Really important to incorporate joy in our perceptions of persecuted groups. Portraying them merely as victims of their circumstance flattens the reality of these people and obscures the forms of resistance and joy that are present.

I think another, quite significant component is a fear of feeling feeling inadequate physically, of not living up to the physical standards. That men continue watching from fascination of the ideal physical form.

Not only do women have to be worried about performance but have the added stress of needing to achieve a certain aesthetic look and often this leads to toxic team cultures.

This type of surveillance is emotionally abusive, in my opinion. This placed women under a construct threat of judgement, and of being deemed a failure if they do not meet a standard.

The obsession with controlling women's bodies, especially in sport is rooted in the discussion on testosterone, masculinity, and superior athleticism. The coaching approach often reflects trying to make females more like men, decreasing their body fat, increasing muscle mass. These protocols are not devised for the maintanence of a healthy female body–with a present menstrual cycle and horomonal health. The female body is almost taken as the unoptimized version of a mans, a work in progress that can be controlled and manipulated. This is a huge factor in the mental illness of female athletes.

female athletes become judges based on how closely they can be like, in their genetic or hormonal makeup, or look like men.

Scientific language confers legitimacy to these arguments.

The way her naturally high levels of testosterone incited a moral panic despite every athlete in every sport having some sort of genetic/natural difference that allows them to be prodigies at their sport says a lot about who we want in or out of middle distance running. What bodies do we accept on an 800m start line vs what do we expect from spinters? The way that people were so concerned about the world record time being broken by Semenya as if the collective white mass of viewers owned it and they could negotiate who had the right to contest that record and ultimately have it.

The perception of the need to protect athletic records and sports from those deemed too dangerous, especially radicalized individuals, says a lot about who society believes should be participating in sport, who should win, and who is allowed to compete and who is not.

This is so incredibly embedded in ideas of colonial domination of Indigenous people–as a game. The presentation of black and indigenous athletes using language that conjures up imagines of them as animals, or primal, as less human. Incredibly sad to think how long lasting these perceptions are in society still today.

very interesting way of framing the roots of sports science.

This is a central idea of the text.

To me these divisions feel like anything but unstable; athletic divisions are clear and heavily protected and politicized.

I think I am a little uncertain about what is being said in this passage, need clarity?

This also makes me think of the ways, on an international level, hegemony is contested through sports. How competition provides a way to resist coloniality.

Why does this attraction to the content exist? What is it about these stories that is so addictive?

This is a really interesting comment about the difficulty in knowledge production when historical data is skewed by cliches, tropes, and stereotypes? Where do you go from there? what does historical revision mean?

The spirit of vulgar language and inappropriate, sexualizing comments gets normalized as the locker-room talk seeps into professional commentating.

Intellectual posturing serves a really important legitimating role of this industry. By appearing academic and complicated, the industry maintains its prestige and exclusionary aspects. This is critical to the maintenance of power over sports by the white western groups.

Unsurprisingly, the roots of sports media and journalism are firmly planted in a particular worldview–white western. Like mentioned earlier, it is important to think about the ways in which this has shaped our public narratives about sports, how we think of athletes, talk about them. Clearly, the absence of voices of colour, queer voices and diversity means there are serious gaps in how we understand sports.

This expert is really powerful. Considering the imposition of sport as evidence or celebration of conquest marks just how powerful sport is. A display of victory by asserting sport also invokes the ideas of the "civilizing mission" that the American imperialists brought proper sports to the places they colonized. Also interesting to consider how colonists imported cultural products into their colonies to make themselves feel more comfortable.

If sport does have the authority to render certain ideologies into truth, and is also major component of a given culture, sport can easily become a tool of coercion, control, and coloniality.

How did sport come to have this authority? Why do we look to sport for these answers?

This paragraph raises a really interesting point about the difficulty of understanding a topic that has never been correctly captured in archives. If sports cultural knowledge is embodied, how can we accurately understand it if archives simply capture written, audio or visual sources which also don't center sports.

This is particularly interesting because if this is true, then we ought to consider the discursive power we vest in the individuals who commentate sports, who host talk shows about sport and those who drive the public narratives around sports.

It is like we wish to forget that they are contractually obligated to be there, to participate. Does the process of value exchange in the sports marketplace somehow change how we enjoy sports? does pretending as though it does not exist make us feel like it is more real?

The way spectators engage with sport also says a lot about how we value the category of athletes. While they are praised for their exceptional ability, we feel a sense of ownership over them. Since they are paid to represent a team or a country, we expect them to perform and feel that we can have an opinion about their lives.

I cannot imagine the feeling of being valued in the process of contract signings or after different seasons. The feeling of a dollar amount being tied to your physical body must feel incredibly dehumanizing.

Sounds incredibly dehumanizing when said like this.

This section reminds me of how compensation is determined in tort law. Harms to individuals are assigned monetary value based, in part, by the current and future "value" of the individual which is determined by their future expected income potential and current income. This sorting is inherently a gendered, radicalized and classed process.

Sports media industrial complex??

I often hear men who discuss women's sports talk about them in 2 ways. First, if they are around other women, by underscoring that their act of watching women's sports made them more feminist and second by highlighting physically attractive features about certain players or moments of a game. Of course there is also a very overt use of "masculine" adjectives to describe female athletes perceived as acting more competitive such as (beast, monster, or demon).

Given society's obsession with the sexualization of women's sports, it becomes no surprise that women's sports that appear to challenge the traditional presentation of female athletes as sexual beings (like women's basketball uniforms that conceal much of women's figures) it is taken as too queer and a threat to the feminine ideal.

The way the media speak about female athletes have always been skewed by an emphasis on aesthetic and the spectacle of sensuality. This emphasis has in many ways served to make women's sports feel like a tier below men's sports which are considered in terms of real and competitive.

Does the assertion of nudity and against-the-norm exposure as a means of liberation really invoke an emancipatory feeling for these individuals? what about for the viewers? Does it challenge them to break down their conceptions of athletic?

I understand that is sentence serves the purpose of rejecting a political approach but I am not sure what is implied in a "turn up"?

I appreciate the awareness of the need for a nuanced, balanced approach to sports studies. By focusing on only material conditions, you miss out on the non-material role of sports and by deploying merely negative critiques of sport, we also miss out on the pleasure, joy, resistance, empowerment and much more that is produced through sport.

The historical and continued exclusion of certain categories of bodies from sports continues to act as a worse form of deprivation than simply not being able to participate. As accurately articulated in this, sports offer us a freedom to live by our own bodies and give us the freedom to govern and take pleasure in our bodies. This is a fundamental part of what it means to be human and have agency and provides insight on the gravity of exclusion.

I really like the approach of this article in attempting to distance itself from a binary approach to sports and instead making the body the locus of study. This makes a lot of sense to me because sports really are just about bodies. By centring bodies, it becomes easier to understand how sports condition culture.

Reminds me of the concept we spoke of in class–the embodied knowledge that we generate through movement and sport.

shows the diversity in the worldviews and perspectives coming into the study of sports as culture. Really cool to see how these different approaches diverge in their interpretations or how they complement one another to enrich understandings.

I find this idea of painful beauty interesting because it is easy to see how this applies to sports like gymnastics, dancing or rather, any artistic sport but I have difficulty seeing the beauty in weight lifting or in running? does it have to be beautiful ?

Curious about Wynter's emphasis on sports being an aesthetic production?

super interesting way to think about how inter-national sports competition but also the basis of sport competition itself as a venue for contestation of power and domination.

I appreciate this Marxist critique. This also reminds me of what we discussed in class about the way the organization of sports culture and of athletes is inspired by military techniques of uniformity and drills.

main question of the article

The porn industry comes to mind as another forum where this comparison, judgement, and sorting is normalized and ubiquitous. The word sort here is particularly powerful, because it assigns people a label that they then carry with them throughout their lives. Being sorted into a given category primes humans on how they view themselves and condition their actions.

I'm curious to know why they deem this kind of body appraisal "right"? what makes appreciating a body for its function right in this case? And what is the function of the word inspiring here? The use of the word inspiring here also caught my attention. How does the cover art want us to think about these athletes. How are we meant to feel inspired? There is an element of the word inspiring, especially when applied to athletes with disability that feels like it obscures the focus from their athleticism and their ability and rather invokes sentiments of their bravery. Perhaps this is not the outcome these athletes were looking for.

This sentence invokes the feeling that these athletic or "different" bodies are being fetishized, made into a spectacle for public consumption rather than a true celebration of athletic bodies and diversity among them.

I am a little unsure o the role of "democratic" in this description. If the author implying that sports has a sort of equalizing force?

This emphasizes the existence of athletes as products, their value being determined by the value of their body, spoken about as if they are commodities to trade or retain for a later payout. This language is deeply troubling for the athletes but also says a lot about how the rest of society views at least professional athletes–as something they somehow have ownership over, as if these athletes owe them something because they are payed for their bodies. In many ways, their bodies are no longer theirs.

Why naked? Why is the nudity such a central component in celebrating diversity of athletes? Is the intent to broadcast diverse athletic bodies as sexually desirable too? Or does the nudity play a role in the embodied art component?