Sporting embodiment: sports studies and the (continuing) promise of phenomenology

Abstract

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under‐realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide‐ranging, multi‐stranded and interpretatively contested perspective phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of interpretative phenomenological analysis is also critically addressed.

Keywords:

• phenomenology
• existentialist phenomenology
• interpretative phenomenological analysis
• sporting embodiment
• the lived body
• Merleau‐Ponty

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the co‐editor and the three reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

Notes

1. In contrast, ‘noumena’ are deemed to be the actual objects that produce the phenomena, although the possibility of their ‘independent’ existence is debated within phenomenology.

2. See Throop and Murphy (2002) for an analysis of Bourdieu’s critique of phenomenology, for example.

3. See Smith (2004) and Smith and Osborn (2003) for good discussions of IPA.