We/you can tell talk from matter

^†A throwback for the UK oldies! ‘You can't tell Stork (margarine) from Butter’ was a popular TV advert slogan in the 70s!! You could tell, easily so, if you went beyond appearances and tasted or touched the slithery yellow matter!

: a conversation with Håkan Larsson and Mikael Quennerstedt

Abstract

How we go about conceptualising and articulating relationships between the body as ‘matter’ and its ‘mattering’ in and by culture, is a critical issue for educational researchers, perhaps especially so for those in Physical Education, Health and sport (PEHS). This paper engages such issue via conversation with ideas presented in the recent work of Håkan Larsson and Mikael Quennerstedt, published in this and another journal (Quest). While we share much the same interests as Håkan and Mikael in researching educational processes, including how policy and pedagogical transactions evident in formal and informal education, PEHS impact subjectivity to either prohibit or progress the well-being of children and young people and, even more broadly, greater equity and equality in society and schools, we highlight some clear points of divergence especially with their views as to how future research might advance understanding of relationships between education, embodiment and specific movement forms. The paper advocates attention to both matter and mattering and their relationality, via border crossings of an ideational, intellectual and disciplinary kind.

Keywords:

• Embodiment
• Research
• Physical education
• Health
• Sport
• Border crossings

Notes

^† A throwback for the UK oldies! ‘You can't tell Stork (margarine) from Butter’ was a popular TV advert slogan in the 70s!! You could tell, easily so, if you went beyond appearances and tasted or touched the slithery yellow matter!

1. We are pretty certain that our commentary on both SES and Quest papers will not have given sufficient regard to the differences between the theoretical perspectives and opinions held by Håkan and Mikael. Just as ‘our’ response obscures quite distinctive differences in Rich, Davies and Evans’ theoretical perspectives, so too our conflated commentary on both SES and Quest papers may serve to obscure important and distinctive differences between Mikael's and Håkan's perspectives. We can only apologise if any misrepresentation occurs through the conflation of the papers.

2. Lennon (2010) for example, draws attention to the work of some transsexual theorists. She says, ‘For Butler, in Gender Trouble the trans-community serves to make evident the constructedness of all gender identities, and helps promote the destabilisation of gender binaries and the normative mappings of gendered behaviour and bodily morphologies’. For many trans-people, such destabilisation provides a framework which can make sense of and legitimate their own fluid gendered positionality. What Butler's account seems less able to accommodate, however, are those transsexuals who seek bodily modification. Prosser (1998) suggests that those with such a desire, for sexed embodiment, can only be seen in Butler's framework as misled by a naturalism about sexed identity. They have failed to grasp that gendered realness is simply a matter of performance. Yet, Prosser argues, this does not accommodate the experiences of those whose feel themselves ‘in the wrong body’.

3. Blackman (2007, p. 3) too reminds us that the body provides ‘a dynamic point of intersection with social and cultural processes. It is not that nature and culture “interact” but rather the materiality of the body is always situated and mediated through the adaptive strategies the person develops to integrate experiences into their lives’. This perspective is reflected in the growing use of affectivity in recent work on the body.

4. At the heart of our work then, is recognition that the body cannot be reduced to either nature or culture, but comprises a complex interplay of processes which cannot be disentangled (see Blackman, 2007). The visible body, its surface inscriptions, are, of course, constituted through a particular intelligibility; shaped in relation to particular discourses, a pertinent issue, certainly in the context of PEHS. However, our work draws attention equally to what Fraser (2002, p. 621) terms the ‘generative force of matter’ which moves beyond this discursive reconstitution of the body. The challenge then lies with ‘how to “think” the body as discursive, material and embodied without reinstating the notion that the discursive and material are two separate, pre-existing entities that somehow “interact” (see Blackman (2007, p. 2) and generating artificial separations between the biological as an ‘autonomous physiological state’ (Littlewood, 1996, p. 15)’. Our work also highlights that material bodies are not to be thought of as static, that discourses and culture are the things that are mutable: entering into some form of interaction with the discourse which changes the embodied experience itself, mattering of the body.

5. Such discussions have, for example, proved fruitful in understanding psychiatric culture and ‘the complex relational dynamics that exist between science and culture in the production of psychopathology’ (Blackman, 2007).

6. This section of the paper draws heavily on and reproduces text and ideas that were first introduced and developed in Evans and Davies (2011) and Evans (2012). We are grateful to Taylor & Francis for permission to use that material.

7. ‘Axiological cosmologies involve the “moral charging” of practices and beliefs through a process of axiological condensation. This process, I argue, creates relations between actors and their practices that are more mediated than standpoint theories but which, nonetheless, emphasise the attributes of knowers as key to legitimacy within the field’ [] A ‘cosmology’ is what makes one system of ideas sexy and another not so hot. More formally, a cosmology is a constitutive feature of social fields that underlies the ways practices and actors are differentially valued. Every social field has a cosmology, though its nature varies between fields and may change over time. In fields like the natural sciences, cosmologies tend to be primarily epistemological and the ‘sex appeal’ of theories is typically (though not always or solely) related to their comparative explanatory power. In fields like sociology and Education, cosmologies currently tend to be more axiological and theories are valued according to their moral or political worth’ (from Maton, in press).