Building on a new materialist ontology, this article explores the significance of viewing the postsecondary institution and learner as assemblages co-emerging in material relationality. Bodies of thought from social cognitive neuroscience, somatic psychotherapy, and physical cultural studies inform an analysis of the evaluation culture predominant in Western postsecondary education. These disciplines are used to interrogate representational performativity and point to new possibilities for material-inclusive learning. A new materialist pedagogy holds possibilities to reconfigure learning architectures to recognise and attend to the corpomaterialities of learners while allowing for new and creative lines of flight in education, as illustrated by physical cultural practices such as sport training, dance, and capoeira.
{"title":"Assemblages and Co-emergent Corpomaterialities in Postsecondary Education: Pedagogical Lessons from Somatic Psychology and Physical Cultures","authors":"J. Joseph, E. Kerr","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0368","url":null,"abstract":"Building on a new materialist ontology, this article explores the significance of viewing the postsecondary institution and learner as assemblages co-emerging in material relationality. Bodies of thought from social cognitive neuroscience, somatic psychotherapy, and physical cultural studies inform an analysis of the evaluation culture predominant in Western postsecondary education. These disciplines are used to interrogate representational performativity and point to new possibilities for material-inclusive learning. A new materialist pedagogy holds possibilities to reconfigure learning architectures to recognise and attend to the corpomaterialities of learners while allowing for new and creative lines of flight in education, as illustrated by physical cultural practices such as sport training, dance, and capoeira.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49169561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, we peer into the scientific networks of humans and non-humans that were assembled to articulate youth fitness in the United States during the Cold War era when the perceived ‘muscle gap’ between United States youth and their European and Soviet counterparts lent urgency to the establishment of national fitness testing standards and plans. We draw on Actor-Network Theory as a theory/method to foreground the materiality of the body and measurement tools whilst also highlighting the contingency of scientific claims about the body and fitness. In particular, we discuss and contextualise two interrelated networks of fitness testing. First, we examine the Kraus-Weber Tests for Minimum Muscular Fitness in Children (K-W tests), whose results were published in 1953 and brought the ‘muscle gap’ to national attention. Second, we explore the networks assembled within the President's Council on Youth Fitness in order to implement fitness testing on a national scale, illustrating how they connected to, and extended, a variety of other networks, including the K-W tests. Throughout our analysis, we seek to illuminate the political implications of the technical work undertaken to articulate youth ‘fitness’.
{"title":"‘We are Not a Nation of Softies, But We Could Become One’: Exploring the Materiality of Fitness Testing in the President's Council on Youth Fitness","authors":"K. Esmonde, Shannon Jette","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0367","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we peer into the scientific networks of humans and non-humans that were assembled to articulate youth fitness in the United States during the Cold War era when the perceived ‘muscle gap’ between United States youth and their European and Soviet counterparts lent urgency to the establishment of national fitness testing standards and plans. We draw on Actor-Network Theory as a theory/method to foreground the materiality of the body and measurement tools whilst also highlighting the contingency of scientific claims about the body and fitness. In particular, we discuss and contextualise two interrelated networks of fitness testing. First, we examine the Kraus-Weber Tests for Minimum Muscular Fitness in Children (K-W tests), whose results were published in 1953 and brought the ‘muscle gap’ to national attention. Second, we explore the networks assembled within the President's Council on Youth Fitness in order to implement fitness testing on a national scale, illustrating how they connected to, and extended, a variety of other networks, including the K-W tests. Throughout our analysis, we seek to illuminate the political implications of the technical work undertaken to articulate youth ‘fitness’.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44954852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article I turn to the theorist Georges Bataille to explore how the transgressive elements of training in mixed martial arts (MMA) facilitate a sense of intimacy and feeling of community among the participants. To build this argument, I draw on ten years spent alongside the hobbyists and competitors who spend their free hours in mixed martial arts gyms punching, kicking, choking, and hurting each other. Taking inspiration from Bataille, along with new engagements with materialism within studies of sport, I make central the exchange of sweat, touch, scent, germs, hair, saliva, blood, and pain. Through combining core elements of Bataille's writings with stories from the MMA gym, I direct attention to the allure of fleshy moments of excess, vulnerability, transgression, and communication. I conclude with a reflection on the gendered expectations that proliferate the gym, the challenges presented by the commodification of the practice, and the radical potentials of play and care.
{"title":"Communicating with Georges Bataille in the Mixed Martial Arts Gym","authors":"Kyle Green","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0366","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I turn to the theorist Georges Bataille to explore how the transgressive elements of training in mixed martial arts (MMA) facilitate a sense of intimacy and feeling of community among the participants. To build this argument, I draw on ten years spent alongside the hobbyists and competitors who spend their free hours in mixed martial arts gyms punching, kicking, choking, and hurting each other. Taking inspiration from Bataille, along with new engagements with materialism within studies of sport, I make central the exchange of sweat, touch, scent, germs, hair, saliva, blood, and pain. Through combining core elements of Bataille's writings with stories from the MMA gym, I direct attention to the allure of fleshy moments of excess, vulnerability, transgression, and communication. I conclude with a reflection on the gendered expectations that proliferate the gym, the challenges presented by the commodification of the practice, and the radical potentials of play and care.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46386744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Seth Perlow, The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric","authors":"Kristen Smith","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0358","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42144922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article argues for a critical re-evaluation of anti-doping testing practices in international athletics, performed by The International Olympic Committee and World Athletics, as overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency. By carefully analysing anti-doping testing procedures and data taking, the conceptions of the body, with its multiplicity and sticky properties of testosterone become evident, revealing obscured connections between anti-doping and sex testing practices. Using a biopolitical framework, I trace the ways anxieties over gender, athletic ability, and race shape molecular level testing mechanisms, constructing and de-constructing the body in the process. This article draws on New Materialist theories and Feminist Science and Technology Studies scholarship, including: Anne Fausto-Sterling’s history of hormones; Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘sticking’; Annemarie Mol’s ‘the body multiple’; Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis’s work on testosterone; and Margrit Shildrick’s theory of ‘leaky bodies’ to argue that the racialised and gendered history of testosterone continue to linger on in the ways this hormone is tested and regulated in women’s athletics. This biopolitical system of surveillance in international sports is founded on an ideal of the body as autonomous, whole, and classifiable within a sexed binary. Yet, there is a distinct tension between this understanding of the body and the ways testing is executed, which relies on leaks, extractions, dissections, and manipulations of the athlete’s bodily substances to in order to discipline it into normalising categories of sex.
{"title":"Leaky Bodies and the Stickiness of Testosterone in Women's Athletics","authors":"V. Moyer","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0352","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues for a critical re-evaluation of anti-doping testing practices in international athletics, performed by The International Olympic Committee and World Athletics, as overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency. By carefully analysing anti-doping testing procedures and data taking, the conceptions of the body, with its multiplicity and sticky properties of testosterone become evident, revealing obscured connections between anti-doping and sex testing practices. Using a biopolitical framework, I trace the ways anxieties over gender, athletic ability, and race shape molecular level testing mechanisms, constructing and de-constructing the body in the process. This article draws on New Materialist theories and Feminist Science and Technology Studies scholarship, including: Anne Fausto-Sterling’s history of hormones; Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘sticking’; Annemarie Mol’s ‘the body multiple’; Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis’s work on testosterone; and Margrit Shildrick’s theory of ‘leaky bodies’ to argue that the racialised and gendered history of testosterone continue to linger on in the ways this hormone is tested and regulated in women’s athletics. This biopolitical system of surveillance in international sports is founded on an ideal of the body as autonomous, whole, and classifiable within a sexed binary. Yet, there is a distinct tension between this understanding of the body and the ways testing is executed, which relies on leaks, extractions, dissections, and manipulations of the athlete’s bodily substances to in order to discipline it into normalising categories of sex.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44307771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Employing a variety of theoretical approaches, feminist researchers have critiqued the fitness industry of its singular emphasis on the impossible, narrowly defined feminine body ideal that is likely to cause more mental (e.g., body dissatisfaction) and physical ill health (eating disorders, injuries) than improve fitness. With the focus on social construction of gendered identities, there has been less problematisation of the materiality of the fitness practices and their impact on the cultural production of the moving body. In this article, I adopt a Latourian approach to seek for a more complete account of the body in motion and how it matters in the contemporary world. A barre class as a popular group exercise class that combines ballet and exercise modalities offers a location for such an examination due to the centrality of a non-human object, the barre, that distinguishes it from other group exercise classes. I consider how exercise practices may be constituted in relation to a material object, the barre, and how the physical and material intersect, historically, with the cultural politics of fitness and dance from where the barre originates. To do this, I trace the journey of the barre from ballet training to the fitness industry to illustrate how human and non-human associations create a hybrid collective.
{"title":"Barre Matters: Hybrid Formations of Ballet and Group Fitness","authors":"P. Markula","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0351","url":null,"abstract":"Employing a variety of theoretical approaches, feminist researchers have critiqued the fitness industry of its singular emphasis on the impossible, narrowly defined feminine body ideal that is likely to cause more mental (e.g., body dissatisfaction) and physical ill health (eating disorders, injuries) than improve fitness. With the focus on social construction of gendered identities, there has been less problematisation of the materiality of the fitness practices and their impact on the cultural production of the moving body. In this article, I adopt a Latourian approach to seek for a more complete account of the body in motion and how it matters in the contemporary world. A barre class as a popular group exercise class that combines ballet and exercise modalities offers a location for such an examination due to the centrality of a non-human object, the barre, that distinguishes it from other group exercise classes. I consider how exercise practices may be constituted in relation to a material object, the barre, and how the physical and material intersect, historically, with the cultural politics of fitness and dance from where the barre originates. To do this, I trace the journey of the barre from ballet training to the fitness industry to illustrate how human and non-human associations create a hybrid collective.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44886213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As urban assemblage theory emphasizes a conceptualization of the city as movement, constituted through the processual interactions between different human and non-human actors. This approach has been recognized as potentially valuable for the study of active bodies in urban environments ( Rick and Bustad 2020 ). Moreover, this approach also encourages the development and implementation of innovative methodologies aimed at conveying the complexity of urban life ( McFarlane and Anderson 2011 ). This article contributes to this approach through the use of digital visual research methods while experiencing a monthly cycling event in Baltimore, Maryland. In particular, we discuss how GoPro cameras might be utilized within the study of the embodied experience of urban cycling, and how this experience demonstrates the assemblage of human, machine, and urban environment. Following Sumartojo and Pink (2017) , we describe how GoPro recordings of active urban embodiment work to provide more than second-hand representations of others’ experiences, and instead can serve to collect and analyze ‘traces’ of the assemblages of urban physical cultures.
{"title":"Cycling in the Flattened City: Urban Assemblages and Digital Visual Research","authors":"Oliver J. C. Rick, Jacob J. Bustad","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0354","url":null,"abstract":"As urban assemblage theory emphasizes a conceptualization of the city as movement, constituted through the processual interactions between different human and non-human actors. This approach has been recognized as potentially valuable for the study of active bodies in urban environments ( Rick and Bustad 2020 ). Moreover, this approach also encourages the development and implementation of innovative methodologies aimed at conveying the complexity of urban life ( McFarlane and Anderson 2011 ). This article contributes to this approach through the use of digital visual research methods while experiencing a monthly cycling event in Baltimore, Maryland. In particular, we discuss how GoPro cameras might be utilized within the study of the embodied experience of urban cycling, and how this experience demonstrates the assemblage of human, machine, and urban environment. Following Sumartojo and Pink (2017) , we describe how GoPro recordings of active urban embodiment work to provide more than second-hand representations of others’ experiences, and instead can serve to collect and analyze ‘traces’ of the assemblages of urban physical cultures.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47088088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since the early 2000s, athleisure (clothing designed for physical activity) has been gaining popularity as both a functional and fashionable clothing trend, particularly among women. Thus far, scholars have explored the gendered nature of athleisure and the neoliberal, postfeminist, and healthism discourses present within this fitness clothing phenomenon. However, the research has yet to account for the materiality of athleisure and its impacts upon women's experiences of fitness and the construction of idealized female bodies. In this article, we use new materialist theory, specifically Karen Barad's agential realism, to explore the material-discursive dimensions of athleisure. Drawing upon a diffractive analysis of interviews conducted with 22 women in Aotearoa New Zealand, in conjunction with social media analyses, we explore two lively intra-actions of women's athleisure-clad moving bodies – the ‘muffin top’ and the ‘big booty’ – to reveal what athleisure does to/with women's bodies. We highlight how these athleisure-body intra-actions work to create boundaries around acceptable femininity and give rise to particular constructions and meanings of women's bodies.
{"title":"The Lively Intra-Actions of Athleisure: A Baradian Analysis of Fit Femininity","authors":"Julie E. Brice, H. Thorpe","doi":"10.3366/soma.2021.0353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0353","url":null,"abstract":"Since the early 2000s, athleisure (clothing designed for physical activity) has been gaining popularity as both a functional and fashionable clothing trend, particularly among women. Thus far, scholars have explored the gendered nature of athleisure and the neoliberal, postfeminist, and healthism discourses present within this fitness clothing phenomenon. However, the research has yet to account for the materiality of athleisure and its impacts upon women's experiences of fitness and the construction of idealized female bodies. In this article, we use new materialist theory, specifically Karen Barad's agential realism, to explore the material-discursive dimensions of athleisure. Drawing upon a diffractive analysis of interviews conducted with 22 women in Aotearoa New Zealand, in conjunction with social media analyses, we explore two lively intra-actions of women's athleisure-clad moving bodies – the ‘muffin top’ and the ‘big booty’ – to reveal what athleisure does to/with women's bodies. We highlight how these athleisure-body intra-actions work to create boundaries around acceptable femininity and give rise to particular constructions and meanings of women's bodies.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42978929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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