Sporting autobiographies of illness and the role of metaphor

Monadic, material and mirroring: Female bodies in track athletics culture

“…The body is monadic, an 'it' to be treated. The work of Stewart, Smith and Sparkes (2011) supports this analysis, highlighting mechanistic metaphors which reveal the disciplined body to be understood (and related to) in terms of a machine.…”

“…The medium of control has been raised as a concern for the highly disciplined sporting body elsewhere. We echo thoughts which focus upon the sporting body's crisis in a loss of control should it suffer career ending circumstances, for example serious illness or injury (Sparkes, 1998;Sparkes, 2004;Stewart et al, 2011).The lack of meaningful narrative resources to make sense of such losses are well documented in these studies and include detriments to mental health and even suicide attempts. This body of work focuses primarily upon Frank's (1991) disciplined body in male athletes and there is no work to date which explores the combination of high levels of mirroring and disciplined body usage in female athletes.…”

“…The work of Frank (1991) has been usefully employed within a sporting and physical culture context to illuminate the construction of 'ideal' body types or 'typical' styles of usage by individuals (Sparkes, 2004;Sparkes, Batey and Brown, 2005;Stewart, Smith and Sparkes, 2011). For Frank, the body is a starting point, and he takes seriously the existence of the corporeal fleshy body which itself affects how people experience their bodies.…”

Taking sporting autobiographies seriously as an analytical and pedagogical resource in sport, exercise and health

“…Extending the notion of 'Body songs' told by the athletes in the sports autobiographies analysed by Pipkin (2008), the illness experience is the focus of attention for Stewart et al (2011). They subjected twelve autobiographies of athletes from a variety of sports to both a thematic and a structural analysis to reveal how different metaphors are embedded in certain narrative types, how these work in combination to shape both the illness experiences of the athletes concerned, and how these experiences are articulated to others in various settings.…”

“…Unfortunately, this has not been the case. According to Stewart, Smith and Sparkes (2011), 'despite providing a potentially rich source of data within the field of sport-related-studies, published autobiographies have, to date, been a neglected resource ' (p. 582). In support of this view, Thing and Ronglan (2014) state that, 'To our knowledge, sociological analyses of sports biographies as texts have hardly been conducted' (p. 1).…”