Features
ISBN Number: 9780415378772
Subtitle: The Nature of Performance
Written by: Magdalinski, Tara
Written by: Magdalinski Tar
Published by: Routledge
Filed Under: Athletes
Filed Under: Sports
Filed Under: Sports Psychology
Filed Under: Performance technology
Filed Under: Body image
Copyright: 2008
Date of Publication: December 2008
Cover Type: Hardcover
Written in: English
Number of Pages: 187
Book Size: 9.30x6.20x.70 in. .95 lbs.
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.
Book News Annotation:
In a cultural analysis of performance technologies, Magdalinski
(sports studies, University College Dublin), describes how controversies
surrounding banned substances and techniques reveal tension within a
range of social identities. Performance enhancement in sport, she
argues, has cultural and social implications and meaning beyond
simply improving athletic output. She identifies and explores
ideologies that are inscribed onto sporting bodies, and analyses how
performance technologies complicate and confound conventional
conceptions of the athletic body.
Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Synopsis:
Modern sport is a contradictory phenomenon; on the one hand an emphasis on winning and on citius, altius, fortius (faster, higher, stronger) makes the drive for improved performance paramount. Athletes, coaches and sports scientists constantly search for techniques, supplements or modifications that will deliver that elusive 'edge'. Yet at the same time, sport remains grounded in notions of 'fair play' and good health, a balance between body and mind.
The single-minded pursuit of achievement rests uneasily on these traditional foundations, and the application of technologies to the body has often been viewed with particular suspicion. This text explores the controversies associated with sport, technology and the body.
