Visualizing Active Bodies: Knowledge-Making in Visual Physical Culture

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorAndrews, David Len_US
dc.contributor.authorSterling, Jenniferen_US
dc.contributor.departmentKinesiologyen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2013-10-10T05:35:10Z
dc.date.available2013-10-10T05:35:10Z
dc.date.issued2013en_US
dc.description.abstractWithin a "world replete with images and representations" (Haraway, 1997, p. 202), visual discourses play significant roles in the ways that bodies, and in particular active bodies, are organized, represented, and experienced in society. In physical culture, visualizing practices shape ways of seeing, and being seen, through the display, and interpretation of, active bodies in a wide variety of settings. Consequently, visual discourse in physical culture takes place, and makes meaning, through a range of visual events, texts, and technologies. To explore these sources and sites for their (re)production of differentiated social positions, I examine the visualization of (im)proper, (un)healthy, and physically (in)active bodies across multiple locations. These include: 1) the exhibition of heroic sporting portraiture in <italic>Champions</italic> at the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC); 2) the gross anatomy lessons of plastinated cadavers in the <italic>Body Worlds</italic> exhibition at the Maryland Science Center (Baltimore, MD); and, 3) my commemorative, yet critical, construction of <italic>Champions All</italic> as part of the <italic>Fear the Turtle Sculpture Project</italic> at the University of Maryland (College Park, MD). Broadly located within the theoretically fluid, interdisciplinary, and multi-method project that is physical cultural studies, I utilize visual discourse analysis and (auto)ethnographic methods to examine the role of visual discourse in physical culture. In particular, I examine each of the above visual events, and their visual and interpretive texts, for their "key themes, claims to truth, their complexities, and their silences" (Rose, 2007, p. 187). In understanding what positions are being constructed, and how they are advanced, challenged, or denied, my research reveals who is rendered (in)visible, and the consequences of such (in)visibilities. Extending empirical definitions of both the visual and the physical, this research illustrates the breadth of visual physical culture and its impacts; the productive nature of visual displays and their practices; and the knowledge-making, and thus world-making, contributions of the visualization of active bodies.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/14659
dc.subject.pqcontrolledKinesiologyen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledSociologyen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledMuseum studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolleddiscourse analysisen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledphysical cultural studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledscience and technology studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledsporten_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledvisual cultureen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledvisual methodsen_US
dc.titleVisualizing Active Bodies: Knowledge-Making in Visual Physical Cultureen_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Sterling_umd_0117E_14551.pdf
Size:
192.16 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Download

Collections

UMD Theses and Dissertations
Kinesiology Theses and Dissertations