Speaker
Description
Surfing and climbing are shaped by their “entangled histories” - and thus by imperialism, colonialism, capitalist commodification, the relationship to nature and limited resources. Therefore, the contribution is devoted to a power analysis of sports. Based on sports sociological, post-/colonial, and visual turn approaches in political science, the contribution explores the question of post-/colonial continuities in practices and narratives of surfing and climbing. The comparison is based on their staging as modern (risk) sports whereby their colonial histories and post-/colonial continuities are thus faded out. I argue that this staging is only possible through the delimitation of an imagined other and thus through processes of othering. The frame of discovery and conquest, as a post-/colonial continuity, plays a central role in this process. The frame is closely connected with a white hegemonic masculinity, especially with the trope of a feminized and sexualized nature to be conquered. Methodologically, the analysis is based on mixed-methods and, thereby, integrating qualitative content analysis based on secondary evaluations of colonial documents and a visually refined image analysis. With respect to the material, surfing and climbing magazines served as data. In line with this, the contribution of my work grasping post-/colonial continuities is twofold: Firstly, I will unfold and explain the dominant practices and power positions, since these are usually not questioned and thus become invisible. Secondly, the analysis serves to “alienate normality” and, against this backdrop, contributes to further advance this transdisciplinary field of decolonial research in the field of sports studies.
