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Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self
Michel Foucault’s work profoundly influences the way we think about society, in particular how we understand social power, the self, and the body. This book gives an innovative and entirely new analysis of is later works making it a one-stop guide for students, exploring how Foucauldian theory can inform our understanding of the body, domination, identity and freedom as experienced through sport and exercise. Divided into three themed parts, this book Accessible and clear, including useful case studies helping to bring the theory to real-life, Foucault, Sport and Exercise considers cultures and experiences in sports, exercise and fitness, coaching and health promotion. In addition to presenting established Foucauldian perspectives and debates, this text also provides innovative discussion of how Foucault’s later work can inform the study and understanding of sport and the physically active body.
262 pages, Paperback
First published September 13, 2006
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November 26, 2012
Michel Foucault has been a figure of immense interest and great influence on my thinking. Combining Foucault's philosophy with my other interest, the worlds of fitness and sport, made this hard to pass up.
Foucault's philosophy can be broken down into roughly two phases: his earlier "archaeology", focusing on the historical construction of knowledge, and the Nietzschean "genealogy" that defines his later works, in which he seeks to decipher the intersection of power, knowledge, and the self. Markula and Pringle examine the modern institutions of exercise and fitness, both in sport and in the commercial fitness club, from a Foucauldian perspective. How does scientific knowledge, via health, fitness, and nutrition, act on us to create subjective ideas of self and identity? What power do these wield over us? How does knowledge work through the practice of exercise, or the panoptic floor of any open-plan gym, to create disciplined bodies?
The book was thorough, tracing through modern institutions of sport and gym-culture from both an archaeological and genealogical perspective. The results, as you'd expect from any reputable post-structural analysis, are at once subversive, illuminating, and -- with a proper reading -- empowering.
Foucault has always struck me as one of the more accessible and less wilfully obfuscatory French philosophers, with a toolkit oriented towards practical ends in the social realm, and here we see that in effect. My own interest in the fitness field turns on a wider desire for 'self-improvement'. By both analyzing implicit power/knowledge relations, and through that illumination providing ways of adopting these discursive 'technologies of the self' for our own purposes -- exemplified in Foucault's ethical notion of treating life as a work of art -- Markula and Pringle open the way for a sharp break with traditional Anglosphere ideas on self, and fitness's role in the construction of that identity.
The reading was as accessible as you can ask for when dealing with complex ideas like these, even allowing for mandatory and inevitable "academese", and no prior knowledge of Foucault is necessary given their ample introduction to his ideas (although I found that my background knowledge made for a richer reading).
Foucault's philosophy can be broken down into roughly two phases: his earlier "archaeology", focusing on the historical construction of knowledge, and the Nietzschean "genealogy" that defines his later works, in which he seeks to decipher the intersection of power, knowledge, and the self. Markula and Pringle examine the modern institutions of exercise and fitness, both in sport and in the commercial fitness club, from a Foucauldian perspective. How does scientific knowledge, via health, fitness, and nutrition, act on us to create subjective ideas of self and identity? What power do these wield over us? How does knowledge work through the practice of exercise, or the panoptic floor of any open-plan gym, to create disciplined bodies?
The book was thorough, tracing through modern institutions of sport and gym-culture from both an archaeological and genealogical perspective. The results, as you'd expect from any reputable post-structural analysis, are at once subversive, illuminating, and -- with a proper reading -- empowering.
Foucault has always struck me as one of the more accessible and less wilfully obfuscatory French philosophers, with a toolkit oriented towards practical ends in the social realm, and here we see that in effect. My own interest in the fitness field turns on a wider desire for 'self-improvement'. By both analyzing implicit power/knowledge relations, and through that illumination providing ways of adopting these discursive 'technologies of the self' for our own purposes -- exemplified in Foucault's ethical notion of treating life as a work of art -- Markula and Pringle open the way for a sharp break with traditional Anglosphere ideas on self, and fitness's role in the construction of that identity.
The reading was as accessible as you can ask for when dealing with complex ideas like these, even allowing for mandatory and inevitable "academese", and no prior knowledge of Foucault is necessary given their ample introduction to his ideas (although I found that my background knowledge made for a richer reading).
Displaying 1 of 1 review