Sport, Physical Culture, and New Materialisms

The physical, material body and its associations have taken primacy during these extraordinary times. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, legions of public health officials, pharma-entrepreneurs, and political intermediaries from around the world have fixed their complexes upon the living body and its varying scales of inter-relatedness. As the global pandemic has evolved, the body has been increasingly rendered visible, quantifiable, relational, traceable, transmissive, vulnerable, and abject. The pandemic body - rife with biological and onto-epistemological contingencies - has been thrust into a paradoxical state of fixity and uncertainty. It is the site of individuated fixation - made into object of (bio)political inquiry and control;at once a complex node of communitas and immunitas. It has been surveilled and technologized in increments of six-foot spacings, single-unit mask adornments, and 95% success rates. However, amidst such COVID-spawned 'body shocks', as Margrit Shildrick (2019) might suggest, the frames by which we as scientists and philosophers have come to know the body, and to embody that knowledge, have very much been unsettled (see Thorpe, Brice, & Clark 2021). The pandemic has forced us to rethink the relatedness of the body - to other bodies, to vulnerable bodies, to the population as a whole, to particulate matter, to the state and its medical-industrial-complexes. We have been forced to reimagine how bodies move, how movement is relative, how we breath, and where we can stand or walk or travel or live.