Jürgen Martschukat is going to present a working paper on "The Age of Fitness. The Power of Able-Bodiedness in Recent American History"

The article explores the power of fitness in recent American history. It argues that  modern fitness is more than the physical condition to succeed in sports, but means having and shaping a body that stands for the willingness and ability to self-improvement, to lead a productive life, and to pursue happiness successfully. Today, a dynamic understanding of fitness seems self-evident, yet as the article argues, it is deeply embedded in modern history and in the shaping of societies based upon liberalism, self-government, and competition as their core principles. In order to come to terms with the climax of fitness in recent America, the article begins with a long-shot perspective on how a discourse revolving around an autonomous, liberal, and competitive self gained shape from the American Revolution to Charles Darwin, and how this sparked a dynamic understanding of fitness that became a most powerful, regulatory ideal of liberal societies. In a second step, the article zooms in on the beginnings of today’s fitness craze in the 1970s and 1980s in order to explore Major paradigms of the age of fitness in greater detail. The concept of ability is crucial to understanding the power of fitness, and examining the history of fitness is most important for a critical analysis of ableism.

 

Sabine Gabriel presents a workshop paper on "The meaning of the body in an individual and societal perspective. An ethnographic and biographical study of professional dancers"

This PhD project aims to make a subject-founded contribution of a theoretical model, as on one hand body can become methodologically and methodically coherent to the object of the research to convey, on the other hand, empirically based knowledge of the body by biographical and temporal processes respectively gradients with respect to the subjective experience of physicality and the attitude to the body to be examined. The additional implementation of a participatory observation is to support the empirical data corpus.
The formulated interest affects fundamentally questions of becoming a person. The person of the sample already work very early intensively and highly focused with their bodies and the included material references. The survey and evaluation methods are selected and modified in a way which physical and material-related processes of confrontation and incorporation can emerge on the basis of the collected data material and then can be reconstructed with the methodological means of evaluation methods. In consideration of the epistemological interest biographical-narrative interviews (see Schütze 1983, 1987) were conducted with ballet dancers (so that implicit references are to be expected). These were analyzed in a technically and methodologically procedural suggestions based on the Soziolinguistischen Prozessanalyse (socio-linguistic process analysis) by Fritz Schütze. This modification has effects on the concrete methodical procedure during the evaluation. In doing so, the biographical data material shows traces of social fields. The participant observation is limited by time, and access to the social field is made to capture person, and therefore bodies, supportively within social practices. This data collection method plays in terms of a flexible and contextual research strategy (see Lüders 2012) an exploratory, complementary role, which is recorded in writing through structured protocols of observation and description in connection (see Przyborski/Wohlrab-Sahr 2014). The data, which is generated from opposite perspectives, is against the backdrop of contrasting case comparison of Glaser and Strauss (1967: 51-83; cf. Schütze 1983: 286f) examined and triangulated.
The following leading research questions are currently assumed: What are the forms of interaction between dancer and body? Which patterns of acting and attitudes in handling and in terms of orientation on the body can be noted? What are the basic process variants of handling the narrators with their bodies show up on the basis of data material? Which somatic and social conditions and process mechanisms, which can be analyzed in the course of their respective biographies, are found? Furthermore, the question is relevant, what processes of learning and education are constitutive for a somatic level, such as the learning of movements and the usage and transformation of attitudes towards the body. In short, which process courses and process structures arise if a person with focus on the body and the bodies of the other are put in the center of the analysis? Furthermore attention is placed on the becoming and being of sexual and gendered bodies in the ballet world and their related acting with the "spare time body" or "private body". The aim is to provide a generalizable scheme of theoretical explanation.