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More About This Textbook
Overview
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.
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Meet the Author
Tara Magdalinski is the Academic Director of the Centre for Sports Studies at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on the construction of social identities and the production of historical narratives through sport. She co-edited With God on Their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion (Routledge, 2002).
Table of Contents
List of abbreviations
1 Introduction: sport, the body and performance technology 1
2 The nature of sport 14
3 The nature of the body 31
4 The nature of performance 54
5 The nature of health 71
6 'Those girls with sideburns': enhancing the female body 91
7 Enhancing the body from without: artificial skins and other prosthetics 109
8 Drugs, sport and Australian identity 128
9 The performance of nature at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games 145
10 Conclusion 157
Bibliography 163
Index 181