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Description
Men were a part of the artistic swimming event when the sport was initially introduced to the public, but were subsequently barred from competing at the highest level until the 2015 FINA World Championships. This is recognized as a turning point in artistic swimming, empowering males’ side in the female-dominated sport through embracing mixed duets in the event. Nevertheless, there has been limited attention from the academic society paid to this watershed event in the history of artistic swimming, the significance of which is considerably under-explored, to a great degree, downplayed.
Inspired by Feminist Critical Theory, we explore why the experiences of men in artistic swimming are different from women and what kinds of knowledge are created by male practices in artistic swimming, and how the male knowledge in artistic swimming takes effect on the traditional knowledge of artistic swimming dominated by females.
We used a qualitative methodological approach to understand male artistic swimmers’ experience. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants. We interviewed 16 male artistic swimmers and 18 female artistic swimmers. We used the Foucauldian discourse analysis to deal with this data.
From a Foucauldian perspective, we focus on “The individualization of male artistic swimmers, " meaning the power of traditional knowledge becomes more anonymous and functional to affect the behaviors of male artistic swimmers. Besides, we focus on “The subjectivation of male artistic swimmer’’, which means the power to make male artistic swimmers observe, analyze, interpret and recognize themselves as a domain of possible knowledge.
