Sculpting girls' subjectivities: physical culture and the normalised body

Abstract

Locating the female body and body movement within a wider cultural politics and in the service of particular political agendas (Andrews 1995; Giroux 2001; Silk and Falcous 2005), within this thesis I seek to explore how the (re)working and (re)constituting of subjectivities is linked to the social context in which we find ourselves. Theorising the 'data' collected from critical sport media analysis, collaborative weekly 'workshops' and focus groups at Franklin School (a pseudonym for the school where my 'data gathering' took place). I interrogate the ways in which a group of twenty young girls both actively (de)constructed the mediated subjectivities they consumed as part of popular (physical) culture and yet continued to vigorously and pleasurably (re)construct and sculpt their own lived subjectivities in accordance with dominant discourses of 'can-do' femininity (Harris 2004a). The girls configured a space for themselves to live, work and be female, this was a space that provided middle-upper class, white young girls with the resources—amalgamated technologies of governance—to maintain their subjectivity in ways that legitimised certain bodies and marginalised others. Via the reconfiguration of power, an acceptable and 'appropriate' femininity was constructed albeit through a recourse to what they are not, a process of 'otherisation.'

Through the extrapolation of the ways in which the everyday practices of physical culture operate as contested spaces in which unequal forces and power struggles are articulated on/with the young girls‘ body I tease out and interrogate an allegorical web of exploration or web of dependency. The body then, becomes understood as a site on which the social and cultural are inscribed, it is a marker of those 'good' and 'bad' citizens, those whose bodies 'fit' and those who are regarded as pathologised outsiders—it is a body that is maintained, represented, regulated and imbued with meanings and values (Wright 2004) that speak to our Westernised, late-capitalist, neoliberal conjuncture. It is a body that is inextricably bound by a diffuse milieu of power, knowledge and mastery. Whilst this focus on the body may not be a new phenomenon, the complexities that arise and insights that are garnered when this body is (in)active offer a unique site whereby the discursive congeals and is contested and where subjectivities are sculpted in ―contextually contingent ways‖ (Andrews 2002, p. 114).

The interdisciplinary nature of this work is conspicuous, allowing it to transgress and combine disciplines in order to better elucidate the intersections between a young girls‘ body and notions of governmentality and biopower (Rose 1999). Throughout the thesis I am concerned with and engage multiple foci—a hybrid theoretical and methodological position (Hall 1992)—as I grapple with how the young girls‘ lived experiences and everyday practices resonate with a radically contextual body politic. To this end, perhaps the major contribution of this work is the 'theorising out' of the lived experiences of the young girls. I offer readings of the body as they were being lived and realised in a distinctly heterosexy, middle-upper class, and white imaginary.

Date of Award	1 Jul 2011
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Michael Silk (Supervisor) & Chris Griffin (Supervisor)