Body Boundaries
Aarhus University
Running is a Contact Sport View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lindsey Freeman
In the final stretch of the London Marathon in 1981, the Norwegian runner Inge Simonsen reaches for the American Dick Beardsley and catches hold of his hand; they run a few paces, break the tape, and raise their arms in elation. Then Simonsen ruffles Beardsley’s hair. With these runners, we can see what the writer Joyce Carol Oates sees in boxing, “part dance, courtship and coupling.” Watching them race, we witness autonomy sweetly dissolve into contact. In the post-race interview, Beardsley says that it was beautiful to win together, and possible because this was not the Olympics, where the runners would have had to compete for national glory. Athletes ‘owe’ nations in contests like the Olympics, which makes a finish like this impossible. Running is not typically thought of as a contact sport, where there is an emphasis on the physical, often brutal, meeting of competitors that you find in boxing, football, roller derby, or wrestling. When contact is considered in running, it is often as a foul or disaster, where one individual causes harm to another. In this paper, I consider what contact in sport could mean if we think of the coming together of bodies in a more tender way. I also challenge the convention in defining contact in sport as always violent. Thinking with sociological research and queer theory, along with my own embodied experiences as a runner and researcher, I explore how running touches us, by considering contact outside and alongside individual, national, and team perspectives.
Featured Corruption in Sport: Citizens' Observatory in Colombia View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mauricio Hernandez
The sport system can not reform itself, it needs the participation of civil society. On the one hand, corruption is a problem that can be viewed from different perspectives. On the other hand, sport as a social fact is full of meanings and value for governments, corporations, and the transnational non-governmental organizations that promote it, such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA. When both phenomena are analyzed, new fields of the study appear, education and training needs are identified in sports organizations, and opportunities are created for anyone interested in the sports integrity industry. This paper presents the results of the Corruption in Sport Observatory in Colombia, three successful models in the fight against corruption in Latin America, which have served as a case study, which can be exported to the world, and adopted into the sport system. The results are classified into five areas: governability, transparency, funding, political campaigns, and international cooperation. The Corruption in Sport Observatory is a branch of the Summit of the Americas.
Featured A Black Feminist Political Economy of Sport in Higher Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rachel Roberson
This study, grounded in Wynter’s perspective of the Human (1994, 1997), evaluates the policies and practices that create and maintain the stratification of power and bodily labor within intercollegiate athletic departments. I build upon the foundation laid by critical higher education scholars (Boggs & Mitchell, 2018; Dancy, Edwards, & Davis, 2018; Mustaffa, 2017; Stein, 2016) who argue that the foundation of American higher education is intrinsically linked to anti-Blackness; thus maintaining the stratification of power upheld by the value of Whiteness. This structural analysis pays particular attention to disentangling the intersectional nuance of Black male bodily labor and White women’s accrual of capital. White women in sport play the role of ‘Border Beckys’ (Ignatiev & Garvey, 2014), wherein their proximity to people of color provides an awareness to difference and results in a desire to separate themselves from the system of oppression that impacts the POC community, however their actions provide insight into the difficulty in dismantling and resisting a system they continuously benefit from. Ultimately, this work builds upon a legacy of Whiteness as property (Harris, 1993; Haney-Lopez, 1996). I add to our understanding of the valuing and devaluing of Black bodies within society at large, emphasizing our historical dehumanization through labor exploitation and domestication. It is my hope this paper help combat the revisionist history (Stein, 2016) of wielding Whiteness within the institution of sport and the neoliberal university.
