https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0966-4431
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ABSTRACT
The gymnastics’ environment has been criticised for producing uncompromising coaching practices, emotional disorders, harassment and abuse. Furthermore, the challenges faced by the young gymnasts can be acute when they live in gymnastics boarding schools, where many aspects of their lives are controlled. Drawing upon a Foucauldian lens, this study explores power relations in the lived experiences of former artistic gymnasts who trained in a gymnastics boarding school in Brazil, and the pedagogical and policy implications. Qualitative data were produced from semi-structured interviews with five former Brazilian artistic gymnasts, who described their everyday lives within and around the gymnastics boarding school. First, we explore how technologies of dominance produced a specific docile gymnast subjectivity and how this subjectivation process impacted the lived experiences of the gymnasts during their careers. Second, Foucault’s later work on the technologies of the self helps us in the microanalysis of how gymnasts negotiated the process of moving out of a space with specific discourses and power relations, that impacted their everyday lives. In so doing, we explore the tensions between technologies of domination and technologies of self. We propose the following pedagogical and policy implications: (a) we question the notion that coaches, and even the gymnastics environment, automatically prepare the gymnasts for ‘real life’ through the application of disciplinary strategies; (b) we advocate for shifting from coercive and punitive strategies to discipline strategies that consider responsive pedagogies and (c) we highlight the importance of the co-responsibility and co-surveillance of stakeholders. Such pedagogical and policy implications might contribute to reflections in gymnastics, in elite athletes’ programmes, and boarding school systems.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr Francesca Cavallerio for her constructive feedback in the first drafts of this article, to the reviewers for their positive and helpful comments, and to the participants that dedicated time to be involved in this study.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Nadia Comăneci is a Romanian former gymnast and a five-time Olympic gold medallist. Nadia was the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10 at the Olympic Games (1976 in Montreal). Nadia is one of the world’s best-known gymnasts and is credited with popularising the sport around the globe.
2 ‘Subjectivity’ is a philosophical term that describes a possibility for lived experience within a larger historical and political context (Heyes, Citation2014). This is important for Michel Foucault, who, in his middle works Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume I, develops a theoretical-historical account of the emergence of the modern subject in the context of what he calls ‘disciplinary power’. In French, the key term Foucault uses to capture the emergence of subjectivities is ‘assujettissement’. In this study, we used the translation as ‘subjectivation’ (Foucault, Citation1983). It describes a process of the action of power in relation to selves. In this way, subjectivation captures the idea that ‘power produces the truth about the individual, it produces the individual and knowledge about him’ (Foucault, Citation1995, p. 193).