Abstract

Physical movement is a primordial and fundamental human activity, whereby we convey important aspects of who we are, and most importantly, perhaps, our sex/gender. A human being that is classified as “woman” can, by choosing a physical expression traditionally considered as male, create confusion regarding his or her sex or gender. Thus, it’s reasonable to assume that gender can be constructed through physical movement and its aesthetics. This argument is the starting point for Roscher’s article about physicality and aesthetics. In this new piece, gender is central to her argument. “Everything is gendered, but gender isn’t everything”, writes Lisa Diane Brush, arguing for including the categories class and race/ethnicity in analyses of the position of women in society. In all likelihood, body movement can tell us something about other organizing and stratification principles, but in Monika Roscher’s analysis gender is the point of departure, and she discusses whether it’s possible, through phenomenological analysis of the physical, aesthetic movement in a sporting context, to study the potentiality of transcending the typical male and female physical expression. Both Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, independently and in different ways, formed the fundamental idea of an aesthetic reflexivity, an education through the body. The distinct feature of sporting activities is the dialectic structure of the possible and the given, and by challenging the individual and cultural boundaries of what is possible, the potential to transcend traditional perspectives arises. The physicality, as well as the gender, of a person is a social construction, and gender as experience occurs when female strengths are transformed into male strengths, and vice versa. Verf.-Referat