Search Results

Women are responsible for large growth rates in self-employment in many industrialized countries, yet little is known about how they interpret or experience the work they do. In the literature, two competing images of self-employment for women have emerged. With the liberation perspective, self-employment is associated with self-fulfillment, autonomy and control, substantial financial rewards, and increased flexibility in balancing work and family demands. In contrast, the marginality perspective portrays self-employment as a low paying, unstable form of home-based work that combines incompatible work and domestic roles while marginalizing women's work in the economy. The purpose of this study was to examine the work experiences of women consultants in the fitness and sport industry based on the liberation and marginality perspectives of self-employment. Observations of home-based work sites, interviews, and validation focus groups were conducted with 13 women who were currently working or had previously worked as fitness and sport consultants. The results revealed that social context, stages of business development, the personal situations of the women, gender relations and body image issues, and the nature of the work itself influenced whether the women described their experiences as liberating or marginalizing.

During the last 2 years the campaign against apartheid sport has taken a new turn, shifting from the blanket boycott of “no normal sport in an abnormal society” to a more carefully nuanced “two-track” strategy, which attempts to strengthen nonracial sport in South Africa while maintaining the international quarantine of proapartheid establishment sport. These efforts are being mounted within the highly fluid dynamic of a society-wide assault on the structures of racist domination. This paper examines ongoing changes in South African sport, the new strategy and organizations developed by the liberation movement in response to the changes, and the promise and problems of the future. It is argued that the antiapartheid campaign provides an important example of effective human intervention in the sphere of modem sport.

Sport management scholars must begin to recognize the significance of race and ethnicity as viable epistemological considerations in research inquiry. This article discusses the concept of “epistemological racism” (Scheurich & Young, 1997) and argues that critical race theory (CRT) is a legitimate epistemological and theoretical alternative to research approaches that have typically been based on the dominant worldview (i.e., Eurocentrism), and that it is an appropriate framework for conducting race-based emancipatory research in sport management. In particular, because CRT focuses on issues of justice, liberation, and the empowerment of people of color in a society based on White supremacy (i.e., Eurocentrism), the primary purpose of this article is to provide sport management scholars and students with insight into how CRT’s epistemological and methodological bases could be applied to critical areas of research in our field. The article concludes with some practical suggestions for how we can address epistemological racism in our sport management research and education.

The concept of discipline traditionally suggests the image of a sterilization of life. Processes of domination, they prohibit, they forbid, they are supposed to block initiatives and forces, and they shape the body into passivity. A conception of physical exercise can emerge from these ideas, one regarding the docility of the body. But the process of rendering the body docile is not possible without a liberation of forces, without a solicitation of initiatives. It is then possible to look at physical exercise as a paradox, that is, a process of subjugation through autonomization. It is possible to read Foucault in a way that emphasizes what the author has suggested in Discipline and Punish, that is, a “’positive economy.” It is this feature of Foucault’s theory that is developed in this article.

The current popularity of aerobic dance exercise makes it an important site for the analysis of women and movement. Feminist researchers have critiqued aerobics as an activity which does more to maintain dominant ideologies of women’s powerlessness than it does to liberate women through movement and action (Kagan & Morse, 1988; MacNeil, 1988; Theberge, 1985, 1987) whereas, based upon psychological studies, a participation in aerobics has been shown to improve self-esteem (Labbe, Welsh, & Delaney, 1988; Plummer & Young, 1987; Skrinar, Bullen, Cheek, McArthur, & Vaughan, 1986). Other scholars point to the contradictions of empowerment and oppression that women must encounter when they participate in aerobic dance exercise (Haravon, 1992; Kenen, 1987; Markula, 1991).

In this paper I consider an alternative feminist reading of aerobic dance exercise, arguing that there are specific ways to make the mainstream aerobic workout a site for empowerment for women. Using the commentary of physical education students, I explain how an aerobic workout can empower its female participants. My definition of the term empowerment is borrowed from the work of Nancy Theberge (1985, 1987) in which she discusses women’s liberation and feminist notions of power as they might apply to sport. Theberge argues that “the potential of sport to act as an agent of women’s liberation stems mainly from the opportunity that women’s sporting activity affords them to experience their bodies as strong and powerful and free from male domination” (Theberge, 1985, p. 202). Theberge discusses both energy and creativity as more feminist ways of conceiving of power in sport (Theberge, 1987). I argue that creative and energetic power as well as the experience of a strong body free from male domination can be cultivated in the aerobic workout.

In the research presented here, I discuss common theoretical critiques of the practice of aerobics, review interactive studies of aerobics, and describe the method and practice of teaching both aerobics and Hatha Yoga. Quoting students in a yoga class, I note certain aspects of the class that might make it an empowering, consciousness-changing experience for these students. The yoga teaching methods discussed here are used as a guideline for the discussion of the empowering aerobic workout, which prescribes methods for teaching empowering aerobics using the recommendations, critiques and comments from the preceding sections. The purpose of this paper, rather than being a comparison of two representative samples of research subjects in yoga and aerobics classes, is to suggest that a juxtaposition of methods of teaching might reveal practical knowledge about empowering students in an aerobics class. Before discussing teaching and empowerment in particular, I offer the following theoretical perspectives on aerobics which are grounded in Cultural Studies, the assumptions of which are discussed below.