Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. (...) The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed. (shrink)

Introduction: Over the past twenty-five years the sporting body has been studied in a myriad of ways including via a range of feminist frameworks (Hall 1996; Lowe 1998; Markula 2003; George 2005; Hargreaves 2007) and gender-sensitive lenses (e.g. McKay 1994; Aoki 1996; Woodward 2008). Despite this developing corpus, studies of sport only rarely engage in depth with the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting and exercizing body (Wainwright and Turner 2003; Allen-Collinson 2009) at least from a phenomenological angle, and in relation (...) to female embodiment. It seems that a more corporeally-grounded, phenomenological perspective on women’s sporting embodiment would be a welcome addition to extant studies. In this chapter I suggest that employing a feminist phenomenological framework can provide a powerful lens through which to explore the subjective, richly-textured, lived-body experiences of sport and exercise. Phenomenology of course offers only one of a multiplicity of avenues to investigate the body in sport, and this chapter provides just a small glimpse of its possibilities. To-date studies of sporting experience employing a phenomenological theoretical framework remain surprisingly under-developed (Kerry and Armour 2000), as do those using its ethnomethodological offspring (Coates 1999; Burke et al. 2008). Further, as Fisher (2000) notes, the significance of the interaction between phenomenology and feminism has only relatively recently begun to be explored. It seems timely, therefore, to address this intriguing, potentially productive, but sometimes uneasy nexus, focusing upon female running embodiment in this case. (shrink)

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. (...) The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed. Key words: phenomenology; existentialist phenomenology; interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA); sporting embodiment; the lived-body; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Almost four decades ago, Kathleen Pearson examined deceptive practices in sport using a distinction between strategic and definitional deception. However, the complexity and dynamic nature of sport is not limited to this dual-categorization of deceptive acts and there are other features of deception in sport unaccounted for in Pearson's constructs. By employing Torres’s elucidation of the structure of skills and Suits's concept of the lusory-attitude, a more thorough taxonomy of in-contest sport deception will be presented. Despite the ubiquitous presence of (...) deception in sport, few scholars have examined this concept in the sport philosophy literature since Pearson’s contribution. This paper hopes to advance a deeper understanding of deceptive practices in competitive sport and also comment on the ethical permissibility of certain sport skills from a moral perspective. (shrink)

Almost four decades ago, Kathleen Pearson examined deceptive practices in sport using a distinction between strategic and definitional deception. However, the complexity and dynamic nature of sport is not limited to this dual-categorization of deceptive acts and there are other features of deception in sport unaccounted for in Pearson's constructs. By employing Torres’s elucidation of the structure of skills and Suits's concept of the lusory-attitude, a more thorough taxonomy of in-contest sport deception will be presented. Despite the ubiquitous presence of (...) deception in sport, few scholars have examined this concept in the sport philosophy literature since Pearson’s contribution. This paper hopes to advance a deeper understanding of deceptive practices in competitive sport and also comment on the ethical permissibility of certain sport skills from a moral perspective. (shrink)

Modern phenomenology, with its roots in Husserlian philosophy, has been taken up and utilised in a myriad of ways within different disciplines, but until recently has remained relatively underused within sports studies. A corpus of sociological-phenomenological work is now beginning to develop in this domain, alongside a longer-standing literature in feminist phenomenology. These specific social-phenomenological forms explore the situatedness of lived-body experience within a particular social structure. After providing a brief overview of key strands of phenomenology, this article considers some (...) of the ways in which sociological, and particularly feminist, phenomenology might be used to analyse female sporting embodiment. For illustrative purposes, data from an autophenomenographic project on female distance running are also included, in order briefly to demonstrate the application of phenomenology within sociology, as both theoretical framework and methodological approach. (shrink)