Culture, Body, Physicality
While the body may appear natural (an authentic expression of some biological essence), this masks its socio-cultural constitution, which is, at the very least, equally as important as its biological constitution. If this is true of the body in general, then it is perhaps even more applicable to the manner in which the active body is socially and culturally regulated, constructed, and experienced. As Ingham crucially noted:
“all of us share genetically endowed bodies, but to talk about physical culture requires that we try to understand how the genetically endowed is socially constituted or socially constructed, as well as socially constituting and constructing” (1997, p. 176).
Given this, our work, in conjunction with our scientific counterparts, offers a truly holistic understanding of the derivation, constitution, and experience of physical activity/human movement. We are interested in the critical, and theoretically informed, analysis of those “cultural practices in which the physical (active) body—the way it moves, is represented, has meanings assigned to it, and is imbued with power” (Vertinsky, 2004). Our work identifies the role played by physical culture in reproducing, and sometimes challenging, particular class, ethnic, gender, ability, generational, national, racial, and/or sexual norms and differences. Further, through the development and strategic dissemination of potentially empowering forms of knowledge and understanding, we seek to illuminate, and intervene into, sites of physical cultural injustice and inequity. Our research is animated by issues of bodily subjectivity and power, surveillance, the formation of and how they experience, sporting practices and spaces. Committed to progressive social change, we articulate physical culture within a wider cultural politics, centred around, but not limited to, the oft interconnected and at times contradictory, vectors of globalisation, internationalisation, inequality, poverty, power, politics, economics, terror, violence, peace, policy, social needs, identities, peace, empathy, and neoliberalism.
We address, for example, the socially constructed concepts of health, fitness and being physical within contemporary society. In applying empirical, theoretical and practical knowledge to the practices of health and fitness, we critically engage with the discursive constitution of human bodies and technologies. Our work in this area thus critically evaluates the discursive constitution of health, fatness and fitness and embodied subjectivities. In so doing, we address issues such as: impact of commercialism on the image of the fit / fat body, fitness promotion and the fitness clientele/instructor/manager relationship; how the human body, health care technologies and health care settings are conceptualised, represented and/or studied by humanists, social and biomedical scientists and health professionals; post- or super-humanism and genetic modification, repair and enhancement; the relationship between healthy and fit bodies and the social formation; those bodies deemed abject or pejorative; disrupted and disabled bodies, disease and disorder; and consumerism, globalisation and bio-politics.
