This article analyzes black female student athletes' participation in an elite collegiate athletic program and shows how the program maximizes black female participants' athletic and academic potential through surveillance, control, and discipline. The program instills in black female athletes a model of womanhood whereby they come to expect and achieve academic and athletic success, but does so at the expense of their autonomy and freedom from surveillance. Ultimately, this analysis shows the promise and peril of panopticonics as educational technology.In thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking... of the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.
-Foucault,1980We study, go to practice, have mandatory study hall, travel, and compete. I compete and I get the grades. I had it out with the President of Alpha [a black fraternity], because he told me that if I just applied myself I could accomplish anything. I know that a lot better than he does.
-black female athlete at Midwestern UniversityAs an elite black female student athlete in her junior year at Midwestern University (MU), the student quoted above constructed herself as a selfaware high achiever who was successful across academic and athletic arenas. In so doing, she reinforced for herself a sense of self and of purpose that had been cultivated during her participation in the MU women's athletic program. This sense of self and purpose had been cultivated as much for her as it was by her. In Foucault's terminology, this individual, "with [her] identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, movements, desires, forces" (Foucault 1980:74).This article is a Foucauldian description and analysis of the circumstances by which, during the tenure of my ethnographic research at Midwestern University, black female student athletes' identities were shaped, as well as the implications of the formation process for their Anthropology & Education Quarterly 34(3):300-323.
