J.A. Carter, Ph.D.
Miami University – Hamilton

I never intended to play full-contact, tackle football.  When I set out to examine the experiences of women playing football, a sport that is guided by a masculinized culture and still thought to be “for men,” my research plan was to participate and observe from the sideline. I expected to carry the water, fetch kicking tees, and hold footballs. But, as an athletic 30 year-old, my participants saw me as a potential player. To build rapport, and gather the best data, I had to play. Making the decision to play was a difficult one, though, because it meant exposing my body to all of the rigors of playing a physically-demanding contact sport.  It also would become the best methodological decision I made throughout the research process.

In researching the physical body there is perhaps no better tool than participant observation. Certainly any activity or observational setting will be embodied in some way; even sitting behind a desk engages the body. However, becoming a full participant in a space where the body is leveraged as a specific tool of the trade can be especially enlightening. Ultimately, the engagement of my body in this research made the "absent body" (Leder 1990) present, illuminating the unique bodily experience of women playing tackle football.

Leder (1990) argues that we focus on the outcome of our bodily experiences, but fail to focus on the body's role in that process. This creates a "corporeal absence," with our body only coming to the forefront when it experiences some kind of dysfunction. He terms this dysfunction, or the reappearance of the body, as dys-appearance (Leder 1990).  

As Leder (1990) notes, dys-appearance largely occurs when we experience pain or injury. One way the absent body becomes present through pain is in reminding us of the value of the appendage that is injured. For example, I never considered the complexity of the muscles surrounding my hip until I was injured during a football drill and suffered a "hip pointer." A hip pointer is when the bone and muscle on the iliac crest, or hip bone, are bruised.  This injury occurs when the soft tissue and muscle on the hip bone are compressed into the bone. Hip pointers are common in football, due to the propensity for the hip to take direct hits during play (Moore, Dalley, and Agur 2010). I had never thought about the many muscles that attach to one another in that area. The injury caused a sharp pain that arose with nearly any movement.  Even sneezing, coughing, or laughing caused excruciating pain.  It was the pain, or dysfunction, that made this absent part of the body present.

Although Leder's (1990) main argument is that the absent body becomes present when it experiences pain, I would argue that there are other situations in which the absent body may present itself.  Women become very aware of their bodies when preparing for and playing contact football. Training for the sport means gaining muscle and strength, while playing guarantees visible markers of its physicality, including bruises, scratches, and cuts.  In this case the absent body becomes present due to "the gaze of the Other," or at least the potential gaze. This "social dys-appearance" alludes to the power discrepancies women experience due to ideological notions of the appropriately gendered body (Leder 1990).  While bruises and injuries functioned as a “badge of honor” and proof of ones sacrifice to the team on the field, women were subject to a stigmatizing gaze off the field. A colleague of Audrey told her "there’s a place you can get help" after seeing bruises on her body. Shannon's large forearm bruises prompted a coworker to say "Shannon, you look disgusting." She responded, "this is normal," to which her coworker said "Yeah, sure Shannon, you’re normal," inciting laughter from all. One of my Sociology of Sports students, a university football player, stated he was sure I played football, "because those kinds of bruises only come from football."  I wondered what other students thought.  I had been asked about them many times, but only by people who knew I was playing football. 

Bruises were not the only injuries that needed to be explained. As a rookie, Tammie broke a bone in her foot during a practice before she even had the opportunity to play in a game. Worried about being stigmatized at her place of employment, when she was asked if she broke her foot slipping on the ice, she agreed, allowing her coworkers to believe this was true. She said she did not want her coworkers to know that she played football, because she did not want to hear people say “I told you so” about getting injured while playing the sport. Although injuries are unavoidable within tackle football, injuries for women can be used as proof that female bodies are not equipped for such a demanding sport. In this case, both physical and social “dys-appearance” can serve to make the absent body present.

If I had not been a full participant in this research space, writing field notes in bathtubs full of ice, lifting weights to gain musculature for the sport, and nursing sore muscles and injured body parts back to health, I likely would have failed to “see” the importance of the body for women who play tackle football. At the very least I would have missed the ways the absent body becomes present had my body not been engaged in the sport. Okley (2007: 66) has argued that "the bodily experience of the fieldworker as research process and source of knowledge has been under scrutinized." Perhaps some of our hesitation to analyze the impact of our own bodies within the research space comes from continued concerns about the reliability and validity of our experience as data.  

Embodied participant observation allows the researcher to gain a first-hand understanding of the corporeal engagement necessary in the site of research, and the meanings and significance of the physical body in interactions within that space.  This may include gaining new skills (Lande 2007; O'Conner 2007), engaging in risk-taking behaviors that may lead to pain/injury (Aalten 2007; Sands 1999, 2002; Okley 2007; Wacquant 2004), or even death (Morris 1982). Full commitment of the body in the research process opens the researcher's body as a site for analysis that can directly address the bodily experience of the people being studied. In examining sports, especially contact sports, this allows for a deeper understanding of the impact these physically demanding activities can have on participants. I was aware of my body more while playing football than perhaps at any other point in my life; during those two years my body was often very present in my consciousness. As sociologists of the body, we have the ability to address the lack of “sufficient substantive investigations of the significance of the body to people’s daily lives," (Shilling 2007:13) and part of that may include using our own bodies as a source of knowledge.

References

Aalten, Anna. 2007. "Listening to the Dancer’s Body." The Sociological Review 55: 109–125. 

Lande, Brian. 2007. "Breathing Like a Soldier: Culture Incarnate." The Sociological Review 55: 95–108. 

Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Moore, Keith L., Arthur F. Dalley, and A.M. Agur. 2010. Clinically Oriented Anatomy, 6th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Morris, Brian. 1982. Forest Traders: A Socio-economic Study of the Hill Pandaram.  London: Athlone Press.

O'Connor, Erin. 2007. "Embodied Knowledge in Glassblowing: The Experience of Meaning and the Struggle Towards Proficiency." The Sociological Review 55: 126–141.

Okely, Judith. 2007. "Fieldwork Embodied." The Sociological Review 55: 65–79.

Sands, Robert R. 1999. Gutcheck!: An Anthropologist's Wild Ride Into the Heart of College Football.  Carpinteria, CA: Rincon Hill Books.

Sands, Robert R. 2002. Sport Ethnography. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Shilling, Chris.  2007. “Sociology and the Body: Classical Traditions and New Agendas.”  The Sociological Review 55: 1-18.

Wacquant, Loïc.  2004.  Body & Soul: notebooks of an apprentice boxer.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Natalie Boero, Ph.D.
San Jose State University

Last week, an article entitled, “My Daughter is Fat, Isn’t it My Job to tell Her?” showed up several times in my various social media feeds. The piece, written by Kasey Edwards, an Australian body image expert, takes on the notion that we parents of fat children are obligated to tell our children that they are fat and to help them lose weight. Edwards gives three main reasons why she does not recommend parents tell children they are fat. First, the obvious- fat kids already know they are fat. As Edwards points out, everyone from family, to teachers, to doctors, first ladies, media, and random strangers make sure that fat kids are reminded early and often of their fatness. Indeed, I wrote elsewhere about one particularly cruel fat-shaming encounter my daughter and I experienced at the hands of a random restaurant patron. Second, Edwards cites well-known and widely available data on the failure rates of diets and evidence showing that a focus on weight often results in weight gain, not weight loss. Finally, Edwards claims that, a focus on weight in children puts them at risk of eating disorders and damages self-esteem. Edwards concludes by advising parents to support their children’s health and wellbeing with unconditional love, and weight-neutral encouragement and facilitation of healthy eating and physical activity.

The article resonated with me given my long-standing commitment to taking a Health at Every Size® approach to my own and my childrens’ health. It also made sense to me given my expertise as a fat studies scholar and size-acceptance activist. Yet, I was troubled that on those same social media feeds, alongside articles like Edwards’, I regularly see articles reporting on new or proposed state and local educational policies designed to be make sure that all students who meet the metrics to be labeled as “fat”- from elite private college students to poor kids of color in struggling schools- become aware that they are fat and therefore “unhealthy.” In the face of evidence that diets don’t work and that fat-shaming does often- irreparable harm, why do we keep insisting that the way to make people healthier is to reduce their health to a body mass index (BMI) statistic- a number that tells us nothing about actual health- and then proceed to beat them over the head with it?

For me the answer to this contradiction lies in a conclusion I came to while researching and writing my book, Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American “Obesity Epidemic” (Rutgers University Press, 2012). Namely, I have come to believe that the moral panic over obesity and resulting anti-obesity policies, programs, and cultural values are about so much more than fatness. In Killer Fat I trace the emergence of the “obesity” epidemic through the media, public policy, and obesity research organizations. I also look at how this construction of obesity as an epidemic plays out in the lives of actual fat people. What I discovered is that concern over obesity- especially among children, the poor, and racial and ethnic minorities- serves to individualize responsibility for public health and to justify punitive policies against already disadvantaged groups while garnering huge profits for diet companies, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies. Communities of color and poor communities are often targeted for having high rates of adult and childhood obesity, but proposed interventions remain individualized and rarely include any real attempt to alleviate structural barriers to good health like poverty, lack of affordable housing, and racism. Policy makers often favor nutrition education and “obesity awareness” campaigns that target parents (usually mothers) as the point of intervention into their communities’ “obesity problems.” In other words, the “obesity epidemic” is a way to talk about race, class, and gender in a way that not only ignores but also masks them as structural bases of inequality.

Image from: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu