Introduction: Regulating Bodies, Regulatory Bodies

Abstract

This is a book about embodied sporting practices. The centrality of the body in sport is often taken for granted, but in this book I seek to unravel some of the diverse and complex meanings and practices of bodies in sport. Although bodies are pivotal to what constitutes sport and to how it is understood and experienced, it has not often been sporting bodies that have been cited as the main source of empirical or illustrative material in the development of theories of the body and embodiment. Bodies are material; they include the physical bodies that are involved in sporting practices and the organizational bodies which regulate what is called sport. These bodies are also physical in the sense that they are material and involve social institutions, but the living human body has been seen as distinctive because, unlike, inanimate matter, the living body has some notion of consciousness or intentionality attributed to it. I focus upon the notion of embodiment, rather than ‘the body’ or even ‘bodies’ because embodiment always involves a self who is embodied and a self which cannot be disentangled from its corporeality. Embodiment challenges the division between subject and object. The idea of embodiment draws upon phenomenological accounts in which action and behaviour cannot be conceived of as outcomes of will which is then executed by the body.