The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of discourses which influenced the various practices related with weight management of athletes who competed in the weight dependent sports, such as Wrestling, Judo, Weight lifting and Bodybuilding ...
The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of discourses which influenced the various practices related with weight management of athletes who competed in the weight dependent sports, such as Wrestling, Judo, Weight lifting and Bodybuilding with Foucauldian perspectives. Specifically, how can be disciplinary power produced in the practices of weight management as a athlete preparation to achieve high-performance goals and through what kinds of mechanisms, that power has effect on the way of behavior and thinking of athletes. Furthermore, another main purpose of this study was to examine how can athletes conform and resist these mechanisms and discourses with entanglement of surveillance practices and strategies of subjectivity.
To achieve the purpose of this study, intensity and criteria sampling was adopted to select participants and 22 athletes who were involved in 6 events - Wrestling, Judo, Taekwondo, Weight lifting, Boxing, and Bodybuilding - participated in the study interviews. In focusing on disciplinary power, weight control, surveillance mechanism, and resistance and conformity, the stories told by athletes in interview settings were analyzed with grounded-theory. The results of this analysis were summarized as follows;
First, adherence of most athletes who participated in weight-dependent sports for the "winning ideology" at competition strongly urged them on doing a rapid weight loss in their daily life. With this adherence, they also revealed their inflexible attitude admitting the cultural atmosphere to infringe 'fair-play' ethics and values of sport for acquiring winning.
Second, most athletes were involved in practices to lose weight, such as food restriction, fasting, sweating in sauna, or doping. Interestingly, they entirely depended on the modes of restricting food rather than exercising to lose their weight. Moreover, most practices to control weight showed extremely similarities in ways of practices and recognitions among athletes because those modes were entirely based on the coaches' past experiences and knowledge.
Third, disciplinary power in preparation process of athletes was generated by control tools such as exercising-timetable or dieting-timetable, normalized discipline and various knowledge about weight control imparted by coaches, and gazes of significant others around athletes. In the gaze of others and effect of disciplinary power male athletes were subjugated to a discourse of "win-at-all" and "athleticism" in their practice of weight control, however, female athletes were mostly dominated with a evaluative gaze compelling a "feminity" of significant others.
Fourth, various mechanisms of surveillance enlarged the effect of disciplinary power which controls and operates athletes in their practice of weight management. These mechanisms of surveillance took an effect with different discourses through panopticism such as knowledge of coaches and the success tales of other athletes, and synopticism, range from a cooperative surveillance among athletes with public weigh-in practice to self-surveillance by mirrors or scales.
Lastly, results about conformity and resist to discourse of weight management showed that most athletes had a tendency to conform to those discourses with the experience of collective practices represented with a morning meeting, athleticism, and hierarchy differences of power between coaches and athletes. However, contrary to this conformity, they also resisted with strategies recommended by Foucault(1980a) such as ethical self-caring, aesthetic self-stylization, and critical self-recognition with self-writing, confession, or commitment to studying.