Sport, Technology and the Body docx

[...]... technology into the body and the application of other artificial or ‘unnatural’ methods is, nevertheless, explicable if the body is regarded, not of nature, but rather as a social construct that is variously imagined as fluid, mechanical, abject and liminal Rather than fixed, the body is flexible, the boundaries of the ‘natural’ stretching as easily as the skin that encases the corpus Further, the body is theorised... work practices had emerged by the midnineteenth century as a cause for concern for many political and social theorists They feared the interplay between humans and technology and 22 The nature of sport the alienation and loss of humanity that would result from factory life and the incorporation of the body by production: labour was becoming part machine, part human and the cyborg worker resulted (Stern... may use their safety equipment as weapons on the sportsfield (Stoner and Keating 1993) Furthermore, the disciplinary regulation of time and space results from the application of technology to physical activity, and even the locations where sport is played are the consequence of the deliberate technological modification or reproduction of the landscape Whilst technology is clearly central to the organisation... and physical manipulations, drugs, supplements and other substances, as well as training methods and techniques The main focus is, however, on illicit performance enhancement such as drugs, blood doping and other prohibited substances and methods, to determine the ways that technology and the body intersect within a discursive construction of the nature/artifice binary The book begins by analysing the. .. another, where the former represents a natural activity in which the human body is the central concern, and the latter is an artificial product that corrupts the body Such a binary construction relies on a broader cultural ‘technophobia’ that contends ‘natural’ products and methods to be superior to anything created by the human hand (Barilan and Weintraub 2001) The interaction between technology and. .. between the national landscape and athletic bodies in the production of Australian identities Finally, this chapter focuses on the topography and terrain of environmental and bodily surfaces, relating the threat of disruption to the body to the nation as a whole, and looks at the significance of the ‘green’ environmentally restorative Olympics within the framework of elite performance enhancement The performance... through the bodies and site of the Sydney 2000 Olympics is explored to determine the way that the body, sport, technology and nature intersect in a single sporting event Introduction 13 Importantly, this book takes no particular stance in relation to performance enhancement, illicit or otherwise, and instead explores the cultural resistance to the application of technology to the athletic body It... industrial and technological advances With the development of mechanised production processes, the informality of rural games was abandoned as the pressures of the time clock and other industrial techniques influenced the structure and conduct of physical activity These emergent leisure pursuits came to closely mirror the new regulation of time, space and the body Sport has thus been complicit in the regulation... escape from the ‘swollen’ cities, opportunities to retreat to and recreate in a natural landscape (Dunlap 1999) The body was similarly rejuvenated and refreshed through sport, which came to symbolise the antithesis of the confined, dirty and unwholesome world of work and became synonymous with good health and clean living These relationships have only intensified throughout the twentieth century The role... the significance of nature for sport, the body and performance, as nature clearly represents the critical juncture where these intersect The analysis traces the juxtaposition of nature/sport on the one hand against culture /technology on the other, each representing discrete categories that appear to come undone through the presence of illicitly enhanced athletic bodies Further, this volume explores how . abbreviations x 1 Introduction: sport, the body and performance technology 1 2 The nature of sport 14 3 The nature of the body 31 4 The nature of performance 54 5 The nature of health 71 6 ‘Those. determine the ways that technology and the body intersect within a discursive construction of the nature/artifice binary. The book begins by analysing the significance of nature for spor t, the body and. enhancing the female body 91 7 Enhancing the body from without: artificial skins and other prosthetics 109 8 Drugs, sport and Australian identity 128 9 The performance of nature at the Sydney