Throsby, K (2015) ‘You can’t be too vain to gain if you want to swim the Channel’: Marathon swimming and the construction of heroic fatness. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 50 (7). pp. 769-784. ISSN 1461-7218
Abstract
The fat body and the sporting body are conventionally understood as mutually exclusive, coming together only in sport-based weight-loss interventions. However, the sport of marathon swimming relies upon body fat as a performance advantage, and weight maintenance and gain are a common element of the training process. The concept of ‘heroic fatness’ offers (some) swimmers a means of negotiating this anomalous sporting embodiment, positioning swimming fat as an undesirable necessity, nobly, but provisionally, borne. The paper argues that this construction is made possible through the construction of swimming fat as fake and as separate from the self. However, the paper unsettles this ideal-type of heroic fatness through the identification of the exclusions upon which it relies, both in terms of gender, and in relation to those who are already fat at the start of training. This opens up the possibility of more ambivalent modes of fatness that run counter to both heroic fatness and its unheroic counterpart – the very ‘real’ fatness that is the target of instrumentalist sport-based weight-loss interventions.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2013. This is an author produced version of a paper published in International Review for the Sociology of Sport. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | marathon swimming; heroic fatness; sport; obesity; gender |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Sociology and Social Policy (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Aug 2016 08:23 |
Last Modified: | 15 Jan 2018 22:14 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1012690213494080 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/1012690213494080 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:89568 |