultural Studies neces-

sarily looks to illuminaterather than nomothetically generalize or reducethemessiness of the human experience (and the corporealities thereof), then we needto cultivate investigations of the bodyfrom the ground up. This we have suggestedcan be done by developing carefully crafted critical dialogue with the authors ofembodiment and empirical praxis, and by cultivating those performative representa-tions of practice that come through human interactionthrough sharing knowledgeand experience with other human beings. We need to understand how and why thebody is meaningful, as well as the conditions of emergence, as Judith Butler(2009) terms it, which have made and make the body meaningful. And we need tothink about the movements by which, and from which, the body emerges. Whether

we are studying the physical movements of the dancer, the worker, the athlete, theconsumer, the politician, or the pedagogue, we need to articulate those techniquesof the body (Mauss, 1934/1973) to the kinesthetic passages having been negotiatedupon arrival. In short, we must act as participants and performers in the meaningsthat we seek to elicit from the subordinated worlds that we try to understand andintervene into, worlds in which we are densely implicated as meaning makers,cultural citizens, and fellow travelers (McCarthy et al., 2007, p. xx).


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Notes

1. The authors thank David Andrews, Michael Silk, and Pirkko Markula for their editorial

guidance and direction, as well as the two anonymous reviewers who provided thought-provokingappraisals of our arguments. Special thanks to Norman Denzin, Yvonna Lincoln, Michele Donnelly,

Ryan King-White, Adam Beissel, and Jennifer Metz for conversations related to earlier versions

of this manuscript. For a more detailed meditation on the themes and arguments underpinning

this article, especially as related to British cultural studies, see Giardina and Newman, 2011.

2. As Jennifer Daryl Slack (1996) makes clear, this form of articulation is boththat connection

between broader contextual formations and the empirical transference we seek to establish, and at

the same time the methodological epistemeunder which we operate. On the articulation of context

and practice, and with particular regard to the ways in which practice produces context, Slack

writes: The context is not something out there, within which practices occur or which influence

the development of practices. Rather, identities, practices, and effects generally constitute thevery context in which they are practices, identities, or effects (p. 125, emphases in original).

3. We use we and our throughout the course of what follows to explicitly position this

contribution as a critical manifesto for one particular direction of Physical Cultural Studies. We

of course recognize that not all practitioners of PCS will find agreement with the arguments put

forthin fact, some may find their version or understanding of PCS to run counter to our position.

However, we stake out such a position, and do so in such at-times strident terms, in the very hope

of generating fruitful discussion, agreement, and disagreementon the principles and practices of

various forms of PCS research. Our language is thus a reflection of this positionality, whereby we

are situated not outside, but rather within, these practices. We should also note that throughout the

article we point to specific qualities found in various physical cultural analyses, both our own and

those of others, in elucidating our various points. However, we are not suggesting that either ourworks cited here, or those of other scholars noted, are totemic masterworks of Physical Cultural

Studies. Rather, each brings to life what we think is an important feature(s) of the broader project

for which we are advocating.

4. Of course, as Stuart Halls (1985) rereading of Louis Althusser made clear some time ago,

these structural formations hold no guaranteed sway over our knowing bodies (see Lattimer,

2009). Rather, they canand most certainly willbe contested.

5. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, as there are substantial bodies of literature in the

areas of dance studies, medical ethics, sport studies, labor studies, and a vast range of other fields

that might fall into this broad categorization. In addition, this list is not meant to demarcate these

nodes of inquiry as antithetical to, or outside of, the Physical Cultural Studies project we aredescribing here. Quite the opposite, as while many of the authors noted here might not consider

themselves Physical Cultural Studies practitioners, many elements of these works citeddespite

their various points of contradictioncontribute to the broader project we are outlining.

6. Our somewhat sardonic use of the term epistemeis largely informed by the work of Michel

Foucault, and particularly from his writings on power-knowledge. In Power/Knowledge, he (1980)

writes:

I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of sepa-

rating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable

within, I wont say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible

to say are true or false. The episteme is the apparatus which makes possible the separa-tion, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as

scientific (p. 197).

In other words, here, and in admitting the somewhat artificial nature of such a boundary-making

project, we nonetheless seek to cull the epistemological architectures of our new scientific

endeavor.


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7. Indeed, many of those scholars doing sociological and/or anthropological analyses of the

body that carry the highest impact factors, readership, and capital within academia these days

have successfully colonized the body and its pluralistic potentiality under the throes of scientism,

medicalism, and positivism. In this regard, we direct the reader to studies conducted by biosoci-ologists and ethnomethodologists such as Michael Kelly, David Field, Simon Williams, Gillian

Bendelow, Kathy Charmaz, Sarah Nettleton, E. Freidson, H. Graham, CF Longino, Marshall

Sahlins, Edward O. Wilson, and Steven Gaulin.

8. Here we are explicitly referring to body sociologists in Europe (namely Chris Shilling,

Mike Featherstone, Lisa Blackman, Nick Crossley, Kate Cregan, Bryan Turner, Chris Rojek,

Sarah Franklin, Kevin Robins, Georges Vigarello, Christian Pociello, Andr Rauch, and Jacques

Gleyse), Australia (e.g., Ann Game, Elspeth Probyn) and North America (e.g., Claudia Malacrida,

Jacqueline Low, Loc Wacquant, and Susan Bordo) whose work has informed the increasingly

relevant sociology of the body discipline.

9. For example, many body work scholars have in recent years begun to interpret bodily flows

within the mobilities paradigm (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006). This mobilities paradigm,

popularized primarily in the work of John Urry (2000; 2007), examines both the macro-movements

of people, objects, capital, and information across the globe, as well as more local processes of

movement through public and private spaces. Following the noted anthropologist James Clifford

(1997), we suggest that mobilities scholars must consider how bodily movements are differentially

constrained, and how those on the move can be variously positioned by, and indeed have the

potential to [re]position, political, economic, and cultural formations. We call for explorations of

the consequences of how new cultures of corporo-mobility are emerging; as people enact, perform,

and combine mobility and immobility, but also how new constraints characterize the contested

nature of mobility. Along these lines, we argue that in the context of neoliberal globalization, a

more politically-nuanced engagement with the somatic self, as Nikolas Rose (2001) calls it,reveals an importantparadox of mobility. Freedom of movement (or the promise thereof)through

the proliferation of moving/sporting bodies across global culture- and capital-scapes (as migrant

laborers, as tourists, as global celebrities or brands)also produces immobility, as vulnerable

subjects (Braun, 2007, p. 6), by way of their corporeal [dis]/[re]location, are increasingly sub-

jected to, and constrained by, the logics of the market (as hyper-regimented athletes, as sweatshop

laborers in clothing factories, or as taxpayers financing media spectacle-mega events for example).

10. For Freire (1970/2006), this critical consciousness, or conscientizao, comes about when

individuals develop an epistemological awareness of the ways dialogic, political, and economic

structures act upon their everyday lives. Such awareness is nurtured through constant dialogue

with, and consideration of, the oppressive elements of ones life; and actively imagining and

working to make real alternative, egalitarian social formations.

11. They continue, pointing to the demands for such a project within the current moment:

This is a historical present that cries out for emancipatory visions that inspire transformative

inquiries, and for inquiries that can provide the moral authority to move people to struggle and

resist oppression (ibid, p. 15).

12. Critical pedagogues maintain that every dimension of schooling and every form of educa-

tional practice (from the classroom to the television screen to the sporting arena) are politically

contested sites (see Kincheloe & McLaren, 2000). Through its focus on grappling with issues of

ethical responsibility and the enactment of democratic ideals of equality, freedom, and justice in

the pursuit of positively altering the material conditions of everyday life, PCS as a form of critical

pedagogy therefore acts as a transformative practice that seeks to connect with the corporeal andthe emotional in a way that understands at multiple levels and seeks to assuage human suffering

(Kincheloe, 2004, p. 2) at every level of injustice.

13. In truth, quantitative or mixed-method analyses of physical culture writ large (that is, stud-

ies done on and about bodies) are both visible and useful, especially in the biomedical, health,

and physical activity sectors. Schooler, Impett, Hirschman, and Bonems (2008) mixed-method


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exploration of body image and sexual health among adolescent boys, Webb, Looby, and Fults-

McMurterys (2004) quantitative study of African American mens perceptions of body figure

attractiveness, and Crossleys (2005) mixed-method evaluation of body modification being three

such examples. Our point is not to dismiss said studies (or studies of this vein), but rather to sug-gest that the embodied physical cultural studiesproject we outline herein is one that takes place

at the level of the sensual, the tactile, the poetic, the performative. Moreover, like any discursive

formation, we see the pedagogical value of such studies. The larger problem we have with many

if not most quantitative analyses of the body, however, resides in hownumbers and quantitative

data are used (or manipulated) for the purposes of creating [institutional, authoritative, bodily

imperial] power.

14. Indeed, their more recent work on this topic,Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling

of Fitness (2009), amounts to a major sociological intervention into the mediated pedagogies

surrounding the body in late-capitalism. Its importance to the field was duly recognized with

the 2010 Outstanding Book award from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

15. The Darren Aronofsky-directed film Black Swan (2010), which centers its gaze on two

competing ballerinas (played by Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis) would serve as an interesting

companion conversation to the Aalten text.

16. Indeed, one might argue that the term PhysicalCultural Studies is, like its Cultural Studies

forbearer, being evermore readily applied for professional or political reasons, to work that is

already being done by a given researcher, rather than signaling a specific theoretical or method-

ological orientation or break.

17. This is a play on Clifton Everss (2006) phrase.

18. Poststructuralism has served us well, but along the way discourse and textuality became the

end, rather than the means, toward understanding the human condition. Thus is our agreementwith our contemporaries a matter of degree, rather than of blanket concurrence.

19. Brub goes on to characterize his view of the current landscape as such: Anybody writ-

ing about The BachelororAmerican Idolis generally understood to be doing cultural studies,

especially by his or her colleagues elsewhere in the university. In a recent interview, Stuart Hall

gave a weary response to this development, one that speaks for itself: I really cannot read another

cultural-studies analysis ofMadonnaor The Sopranos.

20. Our use of technhere is meant to be juxtaposed against our earlier use of the term episteme,

in that while both signify a knowledge of principles, techn suggests a knowing bydoing, as

opposed to a more disengaged production of knowledge. In this way, technis often translated

as a sort of intellectual craftsmanship or artistryin much the same way asKincheloe (2001)

has used the term bricoleur.

21. In other words, an anti-relativist form that inhabits the borderlands of various disciplinary

fields, realizes its own shortcomings and contradictions, actively intervenes into political struggles,

stresses the need for a detour through theory rather than a dogmatic adherence to one theoretical

position, and understands that its project and politics are fundamentally tied to the given context

(Giardina, 2005, p. 132).

22. To these examples, we would also add, among others, the work of Marcelo Diversi and Clau-

dio Moreira (2008), Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt (2009), Grant Kien (2009), Miguel Malagreca

(2007), and Jennifer Metz (2007),

23. For a more detailed reconciliation of Sartres idea of being-for-itself and Merleau-Pontysphenomenological conceptions of self-discovery of fundamental meaning see Kujundzic and

Buscherts (1994) article, Instruments of the Body. For our purposes here, let it suffice to over-

simplify the role of the body in each theorists work is complex, but that each acknowledges

various relational interdependencies between the body, conceptions of the body, and the physical

and ideological worlds.

24. In a different way, Krogs (2006) bookBody Bereftis a similarly powerful, performative

examination of the/her body and the transience of human life.


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25. In her latest work, the stunningBegging to be Black (2010), Krog engages the question

(among others) of Where do I, a white person, fit in Africa?

26. As Denzin (2001) defines it, critical civic journalism assumes a researcher/ethnographer who

functions and writes like a literary and intimate public journalism. This means that ethnographyas a performer-center form of storytelling will be given greater emphasis (Degh, 1995, p. 8). A

shared public consciousness is sought, a common awareness of troubles that have become issues

in the public arena. This consciousness is shaped by a form of writing that merges the personal,

the biographical, with the public (p. 10).

27. Carrington (2001) reminds us that cultural studies was, from its early days, envisioned as a

political project aimed at popular education for working-class adultsin the hope that a genuinely

socialist democratic society could be a createdas a form of political struggle (pp. 277278). It

is in this sense that we view any sense of utility or translatability deriving from the calls herein.

28. Giroux (2001) points specifically to the work of Suzanne Lacy, Coco Fusco, Luis Alfara,

Mierle Ukeles, Peggy Diggs, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena as exemplars of this charge. Thoughdifferently-imagined, we would also call attention to the work of Jay Johnson, whose work on

hazing (especially his documentaryHazed & Confused: Changing the Varsity Initiation Culture)

is an important, policy-minded intervention.

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