Physicality

This paper offers a critical feminist review of how the notion of physicality has been used within the sport sociology literature. Despite the lack of conceptual rigor associated with the term, and the tendency for physicality to be associated with men's sporting experiences, a discussion ensues regarding not only its viability as a concept when examining the physically active experiences of women, but also its importance vis-à-vis sport feminist research. A reconceptualization of physicality is called for, and it is argued that our conceptual usage of it must be situationally specific. Drawing on research in progress, the author sets out one particular way in which a concept of physicality, grounded in the physically active, bodily experiences of women, can be developed.

This paper builds upon an earlier exploratory discussion about the term physicality that called for conceptual clarity regarding our theoretical understanding and use of it within the context of women's lives. In light of fieldwork conducted, physicality is suggested to be the complex interplay of body perception, agency, and self-perception. This article focuses on examining one feature of this construct by assessing the relevance of body perception to two groups of women's experiences of their physicalities through two differently gendered activities: aerobics and wilderness canoe-tripping. Pivotal to this has been qualitatively understanding the lived-body as experienced and understood by the women. In-depth interviews and participant observation were used to explore the meaning and significance these women derived from experiencing their bodies/themselves through these activities. Of specific interest was understanding the effects of these experiences in terms of shaping their understandings of their physicalities particularly beyond that of appearance. Central to this has been apprehending the physically and socially empowering effects of these experiences, especially at the level of their identity. Through the data analysis, body perception was found to be relevant to the women's physical activity involvement in two distinct ways: as a factor initiating activity involvement and as a perception emerging through the experience. In turn, these differing perceptions of the body were found to impact diversely upon their physicalities, either broadening them or contributing to alternative ways of understanding them.

Following recent work by Don Ross (Ross, 2000; Ross & Spurrett, 2004), I contrast the influential theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland in information-theoretic terms. Dennett makes much of the fact that the morphological shorthand which emerges before a witness as she looks upon cohesive aggregates of matter commands some measure of predictive power. This, for him, speaks against eliminating recourse to an intentional vocabulary. By contrast, the eliminative materialism defended by Churchland does not gloss such informational compressibility as an explanatory desideratum, and thus regards the informational noise which accrues at higher levels of description as patently unacceptable. Yet, since it is unlikely, as Ross et al. (2007) have recently suggested, that anything remains once we subtract the appeal to patterns, I argue that the ubiquity of informational compression in scientific explanation seriously undermines the claim that talk of the mental could be eliminated.

Avatar is the phenomenon, which in its essence is the "representative" of the user the virtual environment. The avatar phenomenon contains the duality of its perception and its role in the sociocultural space. This ambivalence is clearly manifests in the positioning of the avatar in the visual arts and its “real” life in a virtual environment. In this article an attempt to understand the term "avatar" are taken. The historical insight allowed to outline the evolution of discourse and to draw conclusions about the fundamental difference between understanding the avatar features in the visual arts and in the sociocultural space. It was concluded that in a broad sense, an avatar realizes the need to “editting” the user's identity in the network and creates the illusion of superhuman, divine possibilities of influencing a character on a virtual network.