Visions of Field

What counts as critical, what counts as theory, and what counts as knowledge is contested territory. (Cole, 1991, p. 45)

The effect of critical work is one which challenges “our” habitual ways of thinking by problematizing the received knowledges and the categories that form and constrain those knowledges (as well as what counts as the study of sport) and our own intellectual identities. (Cole, 1993, p. 78)

In addition to a long-term contribution as an editor of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Cole has challenged the habitual ways of thinking in the field of sport sociology in several ways. Drawing inspiration from the sub-title of one of Cole's (1991) research articles, Visions of Field/Field of Visions, I return to their early work to highlight three research avenues—experimentation with research writing, Foucauldian feminist physical cultural studies, and the body technologies—that have opened up the landscape of sport sociology to critically and theoretically consider what counts as the study of sport.

As a graduate student, I was immersed in the onto-epistemology of interpretive, symbolic ethnography and autoethnographic writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Although embraced by many of my cohort, these ethnographic genres had not quite reached the established sport sociology literature. While we were filled with their promise, our work had generally not found its way to appear in published work. Radical at its time, it was also difficult to garner support for alternative ways of representation from previously sport sociology publications. This is where I encountered Cole's (1991) early work on “alternative narrative strategies” in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport.

Located within ethnography, Cole drew from James Clifford's (1986) now seminal work on “partial truths” to highlight how research writing is always an active part of the politics of cultural representation. In this process, it is the ethnographer who reconstructs these presentations into partial and fragmented texts about cultures. Based on this reading, Cole advocated for critical ethnographic projects that examine and understand subjective meanings to recover insiders’ contradictory experiences. Cole envisioned feminist standpoint theory as a channel to further realize such projects in the field of sport studies. Feminist standpoint theory, as highlighted by Cole, offered an epistemological grounding to emphasize the voices, experiences, and visions of marginalized groups. These ethnographies, nevertheless, required a careful attention to the symmetrical relationship between the researcher and the researched, openly addressed by the self-reflexive ethnographer. In addition, a different type of research writing, where the ethnographer is not solely responsible for the text, offered an opportunity to experiment with possibilities for constructing narratives in collaboration with the research participants. Although not grounded in feminist standpoint theory, my own attempts to conduct an ethnography employing a feminist approach resonated with Cole's work. My ethnographic field of group fitness was dominated by women and filled with contradictory meanings. As an insider ethnographer, my entire project was inspired by the debates of ethnographic representation in anthropology: like Cole, I realized that I would necessarily represent only partial and fragmented truths regarding women's meanings of their fitness participation. As a PhD student who was only dreaming of ever publishing her work, Cole's early vision for experimental texts gave me confidence that my research may also provide a valuable contribution to sport studies.

In a later article, Cole (1993) continued to challenge the field of sport studies to further embrace feminism under the umbrella of cultural studies, emphasizing that it was vital to rethink sport as a discursive construct of multiple intersecting, normalizing practices in consumer culture. Cole turned into one of the visionaries advancing a growing research culture later termed as physical cultural studies (Silk et al., 2017; Silk & Andrews, 2011) that expanded beyond sport to also incorporate my research interests in socio-cultural study of exercise and dance. While suggesting particularly Louis Althusser's work as a possible theoretical framing for cultural studies of sport, Cole also emphasized the importance of the body as a site of cultural politics. Drawing on Michel Foucault (1979, 1980), who argued that the body is directly involved in power relations that invest, train, torture, perform, and carry out tasks, Cole moved to theorize the body as inside of the cultural production of sport. By including Foucault in their feminist cultural studies of sport, Cole aimed to disrupt a series of binaries that engage the body in political struggles (nature/culture; body/mind; sex as biological/gender as social; organic/machine). Such binaries, Cole noted, have also dominated and structured Western thought, and thus, investigating the body as a pivotal element of social life also paved the way for new visions for feminist cultural studies research on sport. Cole further emphasized that sport as an institution operates as a prime site for the technologies of disciplinary surveillance of women's bodies. For example, the feminine body was disciplined through various exercise routines and constant self-surveillance; through the careful control of heterosexualized aesthetics of women bodybuilders; or through the control of women athletes’ bodies through sex-testing—a practice that, in various scientized forms, continues to be used to exclude transgender bodies from women's sport. Cole's conclusion regarding the need to understand the cultural productions of bodies in/through sport can continue to guide the current physical cultural studies research: “In the age of cyborgs, pure body politics, plastic bodies, scientific panoptics, and increasing state intervention, we need to reconsider how sport, exercise, and the politics of fitness (knowledge, discourses, and technologies) are deployed in our everyday lives” (p. 93).

Drawing on Haraway's work on cyborgs already in the early 1990s, Cole highlighted the connections between technologies and the sporting bodies (Cole & Orlie, 1995). This work expanded to discussions of the role of the “natural,” biological body in physical cultural studies and in sport sociology research in general. For example, in their review of the body studies in the sociology of sport, Cole (2000) discussed how the role of science can be viewed as dangerous when it constructs the sporting body through interventions that “call into question or violate human identity” (p. 442). On the other hand, science is used to support the notion of a “natural body” that performs purely and authentically. Such vision, Cole pointed out, is an effort to “conserve conceptual oppositions” of natural/technological or purity/hybridity that no longer hold in late modernity and as such, “are expressions and effects of modern power” (p. 443) instead of “scientific truths.” Here, Cole returned to the question of gender verification and, citing the work of Hausmann (1995), cautioned that technology and science may continue to impinge “the constitution of ‘women’ and transexuals” (p. 444).

To ground the discussion of science creating monsters or protecting the natural body, Cole drew from science studies, citing such scholars as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Bruno Latour in addition to Foucault. For example, following Latour (1993), Cole (1993) observed that “[t]he opposition between nature/artifice, the non-human/human and the effort to maintain/create the purity of each…tends to render the processes by which hybrids are produced unrepresentable and thus invisible” (p. 238). For Cole, Latour's work also suggested a way forward to “slow down, reorient, and regulate the proliferation of monsters by interrogating their production in the space between nature/machine, human/non-human, purity/hybridity” (p. 239). Cole concluded, nevertheless, by emphasizing the need to include the biological body in discussions of how the body is constructed in the consumerist late capitalist power relations. While the biological body is a crucial element, instead of “privileged element” denoting the “real” body, it should be considered “always already invested in a complex network of power which works, in part, by rendering itself invisible” (p. 455).

The attention to the human/non-human binary is currently intensified through the entrance of new materialisms into sport sociology. While not a unified theoretical approach, the proponents of new materialisms (e.g., Coole & Frost, 2010; Devellennes & Dillet, 2018; Dolphin & van der Tuin, 2013; Fox & Alldred, 2017), like Cole suggested earlier, focus on erasing the dualisms between nature and culture, material and meaning, matter and mattering in social science to understand the events in the world more holistically. At the same time, natural science and science studies have now advanced to challenge the positivist doctrine to engage with matter beyond treating it as an object for the scientist to observe. With these developments, many new materialists assess matter as having agency equal to humans to consider the material detail of everyday life and geopolitical and socioeconomic structures together.

To examine sport as simultaneously materially real and culturally mediated, several researchers now interrogate the possibilities of new materialist research in physical cultural studies and sport sociology (e.g., Markula, 2019; Newman et al., 2020; Thorpe et al., 2020). Cole, nevertheless, engendered a vision of studying the physically active body as both biological and cultural within power relations. Their early attention to the work of such scholars as Foucault, Haraway, and Latour, now embraced by the new materialists in sport studies, is an insight into the need for studying and representing the world of sport in multiple and diverse, but theoretically informed, ways. I share this vision for a future of physical cultural studies and sport sociology.