Sport, Technology and the Body

Description

What is the nature of athletic performance? This book offers an answer to this fascinating question by considering the relationship between sport, technology and the body. Specifically, it examines cultural resistance to the enhancement of athletes and explores the ways in which performance technologies complicate and confound our conception of the sporting body.

The book addresses concerns about the technological "invasion" of the "natural" body to investigate expectations that athletic performances reflect nothing more than the actual capacity of the untainted athlete. By examining a series of case studies, including Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, Fastskin swimsuits, hypoxic chambers and an array of illicit substances and methods, the book distinguishes between internal and external technologies to highlight the ways that performance enhancement, and public reaction to it, can be read.

Sport, Technology and the Body offers a powerful challenge to conventional views of athletic performance that stand authenticity against artifice, integrity against corruption, and athletic purity against technological intrusion. It is essential reading for all serious students of the sociology, culture or ethics of sport.

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Sport, the Body and Performance Technology Chapter 2: The Nature of Sport Chapter 3: The Nature of the Body Chapter 4: The Nature of Performance Chapter 5: The Nature of Health Chapter 6: 'Those Girls with Sideburns': Enhancing the Female Body Chapter 7: Enhancing the Body from Without: Artificial Skins and Other Prosthetics Chapter 8: Drugs, Sport and Australian Identity Chapter 9: The Performance of Nature at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games Chapter 10: Conclusion Bibliography

Author Bio

Tara Magdalinski is the Academic Director of the Centre for Sports Studies at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on the construction of social identities and the production of historical narratives through sport. She co-edited With God on Their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion (Routledge, 2002).

Related Subjects

1. Sport Studies
2. Sociology of Sport
3. Ethics and Philosophy of Sport
4. The Body
5. Sociology of Science & Technology