Representing the Boarding Body Discourse Power and the Snowboarding Media Thorpe s Chapter 4 objective Use Michel Foucault s concepts of power and discourse to examine the highly fragmented snowboarding media as an important cultural institution where multiple representations of snowboarding bodies are communicated consumed and contested within and across global and local contexts p 75 Explore diverse ways that power operates within everyday relations between people and institutions such as between snowboarders and media Representations of snowboarding in the media are not inherently oppressive while they are the subjects of media discourses snowboarders are not necessarily its victims p 307 Some men and women adopt critical and reflexive interpretations of various discursive constructions of snowboarding bodies in the mass niche and micro media p 108 Vocabulary discourse s critical reflexive mass niche micro media Historical moments terms issues Mass media Tend to be produced by non snowboarders Reinforce stereotypes Ignore cultural complexities Particularly obvious in 1980s 90s when snowboarding first emerged Independent snowboard videos Brainstorm 1998 the films are manic jumbles that embody these sports renegade soul snowboarders go where they re not supposed to from parking garages to office building steps security guards are usually not far behind They were Jackass before Jackass David Browne Extreme Sports Vault onto the Big Screen nytimes com December 16 2007 Yet snowboarders not passive played with gained power from and contested stereotypes Control and censorship by transnational media corporations like ESPN and MTV Winter Olympics X Games Gravity Games Early video games 1990s Mainstream films such as First Descent 2005 clip These films focus on only the highlights they re what Mr Peralta called action sports pornography It has so little context All you see is exclamation point exclamation point It s not interesting Anyone can shoot and cut tricks What they don t know about is how to tell a story David Browne Extreme Sports Vault onto the Big Screen nytimes com December 16 2007 Star system Sport exposed to mainstream entertainment value of snowboarding media used by public not only for instruction learning by snowboarders Michel Foucault 1926 1984 Brilliant international thinker blurred boundaries between disciplines theory and practice Disrupted fundamental Western truths General overview of Foucault in sport studies Calls attention to the way objects subjects and truth are produced by the interrelation of language social institutions and power Paraphrased from M M Fulkerson and S J Dunlap Introduction Michel Foucault in Graham Ward pp 116 123 Appignanesi and C Garratt Introducing Postmodernism pp 82 83 86 87 Foucault pointed out knowledges and power which somehow come to dominate historical eras He asked what counts as knowledge and truth and what doesn t AND He focused on how power molds everyone not only its victims involved in its exercise Power cannot only be coercive It also has to be productive and enabling Power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress Power is in the texture of our lives we live it rather than have it Paraphrased and quoted from Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish 1977 Foucault investigated processes that create the other that define and control pathology that keep people in society under control Snowboarders wait in line for their turn to hit the jumps in the terrain park at Breckenridge Foucault explored the idea of the panopticon Panopticon Building divided into cells At the center of the cells is a tower in which is placed a supervisor who cannot be seen by the occupants of the cells windows in which supervisor can see in full lighting and the eye of a supervisor The societal idea of panopticism developed from real problems of disease and evil against an extraordinary evil power is mobilized Prisons schools hospitals factories universities Prisoners students patients workers etc can be judged continuously their behavior altered Supervisors of bodies also such as nurses doctors teachers coaches etc The panopticon as marvelous machine supervisor is unverifiable induces in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the functioning of power p 65 panopticon In its many variations it is a type of location of bodies in space of distribution of individuals in relation to one another of hierarchical organization or disposition of centers and channels of power of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power which can be implemented An event in the history of the human mind That the panopticon has given rise to many variations projected and realized is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed in modernity We are in a panoptic machine Modern society For Foucault our society is one of surveillance of the panoptic machine thus the exchange and circulation of images and signs define and regiment the body Next class niche media and micro media Foucault s five distinctive theories of power Technologies of the self Discourses of femininity and re reading offering another interpretation of the female snowboarder through newer understanding of Foucault