Representing the Boarding Body: Discourse, Power and the Snowboarding MediaThorpe’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 mediaHistorical moments, terms, issuesMass 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 truthsGeneral 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