The Making of Modern English Sport
Richard Gruneau
From the medieval period in European history through the Renaissance, words such as “games,” “pastimes” and “sport” referenced a broad range of local elite and folk practices, including field sports and contests in para-military arts; gymnastic exercises; team events or individuals kicking or hitting balls or other objects; as well as religious rituals and festival events involving demonstrations of various types of physical strength, speed or skill. These diverse practices... Read more...
A Photographic Dialogue
Lianne McTavish, Patrick J. Reed
Lianne: I had planned my new project in detail, drawing on my training in visual and feminist theory before reading about auto-ethnographic research methods, the gender politics of bodybuilding competitions, and phenomenological theory. Yet I did not become a future figure competitor until October 18, 2010. That is when I entered a small, dimly-lit consultation room with my current personal trainer, Audrey Shepherd, and removed my workout pants and t-shirt to... Read more...
An Interview with Ludmilla Jordanova
Jonathan Finn, Ludmilla Jordanova
Ludmilla Jordanova is a scholar whose work crosses the disciplines of history, science and technology studies, art history, and visual culture studies. She is the author of numerous books including Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1989), History in Practice (2nd ed. 2006), and The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (2012). While very diverse in subject matter, her works are united in... Read more...
Ways of Knowing Mixed Martial Arts and Visual Culture
Anu Vaittinen
Introduction Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), also previously referred to as No-Holds Barred, Ultimate Fighting and Cage fighting, is a highly mediated contemporary, full contact combat sport. It is an amalgamation of skills and techniques drawn from a range of unarmed martial arts and combat sports that gradually developed into a new, hybrid form of sports fighting.1 A brief introduction highlighting the development of MMA, since it emerged in its contemporary... Read more...
Robin Veder
The Armory Show The “International Exhibition of Modern Art” opened in New York City in February 1913. This was the first extensive exhibition of European and American modernist art to be held in the United States. As such, the Armory Show (as it is now known) is considered a major turning point in the history of aesthetic modernism in the United States. The American Posture League, founded in New Jersey... Read more...
Incorporating the "Other" within Canadian Hockey Films
Russell Field
Narratives of hockey have frequently been mobilized to stand in for Canadian-ness, a seemingly inclusive national identity grounded in the sport’s association with a northern climate. The sport has been called the “Canadian metaphor,” a “national religion,” and an image of a game being played by children on a frozen pond adorns the $5 bill.1 This national image, however, is most often white, male, and middle class (with the Anglo-French... Read more...
