Dan,
The lazy can often be followed by the reductionist. The difficult, hard
thing is to explore how enactions of identity are encountered through
the kind of issues that you note. Neither operates alone, how do they
influence each other and knowledge and response to each other? And how
dos that shuffel the exercise of power.
David Crouch
Anglia University, Cultural Geography
On Mon, 7 Jun 1999 13:47:25 GMT dan knox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Forum,
>
> Eagerly watching the debate on sport, I have been wondering to myself
> a little bit about swimming. While we can all probably say something
> very lame and lazy about swimming as an embodied performance of identity,
> I have been particularly engaged by what I see as the ability
> of the sport to (latently) carry other meanings.
>
> check out http://www.front242.com
>
> This is intriguing to say the least. Explore the site. This is the
> homepage of Belgian Electronic Body Music (a subgenre of industrial
> music) artists Front 242. 242 are known for flirting outrageously with
> totalitarian imagery and to often dress in deliberately ludicrous
> outfits to subvert such rhetoric. Two things to particularly note
> here.
>
> (1) The highly comical use of cricket equipment by a group of old belgian
> men above a caption which reads 'Special forces'.
>
> I am thinking here of how national sports teams are indeed deployed in a manner
> not dissimilar to that in which troops are sent (in fact I think increasingly
> they retain a national image that is often lost to troops engaged in allied, almost
> global, armies). Cricketers as our special forces - often not as embarrasing as
> the SAS (sometimes more so).
>
> (2) The way in which 242 repeatedly used images of swimmers in the early
> 1990s to promote an album entitled 'Tryanny for You'.
>
> Vital to note that both of these sets of images are deployed with a
> strong sense of irony but they do, I would argue, make some very
> valid points in simple ways. The swimming male is here iconic of the strong,
> athletic, disciplined male of totalitarian traditions. Taking this
> further, the swimming images were particularly dominant in the
> promotion of the single 'Never Stop' - the lyrical content of which asserts
> that 'We are the nation, we have control' as well as the repeated
> mantra to 'Never Stop'. Interesting comparison of the similar regimes
> operated by sports coaches and dictators.
>
> I think some of you will agree that this constitutes a very
> interesting mixture of sports and totalitarian imagery and wondered
> if anybody knows of anything in a similar vein or, indeed, any work
> that has been done on such.
>
> Cheers
>
> Dan
> Dan Knox
>
> Department of Geography
> University of Durham
> South Road
> Durham
> England
> DH1 3LE
>
----------------------
David Crouch
Anglia Polytechnic University
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