Abstract
Foucault’s technologies of the self have been used by sociological scholars of sport for nearly two decades. Yet Markula’s seminal articulation of a feminist Foucauldian ethics in 2003 stands as a watershed publication, insofar as the majority of publications following this article have framed much of their analyses in relation to this work. In this article, then, I review sociological studies of sport and exercise that draw on Foucauldian ethics from Markula’s article onward, paying careful attention to how Foucault’s ethics and Markula’s Foucauldian feminism have been deployed. Although I interpret this body of work as productive and insightful, I offer a critical reading of the emphasis on explicit problematizations and, relatedly, develop a methodological critique of researchers’ reliance on interviews as a prime form of research method.
Introduction
Sociologists of sport have productively engaged with Foucauldian theory for more than two decades (e.g., Andrews, 1993; Cole, 1993; Cole, Giardina, & Andrews, 2004; Markula & Pringle, 2006; Rail & Harvey, 1995). The depth and breadth of research using Foucault illustrates the rich complexity that his conceptualizations of power, discourse, truth, and subjectivity offer to our field. Foucault (1993) suggested that his work followed two paths; initially, he focused on ways in which the subject was constituted by “techniques of domination” (p. 203), and yet in his later work, he “became more and more aware that there is in all societies . . . another type of techniques . . . a techniques or technology of the self” (p. 203). Simply put, he became interested in techniques through which individuals seek to focus on and change their self to attain a particular state of being.
In this article, I focus on how sociologists of sport have engaged with Foucault’s later work, focusing on technologies of the self. I begin by outlining key tenets of Foucault’s ethics and then describe in detail Pirkko Markula’s (2003, 2004; Markula & Pringle, 2006) Foucauldian feminism. I then review publications following Markula’s (2003) initial article. 1 From this review and drawing on my reading of contemporary research from the anthropology of ethics and Rabinow’s (2000, 2009) contextualization of Foucault’s ethical turn, I offer a critique of how the concepts problematization and critical self-reflection have been theorized as solely pertaining to explicit, rationalized thought. I link this theoretical critique to the limited body of literature that has been used within the field and the methodological choice to rely, almost exclusively, on interviews as a research method. Relatedly, I argue for greater consideration of how affect, emotions, and embodiment might form part of a problematization, or ethical self-formation more broadly.
My focus on publications from Markula (2003) onward recognizes that studies within sociology of sport prior to 2003 that used technologies of the self were thoroughly reviewed in Markula’s article. More importantly, I recognize that Markula’s feminist reading of Foucault’s later work has been of singular influence within sociology of sport. Sociological studies of sport drawing on Foucauldian ethics published since 2003 reveal the productive influence of Markula’s delineation of Foucauldian feminism (e.g., Jones & Aitchison, 2007; Pringle & Hickey, 2010; Spowart, Burrows, & Shaw, 2010; Thorpe, 2008).
Foucault’s Ethics
As a number of scholars have noted (Markula & Pringle, 2006; Rabinow, 2000; Rajchman, 1986), Foucault died shortly after publishing the second and third volumes of his History of Sexuality. Subsequently, although his analyses of forms of ethical self-cultivation in ancient Greece and Hellenic Rome are compelling, we have only fragmentary evidence for how Foucault might have conceptualized a contemporary, nonuniversal ethics. As Rajchman laments, “perhaps the great work of philosophy of which his death deprives us would have been on this topic” (p. 166). Relatedly, Rabinow (2009) observes that Foucault had become uneasy with his previous refusals to recommend ethical or political principles. Subsequently, “he was in quest of a different way forward when time ran out” (p. 41). Rabinow (2000) nevertheless suggests that “Foucault may well be remembered as one of the major ethical thinkers of modernity” (p. xxvi), a point also emphasized by Markula and Pringle (2006). Collectively, these scholars point to a key tension. Namely that many scholars have found Foucault’s ethical theorizing to be a compelling and productive approach for understanding ethics in contemporary times, while also acknowledging that Foucault’s ethical theorizing was not comprehensively articulated as a modern praxis. Subsequently, many scholars have read Foucault “with a ‘liberational’ intent” (Markula & Pringle, 2006, p. 150), adapting Foucauldian ethics for their own purposes. In this section, then, I briefly outline the key concepts that Foucault developed in his ethical turn, drawing primarily on his own work and highlighting the more ambiguous aspects of his theorizing.
Foucault’s (1984, 1988a) ethics focuses on individuals’ active formation of their selves as subjects in the context of particular discourses, power relations, and practices. Dismissing the possibility of a society existing without power relations, Foucault focused instead on how individuals might act on themselves in the context of ongoing relations of power. Foucault summarized a four-part process of ethical self-creation, which he called the mode of subjectivation. This process consisted of ethical substance, mode of subjection, ethical work, and telos (Foucault, 1984). Ethical substance is that part of one’s self that is identified as the focus of one’s ethical conduct. This could be one’s body, conduct, or thoughts. Mode of subjection refers to the relation a person establishes between his or her self and a rule of conduct. Ethical work refers to the changes to behaviors or thoughts that are made to bring one’s self into compliance with a rule. Finally, telos concerns the integration of this behavior into a broader pattern of conduct. In this sense, telos represents the idealized ethical self that one aspires to embody.
Foucault (1984, 1988b, 1993, 2000c, 2000f) repeatedly outlined the mode of subjectivation as the prime manner in which he understood possibilities for creating one’s self as an ethical subject. Yet he also drew on a range of other concepts, most notably practices of the self and practices of freedom, problematization, and an aesthetics of existence. For Foucault, practices of the self were the regular, repeated actions one took as ethical work to transform an aspect of one’s self. Importantly, however, “these practices are not something invented by the individual himself [sic]. They are models he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, his social group” (Foucault, 2000a, p. 291).
In the same interview, Foucault (2000a) also discussed practices of freedom as a central ethical question. He pointed out that because “liberation paves the way for new power relationships” (pp. 283-284), any process of liberation from oppression must be coupled with consideration of new or alternative ways of engaging in power relations. Subsequently, in discussing practices of freedom, Foucault revealed his understanding of ethics as involving a series of questions about how we might understand and exercise the sociohistorically specific freedoms available to us. He proposed, “ethics is the considered form freedom takes when it is informed by reflection” (Foucault, 2000a, p. 284). Markula’s (2003, 2004) Foucauldian feminism draws extensively on practices of freedom.
Foucault developed the notion of problematization to conceptualize the form or style of thought involved in an ethics of self-creation. Foucault (2000d) suggested that problematization was a style of thought in which:
Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the emotion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem . . . for a domain of action, a behaviour, to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. (p. 117)
In his studies of ancient Greece and Hellenic Rome, Foucault suggested that these cultures problematized the self in relation to freedom, knowledge of the self, and care of the self. A tension arises, however, as to what form of problematization Foucault suggested for contemporary ethics. At times, as in his discussion of practices of the self and his studies of ancient Greek and Hellenic Roman thought, he located problematizations within specific discursive communities rather than with individual subjects. At other times, he implied a more individualistic and foundational critique of the self largely in line with his ongoing antiessentialism.
In the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault (1984) explained his shifting academic trajectory in relation to this stronger form of problematization: “[T]here are times in life when the question of knowing if one can differently think than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (p. 8). Relatedly, Rabinow (2009) contextualized much of Foucault’s later thinking about problematization as located within his own struggle to understand his own role as a philosopher 2 and his contrasting experiences between an increasingly socially conservative climate in France and his visits to New York and California. Following Rabinow’s contextualization, we might observe that not only was Foucault offering a philosophy of ethics but that he was also actively seeking to construct an ethics through which a philosopher might live. Much of Foucault’s later thinking about problematization was about positioning radical critique, or “the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself” (Foucault, 1984, p. 9), as the central task of a contemporary philosopher. It is important to keep this contextualization in mind when examining how problematization has been taken up in the sociology of sport.
Foucault was inspired by the ancient Greeks’ understanding of their lives as aesthetic projects. Driven by his antiessentialism, he endorsed this vision of ethics, suggesting that we should engage in an “aesthetics of existence” in which we can “relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity” (Foucault, 2000c, p. 262). Relatedly, he advocated “let’s escape as much as possible from the type of relations that society proposes for us and try to create in the empty space where we are new relational possibilities” (Foucault, 2000e, p. 160). Indeed, given his recommendation that “we must think that what exists is far from filling all the possible spaces” (Foucault, 2000b, p. 140), there is considerable scope to consider ethics as a creative “stylization of the relation to oneself” (Huijer, 1999, p. 65).
Markula’s Foucauldian Feminism
While writing this review, I experimented with structuring my analysis in relation to Markula and Pringle’s (2006) monograph on Foucault. It is notable, however, that many scholars (e.g., MacKay & Dallaire, 2013; Spowart et al., 2010; Thorpe, 2008) continue to reference Markula’s (2003) initial exposition of Foucauldian feminism. Subsequently, in this section, my review emphasizes Markula’s definitive early work while actively incorporating her subsequent sole-authored and coauthored empirical and theoretical work. It is important to recognize that Markula expanded on her initial analysis of Foucauldian feminism both theoretically and empirically (Markula, 2004), and later, writing with Pringle (Markula & Pringle, 2006), reorganized and expanded this theoretical analysis while adding further empirical case studies. There is of course no objective way in which to review this literature; thus, I seek to reflexively engage with these decisions I have taken while writing this review.
Markula’s (2003) Foucauldian feminism seeks to theorize possibilities for feminist resistance to oppressive notions of the female body that are common within contemporary discourses and power relations in exercise, fitness, and dance contexts. Moreover, her theorizing can be read as offering a poststructural alternative to the authentic preformed agent central to much critical theory. Markula’s revision of Foucault’s technologies of the self combines her reading of Foucault with the scholarship of a range of prominent feminist theorists and Moya Lloyd (1996) in particular. Markula’s conceptualization involves multiple elements, yet perhaps the three most important criteria she nominates are “ethical self-care, aesthetic self-stylization and critical self-awareness” (p. 98). For Markula, these three concepts, when linked holistically, constitute practices of freedom. This three-part conceptualization of Foucault’s ethics, and in particular the emphasis on critically reflexive thought, has been of singular influence within the field.
Markula (2003) explains that ethical self-care occurs when “an individual constituted himself as a moral subject of his own actions” (p. 99). Ethical self-care then involves a concern for one’s self and one’s actions in relation to one’s understanding of oneself as an ethical subject. Ethical self-care manifests in the form of practices, and any practice has the potential to be a form of ethical self-care. Yet as Markula (2003) observes, practices that reflect a concern with the self are relatively common within sport and exercise. For example, diet and exercise might be recorded as part of an effort to modify one’s body shape or improve performance. Although such efforts are not automatically precluded from being examples of ethical self-care, these practices are very often docile responses in relation to dominant discourses of body image and competitive sport. Markula then distinguishes between coping mechanisms, “tricks to cope with the dominant discourses in sport” (p. 101), and genuine ethical self-care, which must exist in concert with critical self-awareness and aesthetic ethical self-stylization.
For Markula (2003), critical self-reflection operates as the lodestone of feminist Foucauldian ethics: “[O]nly critical self reflection [sic] can result in a change of one’s own condition” (p. 101). This critical reflection requires a constant vigilance in questioning both society’s, and one’s own assumptions about one’s identity. It is “through this interrogation of the limits of one’s subjectivity, the possibility of transgression emerges” (p. 102). Moreover, any transgressive action emerging from critical thought can “establish a chance for public impact by provoking confusion about the present discourse of femininity” (p. 102). Markula’s conceptualization of critical self-awareness then corresponds closely with Foucault’s stronger, more antiessentialist accounts of problematization.
Moreover, Markula (2003) was quite specific about how critical self-awareness should be identified:
To detect athletes’ critical self-awareness, feminists need to ask women to articulate it. For example, researchers must know if the athletes are aware of the problems deriving from the narrowly defined body ideal and their critical assessment of such an ideal. (pp. 104-105)
Markula, then, recommended researchers to seek a deliberate, verbally articulated form of problematization by using interviews as a research method. However, it is important to note that this methodological recommendation was subsequently omitted from her coauthored monograph (Markula & Pringle, 2006).
An athlete who is engaged in ethical self-care underpinned by critical self-awareness has the opportunity to develop an aesthetics of ethical self-stylization (Markula, 2003). An aesthetics of ethical self-stylization recognizes that there is no essential self to which one must be true. Thinking of oneself as a work of art recognizes the contingencies that shape one’s subjectivity, and offers opportunities to actively reshape aspects of one’s life in a manner informed by one’s critique. Given the ubiquity of self-stylization within contemporary life (cf. Featherstone, 2007), Markula, drawing again on Lloyd, argues that self-fashioning can only be ethical if it is paired with critical self-reflection. The later coauthored monograph (Markula & Pringle, 2006) drew on O’Leary to argue that Foucault’s use of aesthetics was a strategy to develop a vocabulary of ethics beyond that of normativity and universalism.
No practice in and of itself then can be considered feminist or ethical. Rather both the practice and reason for performing the practice must be considered in tandem:
Wearing the latest fashion does not serve as a technology of the self, but if an individual woman’s conscious, critical efforts to make a political statement through dress can provoke “a critical, querying reaction” (Lloyd, 1996, p. 258), she has potentially problematized women’s present cultural condition and can have an impact on power relations. (Markula, 2003, p. 102)
Ethical self-care, then, involves a focus on one’s self in relation to one’s actions. When allied with critical self-reflection, one can reflect on the seemingly natural ways in which one’s subjectivity is shaped. Subsequently, one might actively reshape part of one’s self through an aesthetics of ethical self-stylization.
It is in relation to these three criteria that Markula argues that Foucault’s technologies of the self have potential as a way of theorizing feminist activism. Nevertheless, Markula (2003) emphasizes that “it is obvious that the technologies of the self is a complex concept, and therefore, there is no clear formula that will detect which sporting practices serve as practices of freedom” (p. 104). In this way, Markula encourages sociologists of sport to aim for a rigorous engagement with Foucauldian ethics.
Foucauldian Ethics in Sport Since 2003
Broadly speaking, studies drawing on technologies of the self can be split into four groups, namely, those who conduct an analysis focusing on tensions between technologies of domination and technologies of the self (e.g., Bridel & Rail, 2007; Hanold, 2010; Jones & Aitchison, 2007; Young & Dallaire, 2008), those who structure their analysis in relation to Markula’s (2003) Foucauldian feminism (e.g., Hardin, 2011; Markula, 2004; Spowart et al., 2010; Thorpe, 2008), those who structure their analysis in relation to Foucault’s mode of subjectivation (e.g., MacKay & Dallaire, 2013; Pringle & Hickey, 2010), and those who emphasize select aspects of Foucault’s ethics (e.g., Crocket, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Markula & Pringle, 2006). Although it is useful to use these groupings to review the literature, I stress that there is considerable overlap between these groups and they should not be viewed as fully distinct. In particular, these studies consistently followed Markula’s emphasis on critical self-awareness, which, I suggested above, fits most closely with Foucault’s more demanding accounts of problematization.
Tensions Between Technologies of Domination and Technologies of the Self
Three of the four studies (Bridel & Rail, 2007; Hanold, 2010; Jones & Aitchison, 2007) reviewed in this section were based on endurance sport, while the fourth (Young & Dallaire, 2008) focused on female skateboarders. These studies tended to focus on Foucault’s notion of discourse and to deploy Markula’s critical self-awareness as a way of distinguishing between technologies of domination and of the self, without a broader analysis drawing on the other two pillars of Markula’s Foucauldian feminism or Foucault’s mode of subjectivation.
Importantly, all four of these studies revealed a complex combination of technologies of domination and technologies of the self. More specifically, although each study highlighted participants’ problematization of specific discourses, often in relation to bodily aesthetics, this was often predicated on a seemingly uncritical acceptance of alternative discourses. Bridel and Rail (2007), for example, showed that although their marathon-running participants uncritically validated the slim running body, this bodily ideal allowed these men to express a critique of dominant bodily aesthetics within gay culture. Relatedly, Hanold (2010) discovered that “through the process of being disciplined by the ‘ultrarunning success’ discourse, participants developed a critical awareness of the normative running and ideal female body discourses” (p. 173).
Markula’s Foucauldian Feminist Approach
Four studies have closely followed Markula’s (2003) articulation of a Foucauldian feminist approach (Hardin, 2011; Markula, 2004; Spowart et al., 2010; Thorpe, 2008). Yet as I describe below, there is some variation within these studies about how Markula’s three-part conceptualization—described above—has been applied, with some articles swapping out one or more of these terms in favor of another term Markula (2003, 2004) regularly uses, namely, practices of freedom.
For Spowart et al.’s (2010) participants, all of whom were mothers who surf, surfing was “rendered a felt reality, not just an activity, but a way of being a different self” (p. 1193). In this very direct manner, then, surfing was conceptualized as a form of ethical self-care. Markula (2004) observed an absence of ethical self-care among the instructors of the mindful fitness program, hybrid. However, Markula contrasted this absence of ethical self-care among exercise instructors with the creator of the class, whose “practice of self-care then translated into creating an exercise class that de-emphasized the looks of the body in favor of the functional benefits of fitness” (p. 318). The instructors, she noted, “ended up functioning in the discourse of the body beautiful rather than stretching its boundaries” (p. 316). Neither Thorpe (2008) nor Hardin (2011) directly discuss care of the self, focusing instead on the dual strategies of critical self-awareness and practices of freedom.
Critical self-awareness was strongly emphasized in all these studies, with Markula (2003) and Lloyd (1996) being consistently drawn on to develop this theoretical construct. Spowart et al. (2010) found that their participants were critical of the masculine image of surfing and thought it important that women support each other to gain access to surfing. In this way, they noted that “the group has potentially problematized women’s present position in surf culture” (p. 1194). Markula (2004) found, unsurprisingly, that hybrid fitness instructors were not critically self-aware, although the creator of the hybrid program did problematize the fitness industry’s emphasis on body shape and lack of concern for training for functionality.
Thorpe (2008) revealed a complex process of critical self-awareness in her study of snowboarding, gender, and media. Some participants, for example, drew on third-wave feminism to endorse the choices of certain elite female boarders who posed in men’s magazines. Other participants differentiated between these choices of active snowboarders and the passive, sexualized portrayal of nonathlete models in snowboarding media. In particular, Thorpe argued that “women who have experienced snowboarding as a fulfilling physical activity and who view their bodies as powerful and athletic are the ones best able to problematize such images” (p. 215). Hardin (2011) found critical self-awareness to be widespread, albeit not universal, in her examination of a collective who blog about women’s sport. Many bloggers, she explained, “talked about transformational power of ‘writing the self’” (p. 55) and found that their blogging facilitated their awareness of, and engagement with, feminist issues.
Spowart et al. (2010) identified multiple practices that formed an aesthetics of ethical self-stylization for the surfing mothers, including an online chat forum, a clothing range, and an active support group for mothers who surf. Thorpe (2008) and Hardin (2011) made little direct mention of an aesthetics of ethical self-stylization. Instead, they discussed practices of freedom, which Thorpe (2008) defines as “practices that an individual can use to transform him- or herself within power relations” (p. 209). It is unclear whether Thorpe and Hardin use practices of freedom as a synonym for an aesthetics of ethical self-stylization, or as Markula (2003, 2004) does, to denote Foucault’s thoughts on what might constitute a contemporary ethic of self-creation. Given Markula’s (2004) suggestion that “several features, such as aesthetics of existence, the ethics of care of the self and critical thought, begin to characterize the practices of freedom” (p. 304), there is a degree of ambiguity in how the term practices of freedom is used by different scholars.
Studies Using Foucault’s Mode of Subjectivation
Two studies have structured their analyses in relation to Foucault’s mode of subjectivation with sections discussing ethical substance, mode of subjection, ethical work, and telos (MacKay & Dallaire, 2013; Pringle & Hickey, 2010). MacKay and Dallaire’s (2013) study of the Skirtboarders, a female skating collective who run a prominent blog about their group, revealed that these sportswomen took as their ethical substance “their gender subjectivity and particularly their relationship to other women” (p. 180). Pringle and Hickey’s (2010) study of a select group of male athletes and coaches identified that “select hypermasculine performances [e.g., heavy drinking, misogyny and hypercompetitiveness] existed within all of their sporting contexts and these performances and related moral codes eventually became sources of tension” (p. 124).
The Skirtboarders’ mode of subjection was constituted by the question “how does their collective Internet project establish their relationship to the moral imperative of mutual support among crew members and solidarity with other young women” (MacKay & Dallaire, 2013, p. 183). Pringle and Hickey’s participants, reflecting on their problematizations of hypermasculinity, variously established modes of subjection in relation to principles of respecting others and feminist understandings of gender inequities.
Ethical work, for the Skirtboarders, took on the form of active participation in creating and commenting on their blog. As MacKay and Dallaire (2013) explain, “their active Web presence launched these sportswomen on an innovative process of constituting themselves as gendered skateboarders as they reported on the crew’s activities” (p. 187). Pringle and Hickey’s (2010) participants took on a variety of ethical work, including moderating their own alcohol consumption, developing a family-friendly rugby club, and advocating for equitable resourcing of women’s volleyball.
Both Pringle and Hickey (2010) and MacKay and Dallaire (2013) compared the ethical work of their participants with the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia, or fearlessly telling the truth. Parrhesia is a social practice that aims to effect social change, which is indicative of Foucault’s (2000a) claim that care of the self “is also a way of caring for others” (p. 287). Relatedly, MacKay and Dallaire (2013) compared the Skirtboarders blog with hypomnemata, “a form of self writing used by the Ancient Greeks who recorded thoughts, experiments and/or curiosities in a notebook or journal for later synthesis and reflections” (p. 187). Hypomnemata is also fruitfully explored by Markula and Pringle (2006), which I examine below. Although hypomnemata have been fruitfully used as an analytic tool, it is notable that such analyses have not drawn explicitly on Foucault’s later lectures, which have only relatively recently been published (e.g., Foucault, 2005, 2011). In these lectures, he considers parrhesia and hypomnemata in further detail.
As Skirtboarders, MacKay and Dallaire’s (2013) participants aspired to a telos of becoming “engaged female skateboarders committed to one another . . . This ambition expanded as they undertook to act as an example to other young women” (p. 191). Significantly, this is the only study that shows a change in how participants understood their telos over time. Pringle and Hickey (2010) identified that “the telos or broad existential goal of Peter, Mitch and Robert was a desire to show respect, regardless of gender, to all people” (p. 130).
Although Foucault’s mode of subjectivation was the key analytic tool in these two articles, problematization was theorized, following Markula (2004) and Markula and Pringle (2006), in explicit terms. MacKay and Dallaire (2013), for example, explained that “ethical subjects must also use critical self-awareness strategies (questioning what appears ‘natural’ and inevitable in one’s own subjectivity)” (p. 175). Examples of problematization were integrated throughout each study.
Studies Selectively Drawing on Foucauldian Ethics
A final set is those studies that selectively draw on aspects of Foucault’s ethics to examine specific features of ethical self-formation (e.g., Crocket, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Markula & Pringle, 2006). Markula and Pringle’s (2006) monograph on Foucauldian theory included analyses of Markula’s attempts to become an ethically engaged Pilates instructor and Pringle’s engagement with ethical pedagogical practice. Although the entire book was coauthored, in this section, I refer to the former of these studies as Markula and the latter as Pringle for the sake of clarity.
Markula’s account of her reflexive engagement training as a Pilates instructor drew strongly on her earlier conception of Foucault’s ethics, namely, “aesthetic practice; critical self-awareness; . . . and self-transformation” (Markula & Pringle, 2006, p. 185), yet of equal significance was her exposition of the use of hypomnemata in an attempt to establish “a sort of permanent political relationship between self and self” (Foucault, 1983b, cited in Markula & Pringle, 2006, p. 182). In this way, Markula focused on a particular form of writing as ethical work and its relation to Markula’s broader goal to “create an ethical fitness practitioner out of myself” (p. 184).
Pringle (Markula & Pringle, 2006) considered ethical pedagogies within sociology of sport. Focusing on Foucault’s suggestion that we might think of ethics as an attempt to engage in power relations involving a minimum of domination, Pringle sought to facilitate students’ abilities to problematize discourses of rugby, without assuming that “we had the ethical right to tell our students ‘what to do’ with respect to their relationships with rugby” (p. 200). Drawing on his earlier analyses of rugby masculinities, Pringle constructed a collective story which included “disqualified or silenced knowledges” (p. 209), which he used to stimulate a conversation about possible problems within contemporary rugby discourses.
My examination of the ethics of sporting retirement focused on three Foucauldian notions, namely, games of truth, problematization, and ethical work (Crocket, 2014). Moreover, identifying that Foucault’s notion of problematization was broad, I used Denzin’s (1989) notion of epiphany to elucidate poignant moments in these athletes’ careers. Significantly, there was substantial variation in how each athlete came to problematize the games of truth that defined their sport. Nevertheless, each of the athletes in my study reached a point, relatively early in their athletic careers, where ongoing participation was too problematic to the maintenance of a satisfactory sense of self. At this point, these athletes engaged in ethical work by retiring from these competitive team sports.
In two further studies, I followed Foucault’s approach in The Use of Pleasure focusing on practices and problematizations to examine ascetic and pleasurable practices of the self in Ultimate Frisbee, respectively (Crocket, 2015a, 2015b). After identifying problematizations relating to excessively competitive behavior, I explored how players interpreted and implemented ascetic practices of moderation, tolerance, and honesty and pleasurable practices of humor and irony recommended within the Ultimate community. To gain a more thorough reading of humor and irony, I supplemented my Foucauldian theory with Hutcheon (1994) and Critchley’s (2002) analyses of irony and humor, respectively. Noting that humor and irony are aesthetic techniques of self, I argued that Foucault’s notion of aesthetics of existence opens space for considerations of a pleasurable ethics rather than an ethics solely based on ascetics. These practices—moderation, tolerance, honesty, irony, and humor—offered a range of ways in which Ultimate players could work to produce an athletic self that showed care for self and others.
Analysis
Across these studies, Foucault’s later work has facilitated a microanalysis of individuals’ negotiation and active creation of an ethical self within the sociohistorically specific discourses and power relations that form their everyday lives. I argue that the diversity of interpretation and emphasis highlights the rich heuristic potential of technologies of the self within sociology of sport. Although scholars have clarified that participants in their studies are unlikely to alter dominant discourses and power relations at a societal level (e.g., Pringle & Hickey, 2010), they have nevertheless shown that microlevel change is both possible and meaningful. Moreover, as MacKay and Dallaire (2013) revealed, individual and collective processes of ethical self-creation can affect or influence change among others in unanticipated ways.
As I have demonstrated in this review, these studies, without being uniform, draw on key tenets of Foucauldian ethics with a distinct but not totalizing tendency to follow Markula’s Foucauldian feminism. This is indicative of the quality of Markula’s theoretical explication of Foucault’s work and that most of this body of scholarship has shared Markula’s interest in examining possibilities for feminist activism and change within sport and exercise from a poststructuralist perspective (e.g., Hanold, 2010; Hardin, 2011; Jones & Aitchison, 2007; MacKay & Dallaire, 2013; Markula, 2004; Markula & Pringle, 2006; Spowart et al., 2010; Thorpe, 2008; Young & Dallaire, 2008).
Problematization
With the exception of Bridel and Rail (2007), all the studies I reviewed have emphasized the need for problematization or critical self-awareness to underpin any technology of the self. More specifically, sociologists of sport have consistently drawn on Markula’s conceptualization of critical self-awareness, which fits with the stronger or more demanding accounts Foucault offered in relation to problematization. Whereas the other two pillars of Markula’s Foucauldian feminism, ethical self-care and aesthetics of ethical self-stylization, have not been drawn on by other scholars in such a regular manner, the consistency of interpretation of critical self-awareness is arguably the defining characteristic of this body of scholarship. I now examine this defining characteristic in detail.
Despite a consistent theoretical emphasis on a strong form of problematization or critical self-awareness, there have been constant challenges in relation to specific empirical examples of these concepts. Markula (2004), Jones and Aitchison (2007), and Hardin (2011) have all recognized that there can be difficulties finding evidence of problematization, yet they do not consider what this might mean in terms of how problematization itself has been conceptualized. Jones and Aitchison observed that the more involved their participants were within triathlon culture, the less they tended to problematize it. Relatedly, Markula (2004) suggested that in relation to her study of exercise instructors, if individuals have not had cause to find their experiences problematic, they may not yet have been exposed to discourses and power relations that might trigger or facilitate a process of problematization.
Perhaps more importantly, all the studies that examined tensions between technologies of domination and technologies of the self (Bridel & Rail, 2007; Hanold, 2010; Jones & Aitchison, 2007) identified ways in which their participants simultaneously demonstrated problematization and docility. Bridel and Rail, for example, found their gay male marathon runners relatively uncritically approved of the aesthetics of the ideal, read slim, running body. Yet at the same time, this bodily aesthetic was also the basis of the runners’ critique of dominant, muscular, bodily aesthetics within gay culture in North America. Relatedly, Thorpe (2008) revealed snowboarders’ problematizations of sexualized snowboarding media varied according to whether her participants subscribed to second- or third-wave feminism.
Pringle and Hickey (2010) found that one of their participants understood that his critique of hypercompetitiveness in sport involved learning to be faithful to his essential, true self. As Pringle and Hickey observe, such an insistence is at odds with Foucault’s antiessentialism. Thus, we might question whether this participant is genuinely in a process of problematization in which he “constantly questions what is seemingly ‘natural’ and inevitable in one’s identity and as a result, creates an identity of one’s own” (Markula, 2003, p. 102). Writing autoethnographically about her training as a Pilates instructor, Markula (Markula & Pringle, 2006) reported that “the third category of my hypomnemata, critical self-reflection, proved a difficult challenge. I was quite unsure about what to report under this heading” (p. 186).
Subsequently, I suggest that although problematization or critical self-awareness has justifiably been theorized as a pivotal aspect of Foucault’s ethics, there is a disjuncture between how problematization has been conceptualized in terms of explicit, rationalized thought through which one continuously questions one’s assumptions about one’s subjectivity and the messiness, complexity, and ambiguity of life within late modernity. I speculate that although defining problematization in explicit and demanding terms appears intuitive to critical scholars, this is because we are already thoroughly immersed in discourses of explicit critique. Drawing on my earlier contextualization of Foucault’s later thinking on problematization, I suggest that the terms in which scholars in the field have theorized problematization fit closely with Foucault’s later thinking on the work or task of a philosopher. Yet with the exception of the autoethnographic examples offered by Markula and Pringle (2006), research participants have typically spent little time in the rarefied discourses and critiques of the academy, and relatively few research participants appear to be engaged in a mode of thought that “constantly questions what is seemingly ‘natural’ and inevitable in one’s identity” (Markula, 2003, p. 102, emphasis added).
In contrast, research participants may be more likely to express critique in the vernacular of their everyday lives, using language and phrases that might not pass as adequately critical within scholarly discourse. Participants might offer ambiguous or partial problematizations, or be struggling with an issue that they have yet to fully articulate to themselves, let alone to a researcher. Similarly, participants might engage in problematizations in an irregular manner, going through periods of critical questioning and periods where such questioning is less prevalent. In light of such complexities, I suggest that greater recognition is needed of potential difficulties relating to interpreting problematization among research participants. Furthermore, in unpacking the complexities and ambiguities of problematization, I suggest that researchers might productively consider the possibilities of embodied, affective, and emotional aspects of problematization.
Although this suggestion contrasts with Markula’s (2003) earlier emphasis on asking participants to make explicit statements emphasizing critical self-awareness, I suggest that a more complex examination of problematization does not preclude considering explicit, fully formed critique, and that this alternative interpretation is, ultimately, a relatively subtle change building on Foucault’s more moderate accounts of problematization. However, this shift would bring two advantages. First, it would be a responsive modification of theory in light of empirical studies. Second, it would recognize that in recent years, sociology and cultural studies have increasingly acknowledged the importance of embodiment, affect, and emotions (e.g., Burkitt, 2014; Markula, 2008; Phoenix & Orr, 2014; Pringle, Rinehart, & Caudwell, 2015; Thorpe & Rinehart, 2010). Indeed, it is notable that many scholars who have used Foucauldian ethics have subsequently published separate scholarly accounts exploring the role of affect and emotions in sport. There is considerable scope, I suggest, to consider how different approaches to understanding affect, embodiment, and emotions might inform considerations of problematization, and technologies of the self more broadly. 3
To illustrate this point, I draw on an example relating to a participant in my examination of the ethics of sporting retirement (Crocket, 2014) in which affect, emotion, and embodiment can productively be interpreted to be part of a process of problematization. Beth, a former National Collegiate Athletic Association athlete, described an ongoing tension throughout her career between feelings of anger on field and her desire to be considerate and caring in all aspects of her life. She experienced some relief from this tension after taking a year away from team sports while overseas. However, it reemerged when she returned to the United States and began coaching high school sports teams. She described her feelings of dismay at the reemergence of her previous angry self, “I had come back and found I had some tendencies to be my old person as a coach now and I didn’t like it one bit” (Beth, cited in Crocket, 2014, p. 194). Speaking to me years after this struggle, Beth suggested that she “hadn’t done enough thinking and self-introspection yet” (p. 195).
I interpret Beth’s feelings of distress, conflict between her love of sports and the anger that involvement in sport generated for her, and her struggle—at that point in time—to articulate this tension and find an alternative (preferable) way of being to be a crucial, albeit incomplete, aspect of her problematization of her competitive athletic self. Reflecting on my interview with Beth, I now believe that I could have generated further nuances relating to Beth’s process of ethical self-creation had I actively developed further discussion of Beth’s feelings of anger and her feelings of shame and embarrassment, which followed her feelings of anger. Consideration of such aspects of embodiment and emotion, I argue, do not diminish the importance of the explicit critique of competitive team sports that Beth eventually developed. On the contrary, such an analysis stands to contextualize the explicit problematization Beth eventually developed. Moreover, even Beth’s poignant metaphor, which I interpreted as an explicit, rational problematization, also clearly offers an emotional critique: “I had no desire to be having this battle with this man, this faceless man on the soccer field anymore” (Beth, cited in Crocket, 2014, p. 195).
Equally as importantly, it is apparent that although Foucault is cited as a primary source, with few exceptions when theorizing problematization and critical self-awareness, sociologists of sport use of secondary sources has been limited to Markula (2003, 2004) and Markula and Pringle (2006) and a subset of sources introduced by Markula (2003). Although Markula’s (2003) seminal work draws on Foucault’s original materials, her interpretation of critical self-awareness, which I interpret as emphasizing Foucault’s stronger forms of problematization, draws closely on the work of Lloyd (1996). Lloyd’s chapter was produced as part of a debate within feminist theorizing, in the early to mid 1990s, about the potential of Foucauldian theory.
Although Markula’s (2003) interpretation of this debate was, and remains, a pivotal exposition of Foucauldian ethics for sociology of sport, given the complexity of Foucault’s work and how widely it has been used within different academic fields, there is significant scope—some 13 years after Markula’s seminal article—to consider other readings of Foucault, and problematization more specifically. My critique is not of Markula’s work, which I interpret as a robust and thorough approach that draws on Foucault’s stronger accounts of problematization; rather, my critique is that other scholars who have drawn on Foucauldian ethics have tended to limit themselves to the sources used by Markula, most notably in relation to problematization. Diverse fields have engaged with Foucault’s ethics, including education (Besley & Peters, 2007; Peters, 2003), anthropology (Faubion, 2001, 2011; Laidlaw, 2002; Pandian, 2010), politics (Bennett, 1996; Bevir, 1999; Connolly, 1993), psychology (e.g., Evans, Riley, & Shankar, 2010; Lester, 1997), and philosophy (Flynn, 1985; Huijer, 1999; Rajchman, 1986; Roth, 1981). There are opportunities to consider further understandings of Foucault’s work by examining how other fields have engaged with technologies of the self.
Anthropology of Ethics
One field I have found useful in this process of thinking differently about Foucault is the anthropology of ethics, a subdiscipline that largely emerged in the 2000s and has drawn extensively on Foucauldian ethics (e.g., Faubion, 2001, 2011; Laidlaw, 2002; Mahmood, 2003; Pandian, 2010; Robbins, 2004). For example, reflecting on her study of ethical self-formation by women within the Islamist piety movement in Egypt, Mahmood (2003) observed,
For some scholars of gender, women of the kind I worked with are often seen as depriving themselves of the ability to enact an ethics of freedom, one founded on their capacity to distinguish their own (true) desires from (external) religious and cultural demands. (pp. 855-856)
For Mahmood (2003), the question of whether the adherents of the piety movement were critically self-reflexive was not a germane question. Rather, she focused on how specific interpretations of Islam called upon these women to act in certain ways, such as with modesty and shyness, and the manner in which “socially prescribed forms of behaviour constitute the conditions for the emergence of the self as such and are integral to its realization” (p. 857). Put another way, Mahmood emphasized the problematizations and practices of the self recommended to women within the piety movement over the notion that these women should problematize the demands of the piety movement.
In his exposition of a Foucauldian anthropology of ethics, Laidlaw (2002) offers a critique of the way anthropologists have used agency: “Only actions contributing towards what the analyst sees as structurally significant count as instances of agency. Put most crudely, we only mark them down as agency when people’s choices seem to us to be the right ones” (p. 315). Although he focuses here on the term agency, Laidlaw’s questioning can be fruitfully applied to notions such as problematization and critical self-awareness. Might sociologists of sport also risk only accepting problematizations that are couched in adequately sophisticated language or that cohere closely with our existing views? Notably, within the anthropology of ethics (e.g., Laidlaw, 2005; Mahmood, 2003; Pandian, 2010), problematization is contextualized within the culture or group being studied. Problematization in this sense is not a radical questioning of self and society so much as a set of questions about self recommended within a cultural setting, much like those Foucault investigated in The Use of Pleasure and Care of the Self. The closest example to this within sociology of sport is MacKay and Dallaire’s (2013) examination of the Skirtboarders, which revealed the role of a collective and dynamic subjectivity constructed through ongoing interactions within the group and between the group and others. My reading within the anthropology of ethics gave voice to my feeling that demanding particularly strong and explicit forms of critical self-reflection might miss more subtle or nuanced interpretations or even reject the possibility that a person might be involved in a process of ethical self-creation. Moreover, my reading of the examples of problematization offered by sociologists of sport suggests that stronger forms of problematization in which one constantly questions one’s assumptions about oneself are relatively rare.
Anthropology, of course, is distinctive for its extensive use of fieldwork as part of its ethnographic research method. Reading within this field revealed descriptions of affect and emotions in relation to ethics (see, for example, Robbins, 2004), which I have not read within sociology of sport. It is notable in contrast that sociological studies of Foucauldian ethics in sport and exercise (e.g., Bridel & Rail, 2007; Hanold, 2010; Hardin, 2011; MacKay & Dallaire, 2013; Markula, 2004; Pringle & Hickey, 2010; Young & Dallaire, 2008) have relied almost exclusively on interviews as the prime research method. Even those scholars whose work has included ethnographic methods have rarely shown how their fieldwork might have influenced their interpretations of problematization or any other aspect of Foucauldian ethics. Despite difficulties identifying or interpreting critical self-awareness, this has not been reflected upon in relation to research method or in relation to how critical self-awareness has been theorized in rational, explicit terms familiar to the academy but perhaps removed from many people’s everyday lives.
Subsequently, moving to a more complex consideration of problematization, including aspects of embodiment, affect, and emotion, would potentially invite additional research methods, such as fieldwork, to complement interviews. Observing lived, embodied actions and emotions over an extended period of time might add additional layers to any consideration of problematization. For instance, specific observations might form part of an interview with a participant. Discussion of these specific instances of participant’s visible emotions or actions might facilitate a participant’s articulation of a particular problematization. Furthermore, field notes might offer important contextual data through which interviews might be read or interpreted.
This is not to argue that fieldwork is necessarily any more coherent a source of data than interviews (Marcus, 2009), that interviews should now be considered inadequate as a research method, or that fieldwork alone is sufficient to discern or interpret problematization. Rather, I suggest that it is problematic to assume that interviews offer untrammeled access to participants’ problematizations and, equally, that it is problematic to assume that failure by a participant to offer an explicit, fully formed problematization within an interview means they are not engaged in an ethic of self-creation. Relatedly, we could recognize that the tidiness with which most studies of Foucauldian ethics in sport have been presented contrasts with the messiness of lived experience within late modernity. This echoes calls within the sociology of sport more broadly to write in ways that reflect the messiness of contemporary life (Denison & Markula, 2003).
Conclusion
This article has reviewed socoiological studies of sport drawing on Foucauldian ethics since 2003. I identified four prime ways in which scholars have analyzed and structured their findings, namely, analyzing tensions between technologies of dominance and technologies of the self, Markula’s Foucauldian feminism, Foucault’s mode of subjectivation, and selective use of Foucault’s concepts. Each of these approaches articulates a theoretical engagement with technologies of the self to analyze empirical materials. This is a rich and productive vein of scholarship. Nevertheless, when viewed collectively, I argue that there are matters worth considering further.
Most notably, I suggest that scholars have used problematization and critical self-reflection as an unproblematized construct. Problematization has been positioned as if it is a simple task to interpret whether an utterance counts as a problematization or not, particularly given the theoretical emphasis on explicit, rational critique. Borrowing from Laidlaw’s (2002) critique of agency, I suggest that we must be wary of only accepting that an athlete has problematized his or her situation when his or her critique fits neatly with our own perspective. Given these difficulties, it is now time to consider a more reflexive account of problematization, which acknowledges that participants may engage in problematization in different ways, to different degrees, and perhaps in ways that we critical researchers may not be entirely comfortable with. For example, problematizations may have embodied, emotional, and affective components rather than be solely articulated through rational discourse. Such a shift recognizes that athletes live messy lives and that messiness has been underrepresented within studies of Foucauldian ethics in sport.
It is also notable that scholars drawing on Markula’s work have relied on a narrow range of literature, typically citing only a subset of Markula’s sources, most notably in relation to critical self-awareness. Whereas Markula introduced her reading of Foucault by drawing on scholars and debates from outside the sociology of sport, subsequent scholarship has tended to apply Markula’s reading across a range of sporting contexts. There is considerable scope, then, to broaden the theoretical literature through which Foucauldian ethics is understood.
In undertaking this review and focusing in particular on the ongoing significance of Markula’s Foucauldian feminism within our field, I have sought to acknowledge the seminal contribution to the field offered by Markula’s conceptualizations. They have been, and still are, an inspiration for me in how I read Foucault, and have pushed me toward an ongoing engagement that seeks a continual exploration of the limits of how we might interpret and apply Foucauldian theory. Offering select examples from the anthropology of ethics, I sought to illustrate how other discipline’s interpretation of Foucault can inform theorizing within sociology of sport. Building on the anthropological literature and my review of Foucauldian ethics in sociology of sport, I suggest a subtle shift in how problematization can be understood in the context of technologies of the self. The value of a theoretical approach within a field of research, I suggest, is most productively understood through its potential to generate debate and offer differing interpretations.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.