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Dans nos societes neoliberales, le « bien-etre » est concu de facon strictement individuelle. Il s’integre dans un discours dominant et se nourrit de la biomedicalisation pour contribuer a une « biomoralite » violente a la fois sur les plans symbolique, physique et social. On fait appel aux technologies numeriques pour renforcer le developpement et le maintien du bien-etre par l’autocontrole, l’autodiagnostic et des methodes skinneriennes pour apprendre a agir sur son propre bien-etre. L’imperatif du bien-etre repousse l’engagement politique et conduit plutot a la construction sociale d’un biocitoyen en forme, heureux et productif, ainsi qu’a celle de son oppose, le bio-Autre, un moins-que-citoyen en mauvaise forme physique, mal en point et improductif. Dans cet essai, je presente une analyse feministe et poststructuraliste qui s’interesse aux discours et aux relations de pouvoir dans les societes occidentales contemporaines. Je presente ensuite une critique de la violence des interventions pretendument « humanitaires » pour sauver l’« abject » bio-Autre. Je discute des « missions de sauvetage » mal concues dans le domaine de la sante publique. De telles missions exacerbent les divisions de classe et reproduisent des hierarchies patriarcales et coloniales. Je m’interroge sur l’instrumentalisation des activites physiques et sportives dans le plan commercial global qui, au nom du bien-etre, vise la conquete de nouveaux marches. Je conclus l’essai par des reflexions sur la place de la sociologie du sport dans le projet plus vaste de justice et de bien-etre social.

Sexual and/or gender minority populations (LGBQ/T) have particular cancer risks, lower involvement in cancer screening, and experience barriers in communication with healthcare providers. All of these factors increase the probability of health decisions linked with poor outcomes that include higher levels of cancer mortality. Persistent discrimination against, and stigmatization of, LGBQ/T people is reflected in sparse medical curriculum addressing LGBQ/T communities. Marginalization makes LGBQ/T persons particularly reliant on knowledge derived from online networks and mainstream media sources. In what is likely the first nationally-funded and nation-wide study of LGBQ/T experiences of cancer, the Cancer’s Margins project (www.lgbtcancer.ca) conducted face-to-face interviews with 81 sexual and/or gender minority patients diagnosed and treated for breast and/or gynecological cancer in five Canadian provinces and the San Francisco Bay area (US). With specific attention to knowledge access, sharing, and mobilization, our objective was to document and analyze complex intersectional relationships between marginalization, gender and sexuality, and cancer health decision-making and care experiences. Findings indicate that cancer care knowledge in online environments is shaped by cisnormative and heteronormative narratives. Cancer knowledge and support environments need, by contrast, to be designed by taking into account intersectionally diverse models of minority identities and communities. Keywords: biographical knowledge; biomedical knowledge; cancer; cancer care; gender; health disparities; health equity; information access; LGBT health; minority cancer patients; transgender; treatment

Canadian and American population-based research concerning sexual and/or gender minority populations provides evidence of persistent breast and gynecologic cancer-related health disparities and knowledge divides. The Cancer's Margins research investigates the complex intersections of sexual and/or gender marginality and incommensurabilities and improvisation in engagements with biographical and biomedical cancer knowledge. The study examines how sexuality and gender are intersectionally constitutive of complex biopolitical mappings of cancer health knowledge that shape knowledge access and its mobilization in health and treatment decision-making. Interviews were conducted with a diverse group (n=81) of sexual and/or gender minority breast or gynecologic cancer patients. The LGBQ//T2 cancer patient narratives we have analyzed document in fine grain detail how it is that sexual and/or gender minority cancer patients punctuate the otherwise lockstep assemblage of their cancer treatment decision-making with a persistent engagement in creative attempts to resist, thwart and otherwise manage the possibility of discrimination and likewise, the probability of institutional erasure in care settings. Our findings illustrate the demands that cancer places on LGBQ//T2 patients to choreograph access to, and mobilization of knowledge and care, across significantly distinct and sometimes incommensurable systems of knowledge.

RéSUMé: OBJECTIF: L'objectif était d'étudier le déploiement des discours sur la vaccination contre les VPH (VVPH) et leur impact sur les filles, les parents, les infirmiers/infirmières et les médecins canadiens. MéTHODES: Des entrevues ont été réalisées avec des participant(e)s (n = 146) de quatre provinces canadiennes. Une analyse poststructuraliste du discours a permis d'examiner les campagnes de VVPH et les transcriptions d'entrevues pour documenter la façon dont les participant(e)s interprètent les VVPH et se positionnent comme sujets au sein des discours de l'industrie ou des agences de santé publique. RéSULTATS: Les campagnes de VVPH sont sexistes, hétéro-normatives et trompeuses. Émergeant de l'analyse des entrevues est le manque d'information des filles et des parents en ce qui a trait à la VVPH. Les mères se construisent en tant que bio-citoyennes responsables, mais au prix de l'impuissance, de l'anxiété et de la peur ressenties parallèlement à l'impératif d'agir pour minimiser le risque de cancer de leur fille. Quant aux professionnel(le)s de la santé, ils s'approprient les discours dominants sur la VVPH et utilisent la peur comme stratégie pour fabriquer le consentement pour la VVPH. Les occasions de dialogue sur la VVPH et la santé sexuelle des filles sont perdues et les positions en tant que sujets sont problématiques pour tous les types de participant. CONCLUSIONS: Nous nous questionnons à savoir si la santé publique est bien servie quand les discours sur la VVPH transforment des corps en santé en corps « à risque » et quand la peur du cancer est instrumentalisée pour la pharmacologisation de la santé publique.

Using the cultural phenomenology of Sara Ahmed, we expand upon biopolitical analyses of obesity discourse by interrogating how the contours of normative feminine embodiment are formed through entangled relations between dominant obesity discourse and everyday sensuous encounters. We examine qualitative interviews with young women and suggest that fat encounters are situated within a “cultural politics of emotion”, where “feelings about” and “feelings for” fat others reflect emotional orientations that imbue the boundaries demarcating the normatively thin feminine subject with a sensuous materiality. We conclude by suggesting that Ahmed’s cultural phenomenological approach offers novel and nuanced insights into the materialization of embodied feminine subjectivities by centring the sensuous, felt and emotional encounters between sameness and difference.

This collection of commentaries emerged from ongoing conversations among the contributors about our varied understandings of and desires for the sport studies field. One of our initial concerns was with the absence/presence of feminist thought within sport studies. Despite a rich history of feminist scholarship in sport studies, we have questioned the extent to which feminism is currently being engaged or acknowledged as having shaped the field. Our concerns crystallized during the spirited feminist responses to a fiery roundtable debate on Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) in New Orleans in November 2012. At that session, one audience member after another spoke to what they saw as the unacknowledged appropriation by PCS proponents of longstanding feminist—and feminist cultural studies—approaches to scholarship and writing. These critiques focused not just on the intellectual moves that PCS scholars claim to be making but on how they are made, with several audience members and some panelists expressing their concerns about the territorializing effects of some strains of PCS discourse.

In this article, we offer an introduction to the special issue of Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies. First, we present some of our own reflections and, second, we provide an overview of the articles assembled here to advance the critical interrogation of biopedagogies and/of public health. Our own reflections focus attention on biocitizens and the ill-fated “rescue missions” to save bio-Others. In brief, we argue that (a) within neoliberal societies, an assemblage of private and public institutions and organizations circulate the “health imperative”; (b) this imperative leads to the creation of the fit and productive biocitizen through various market solutions; (c) this imperative leads to biomorality and the construction of the unfit, unwell, and unproductive bio-Other; (d) public health invests in rescue missions to “save” this bio-Other; and (e) public health initiatives are instrumentalized within corporate schemes to expand markets in the name of health. We then conclude our piece with thoughts on the place of cultural studies and critical methodologies in the larger project of health and social justice, while presenting an overview of the articles selected for this special issue in connection to three themes: biopedagogies and spaces, identifications, and affects/effects.

In this paper, we conduct a critical feminist-informed poststructural analysis of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's reality weight loss series, Village on a Diet (VOD). We argue that the “problem of obesity” is felt into reality through the cultural work of emotions as represented in VOD. We further situate VOD as one node in a more expansive, interwoven network of discourses, sites, and technologies. In so doing, we argue that the felt force of “obesity” discourse is magnified as it circulates relationally throughout this network, materializing the felt “truth” about fatness (e.g., that it is unhealthy) and fat subjects (e.g., that they are unhappy, unsexy, bad parents). In this way, VOD serves a (bio)pedagogical function as it instructs—indeed, necessitates—that villagers and viewing Canadians alike work on and transform their bodies into leaner, supposedly more healthy forms as a means of striving towards the promise of a better life.

À partir d'une perspective poststructuraliste et féministe, les auteures explorent, dans le contexte du discours dominant de l'obésité, les constructions discursives de la santé de 20 jeunes femmes vivant en situation de handicap visuel. Dans un premier temps, elles utilisent l'écriture évocatrice afin de rapporter les résultats de l'analyse thématique. Cette dernière leur permet de mettre en scène deux résultats émergents: la santé est principalement construite en termes corporels et en tant que responsabilité individuelle liée à l'adoption de pratiques sanitaires. Dans un second temps, les récits des jeunes femmes sont examinés par l'entremise d'une analyse poststructuraliste du discours. À partir de celle-ci, les auteures notent les positions multiples et fluides que les jeunes femmes adoptent en tant que « sujets » : à certains moments en tant que sujets « néolibéraux », reproduisant sans les remettre en question les éléments de certains discours dominants de la santé et de l'obésité, mais à d'autres moments en tant que sujets « poststructuralistes », capables d'apporter un regard critique sur les discours dominants et ainsi de reconstruire la notion de santé autrement et de manière moins oppressive., Using a feminist poststructuralist approach, we explore the discursive constructions of health of 20 young women living with a visual impairment in the current context of a dominant obesity discourse. First, we use creative writing to report results from our thematic analysis. The latter allow us to highlight two emerging results: health is mostly constructed in bodily terms and as a matter of personal responsibility via the adoption of health practices. Second, a poststructuralist discourse analysis method is used to investigate the young women's narratives. As a result of this analysis, we note the multiple and fluid subject positions adopted by the young women: at times, as “neoliberal” subjects (re)producing elements of dominant health and obesity discourses and, at other times, as poststructuralist subjects critically gazing at dominant social discourses, offering some forms of “micro-resistance”, and discursively reconstituting health in a less oppressive way.

The recent construction of a so-called “obesity epidemic” has been fueled by epidemiologically-based studies recuperated by the media and suggestions of the rapid acceleration of obesity rates in the Western world. Studies linking obesity to ill-health have also exploded and greatly impacted our “physical” culture. In this article, I present a series of postcards to summarize the dominant obesity discourse and document the rhetorical terrain of the impending epidemic. I also offer counter-postcards to dispute the postcards’ objective postulations and contextualize the birth of what I call the “Obesity Clinic.” I then characterize this polymorphous clinic as an apparatus of capture sustained by biomedicalization, bioeconomics, and biocultural discourses and speak to its regulation and abjection of unruly (fat) bodies. I conclude with a few reflections about the territorializing nature of the Obesity Clinic as well as what it means for individuals and, more generally, for physical culture and its study.

In Canada, obesity is increasingly emphasised as a ‘risk’ to the health of mother and foetus. At a time when pregnant women are under greater pressure to personally uphold the health of their foetus, understanding the impact of the discourse surrounding obesity and health on young pregnant women is critical. Using a feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, we explore how pregnant young women construct their subjectivities either within dominant discourse on health and obesity or possibly resistant discourses. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 15 pregnant women between the ages of 18 and 28, coming from various socioeconomic and educational backgrounds in the Ottawa region. The analysis reveals that these women constitute themselves as complex, fragmented subjects who at times construct themselves within alternative and resistant discourses but generally reproduce dominant discourses of obesity, of individual and moral responsibility for health, and of maternal responsibility for foet...

In this article, we draw on a feminist poststructuralist perspective to explore how young pregnant women discursively construct the pregnant body in the context of the dominant obesity discourse and other prevailing bodily discourses. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 15 pregnant women between the ages of 18 and 28 coming from various socioeconomic and educational backgrounds in the Ottawa region. The poststructralist discourse analysis reveals that, overall, the participants are interpellated by the dominant obesity discourse and other bodily discourses surrounding beauty, femininity, and heterosexuality. Paradoxically, they also recite alternative discourses that resist dominant bodily discourses. The young pregnant women seem to constitute themselves as conflicted subjects simultaneously reproducing dominant and subversive discourses. This leads us to conclude with a discussion surrounding the need for more realistic and inclusive subject positions within pregnancy discourses.

This article focuses on the results of a study exploring young Shia Muslim Canadian women’s discursive constructions of physical activity in relation to Islam and the Hijab. The aims of the study were primarily informed by feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial theories. Poststructuralist discourse analysis was used to analyze the transcripts of conversations with 10 young Hijab-wearing Shia Muslim Canadian women. The results show that the participants discursively constructed physical activity in terms of being physically active (involved in fitness activities rather than sport), feeling good about themselves (i.e., being physically and mentally healthy), and losing weight or remaining “not fat.” The participants mentioned that they would choose Islam over physical activity if they had to make a choice between the two. Participants strongly resisted the Islamophobic discourse present in Canada, and appropriated an intersectional discourse that legitimates their refusal to choose between their right to religious freedom and their right to physical activity.

The recent construction of an ‘obesity epidemic’ has been fueled by epidemiologically-based studies recuperated by the media and suggesting the rapid acceleration of obesity rates in the Western world. Studies linking obesity to ill-health have also exploded with more recipes on how to wage ‘a war’ on obesity and dispose of ‘domestic terrorists.’ In this paper, we assert that the fabrication of ‘evidence’ in obesity research constitutes a good example of micro-fascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena. Favoring a particular ideology and excluding alternative forms of knowledge, obesity scientists have established a dominant ‘obesity discourse’ within which obese and ‘at-risk’ bodies are constructed as lazy and expensive bodies that should be submitted to disciplinary technologies (for example, surveillance), expert investigation and regulation. Using a poststructuralist approach, we examine the politics of evidence in obesity science and explore the connections between obesity discourses and the ways in which health and the body are discursively constructed by Canadian youth.

Pornography consumption appears to be more accepted and normalized among gay males than among heterosexual men. Nevertheless, what motivates the consumption of pornography remains understudied. Using a poststructuralist approach, we conducted an exploratory audience research that allowed us to document the motivations of consumers of gay male pornography through the narratives of twenty users from Toronto (Canada). Using a thematic and a critical discourse analysis, we found that the motivations can be grouped around four main concepts: sexual satisfaction, fantasy exploration, escapism, and finally, protection from others. Our critical discourse analysis suggests that participants construct their subjectivity from alternative discourses on sexuality, dominant discourses on individualism, consumption and health, and contradictory discourses on risk. Using society of spectacle, society of consumption, scientia sexualis and ars erotica as main theoretical concepts, we conclude that pornography is part of the apparatus [dispositif] of sexuality in the Foucauldian sense, an apparatus that maintains sex at a discursive level. Resume : L’usage de la pornographie semble plus accepte et normalise chez les hommes gais que chez les hommes heterosexuels. Les motivations de consommation de la pornographie au sein de cette population demeurent toutefois meconnues. Notre etude exploratoire d’auditoire nous a permis de decouvrir les motivations de consommation de la pornographie gaie dans les recits de vingt utilisateurs de Toronto (Canada). Les motivations decelees par l’analyse thematique sont : la satisfaction sexuelle, l’exploration des fantasmes, la fuite, et enfin la protection contre l’autre. L’analyse critique de discours quant a elle nous devoile que les hommes interviewes prononcent des discours alternatifs sur la sexualite, des discours dominants sur l’individualisme, la consommation et la sante, et des discours contradictoires sur le risque. Nous avons pu mettre en lumiere le fait que la pornographie fait partie integrante du dispositif de sexualite qui maintient le sexe a un niveau discursif.

Cette recherche qualitative exploratoire vise à mettre à jour les impacts psychosociaux possibles de consommation de pornographie homosexuelle masculine à travers les discours de 20 usagers gais de Toronto (Canada). La consommation de pornographie semble plus acceptée et normalisée chez les hommes gais que chez les hommes hétérosexuels. Une telle consommation peut avoir une incidence sur certains aspects de la santé sexuelle et de la santé mentale. L'analyse thématique du corpus de nos données nous révèle que les impacts peuvent se faire sentir au niveau de l'apprentissage, de l'édification de la fantasmatique, de la validation de la sexualité entre hommes, de l'ingérence dans la vie sexuelle et enfin, sur l'habituation et sur l'image de soi/image corporelle. À l'aide de l’analyse critique de discours, nous avons pu documenter les discours sociaux plus larges en jeu dans les récits des usagers et voir de quelle façon ils se positionnent à l'intérieur de ces mêmes discours.

Informed by the work of Michel Foucault, the authors discuss the Nip/Tuck episode entitled ‘‘Momma Boone’’ and how it discursively constructs ‘‘obesity’’. They show how this popular media text can be understood as a crystallisation of the dominant discourse surrounding fat bodies. In the process, how the episode can be seen as a ‘‘biopedagogy’’ that instructs its viewers in how to think and feel about the fat body is examined. Foucault’s formulation of the confessional is seen to be useful to theorise the ways in which biopedagogy leads subjects to believe and ultimately take part in processes leading to salvation. It is argued that in this Nip/Tuck episode, biopedagogy functions in and through Momma Boone’s ‘‘confessions of the flesh’’, that is, confessions aimed at revealing her obese body so that it can be rescued, rehabilitated and saved. Momma Boone’s salvation is shown to require three stages: first, the ‘‘confession’’ of obesity; second, the conversion to the ‘‘truth’’ of the ‘‘dominant obesity discourse’’; and third, the codification of a ‘‘new life’’ for the obese subject. In the end, it is argued that since it is represented as abject, monstrous and out of control, Momma Boone’s body is made to inspire fear and panic in so far as it provides constructed ‘‘evidence’’ regarding the consequences of the obese subject’s failure to convert to the truth of obesity discourse.

Abstract Drawing on the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, this paper interrogates the constitution of ‘evidence’ that defines the evidence-based movement in the health sciences. What are the current social and political conditions under which scientific knowledge appears to be ‘true’? Foucault describes these conditions as state ‘science’, a regime that privileges economic modes of governance and efficiency. Today, the Cochrane taxonomy and research database is increasingly endorsed by government and public health policy makers. Although this ‘evidence-based’ paradigm ostensibly promotes the noble ideal of ‘true knowledge’ free from political bias, in reality, this apparent neutrality is dangerous because it masks the methods by which power silently operates to inscribe rigid norms and to ensure political dominance. Through the practice of critique, this paper begins to expose and to politicise the workings of this power, ultimately suggesting that scholars are in a privileged position to oppose such regimes and foremost have the duty to politicise what hides behind the distortion and misrepresentation of ‘evidence’.

Sport is often perceived as affected by heteronormativity; however, it also seems to facilitate the expression of nonconventional sexualities. In this article, the authors explore the narratives of 14 young Francophone sportswomen from Montreal (Quebec, Canada) who identify themselves as “ gaie,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” or refuse labels altogether. A feminist poststructuralist approach is used to examine their discursive constructions of gender, sexuality, and sport. More specifically, the article aims to investigate the coming out process and the expression of nonconventional sexualities in sport. In line with queer theory, the findings challenge the heterosexual/homosexual binary, the idea of a fixed sexuality, and the linearity of the coming out process. The results also suggest that the coming out process and the expression of nonnormative sexualities may be influenced by sport.

Several studies on the experiences of nonheterosexual women in sport have highlighted the development of lesbian subcultures in sport, while others have emphasized the scarcity of athletic contexts embracing sexual diversity. This article explores the narratives of 14 young Francophone sportswomen positioning themselves as “gaie,” lesbian, bisexual, or refusing labels altogether. Using a feminist poststructuralist perspective, we examine their discursive constructions of sport and argue that the discourses articulated in sport allow for the creation of a space of resistance to heteronormativity. We suggest that the sport space is constructed as a “gaie” space within which a normalizing version of lesbian sexuality is proposed. We investigate how in/ex/clusion discourses are inscribed in space and how subjects are impacted by and, in turn, impact these discourses.

The author reflects on an article which was written by S. Brayton and T. Alexander about Quebec, Canada. The way in which a frog, a logo from a local basketball team, was used as a metaphor is discussed. The author's opinions regarding Alexander and Brayton's use of the frog in the article are mentioned.

No exit? Have we arrived at an impasse in the health sciences? Has the regime of ‘evidence’, coupled with corporate models of accountability and ‘best-practices’, led to an inexorable decline in innovation, scholarship, and actual health care? Would it be fair to speak of a ‘methodological fundamentalism’ from which there is no escape? In this article, we make an argument about intellectual integrity and good faith. We take this risk knowing full well that we do so in a hostile political climate in the health sciences, positioning ourselves against those who quietly but assiduously control the very terms by which the public faithfully understands ‘integrity’ and ‘truth’. In doing so, we offer an honest critique of these definitions and of the systemic power that is reproduced and guarded by the gatekeepers of ‘Good Science’.

Placing the sporting body and Michel Foucault’s technologies of power and of the self at the center of our research inquiry, this article explores the ways in which 12 Canadian gay male marathoners discursively construct their bodies within and beyond the marathon context. Thematic analysis of the research materials (gathered through guided conversations, written stories, and the first author’s research journal) revealed four main themes: self-governed bodily practices, body modification, the marathoning body as resistant to dominant representations of male corporeality in gay culture, and transformative potential. Following Foucault, materials were further submitted to discourse analysis through which we uncovered the appropriation of and resistance to dominant discourses. This analysis suggested the subjects’ discursive constructions as “hybrid” creations located both within, and sometimes in contest to, dominant discourses of physical activity, running, and the male body in gay culture. Our research explores the experiences of gay male athletes through a sociological lens that differs from the present literature, which has largely drawn on hegemony theory. It also adds new insights into distance running as a social phenomenon.

In this article, we explore the narratives of 14 young Francophone women from Montreal (Quebec, Canada) competing in team sports and identifying as `gay', `lesbian', `bisexual' or refusing labels altogether. We seek to gain a better understanding of these young women's discursive constructions of gender and sexuality as well as of their performative acts in sport and in other milieus. We submitted their narratives to a thematic analysis which was followed by a critical discourse analysis inspired by poststructuralism. Our findings suggest that the participants generally positioned themselves as ` gaie' (as opposed to lesbian or queer), which seems specific to Quebec. By emphasizing the lightness of being gaie in sport, the participants relied on an alternative discourse that tends to be positive towards gaie sexuality. Moreover, by constructing gaie sexuality as a more `feminine', less visible and consequently less disturbing version of lesbian sexuality, these sportswomen also articulated dominant discourses that reproduce lesbo/butch-phobic ideas. We also show the participants' unstable and changing subjectivity as we highlight the contradictions in their discursive constructions of gender and sexuality.

Background Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena. Objective The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm - that of post-positivism - but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure. Conclusion The Cochrane Group, among others, has created a hierarchy that has been endorsed by many academic institutions, and that serves to (re)produce the exclusion of certain forms of research. Because 'regimes of truth' such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.

Newspaper photographs of athletes at the 1999 Pan-American Games from five Canadian newspapers were analyzed for sexual differences in amount and content. Improvements in media coverage were noted over earlier studies. The percentage of photographs of women athletes was very close to that of men, and bettered their participation rate. There was also little difference in the camera angles used or in the activity level of the athletes pictured. However, sexual differences were still created in very subtle ways. Photographs of men were more likely to appear in prominent locations in the newspaper. Women in some stereotypically “male-appropriate” sports received coverage that brought them back into line with feminine ideals and mitigated their “gender transgressions.” Results suggest that women in the sports media are receiving greater amount of coverage, but the media still maintains practices that subtly create and naturalize sexual differences and set particular sports off as appropriate only for men.

Prolonged standing is associated with health problems. Despite regulations providing for access to seats, most Québec (Canada) workers usually stand. Only one in six can sit at will. Standing service workers such as cashiers and sales personnel are often confined to a small area where sitting is theoretically feasible. In many other countries, such workers have access to seats. This study asks why North American workers do not press for seats. In a qualitative, exploratory approach, 30 young workers who usually work standing were interviewed about their perceptions and experiences of prolonged standing at work. All but one experienced discomfort associated with this posture, and two-thirds reported that they had changed their lifestyle in some way as a result of their symptoms. However, their accounts of relationships with employers, health care personnel, and the health and safety system suggest that many environmental factors as well as attitudes toward work, employers, health, and the body contribute to maintaining the status quo. Workers describe problems with the image of a seated worker and thought that asking for a seat would threaten their relationship with the employer. Personal comfort was considered an insufficient reason to challenge worksite design, attitudes, and organization.

Women 65 years old and over make up the fastest growing population segment in North America. They are, particularly among the underprivileged, known to be heavy consumers of prescribed and over-the-counter drugs. The objective of this study was to identify the role of medication in underprivileged elderly women's strategies for aging well and dealing with minor health problems. A qualitative study was conducted among 40 women aged 65 to 75. Results show that elderly women seldom mention resorting to medication to “age well” although they report using this strategy to deal with minor health problems. Overall, the elderly women mentioned a wide range of strategies to cope with aging and minor health problems, which suggests that they are well equipped to face the challenges of aging.

La posture debout prolongee, observee chez la majorite des travailleuses quebecoises, est associee a des troubles cardiovasculaires et des douleurs au dos, aux membres inferieurs et aux pieds. En effet, dans deux des cinq professions ou l’on retrouve le plus de travailleuses, on observe une posture de travail debout prolongee et relativement statique. Cette contrainte posturale est typique de certaines expositions professionnelles des femmes parce que l’effort demeure peu evident et ne produit pas d’effet visible a court terme. Malgre les rapports de douleur, il y a beaucoup de resistance au changement. Le present article rapporte les resultats de plusieurs etudes sur les postures de travail des femmes, sur les consequences physiologiques de la posture debout statique prolongee et sur les attitudes des femmes et des hommes face a la posture debout, le tout, afin de comprendre le pourquoi de cette resistance.

JETTE S. and RAIL G. Nursing Inquiry 2013 Resisting, reproducing, resigned? Low-income pregnant women’s discursive constructions and experiences of health and weight gain In this article, we use qualitative methodology to explore how 15 low-income women of diverse sociocultural location construct and experience health and weight gain during pregnancy, as well as how they position themselves in relation to messages pertaining to weight gain, femininity and motherhood that they encounter in their lives. Discussing the findings through a feminist poststructuralist lens, we conclude that the participants are complex, fragmented subjects, interpellated by multiple and at times conflicting subject positions. While the discourse of maternal responsibility (i.e. managing personal behaviours for the baby’s health) is very much in evidence in their narratives, embodied experiences of pregnancy, lived experiences of financial constraints and religious beliefs provided some with an alternative discourse and resistant subject position. Participants also had mixed emotions about weight gain; they recognized the need to gain weight in order to have a healthy pregnancy, but weight gain was also not welcome as participants reproduced the dominant discourse of obesity and the discourse of ‘feminine’ bodily norms. Based on our results, we advocate for change to recent clinical guidelines and social discourses around pregnancy and weight gain, as well as for policies that provide pregnant women with a range of health-promoting resources.

Our interest stems from the dramatic increase in the number of obesity studies, which expose Canadian women to a huge amount of information that links health to weight. Using feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial lenses, this paper investigates young Lebanese-Canadian women’s constructions of the body and “health” practices within the context of the dominant obesity discourse. Participant-centered conversations were held with 20 young Christian Lebanese-Canadian women. A thematic analysis was first conducted and was followed by a poststructuralist discourse analysis to further our understanding of how the participants construct themselves as subjects within various discourses surrounding health, obesity, and the body. Our findings reveal that most participants conflate the “healthy” body and the “ideal” body, both of which they ultimately portray as thin. The young women construct the “healthy”/“ideal” body as a solely individual responsibility, thus reinforcing the idea of “docile bodies.” The majority of participants report their frequent involvement in disciplinary practices such as rigorous physical activity and dietary restrictions, and a few young women mention the use of other extreme forms of bodily monitoring such as detoxes, dieting pills, and compulsive exercise. We discuss the language employed by participants to construct their multiple and shifting subjectivities. For instance, many of these Lebanese-Canadian women use the term “us” to dissociate themselves from Lebanese women (“them”), whom they portray as overly focused on thinness and beauty and engaged in physical activity and other bodily practices for “superficial” purposes. The participants also use the “us/them” trope to distance themselves from “Canadian” women (read: white Euro-Canadian women), whom they portray as very physically active for purposes beyond the improvement of the physical appearance of the body. We discuss the impacts of the young Christian Lebanese-Canadian women’s hybrid cultural identities and diasporic spaces on their discursive constructions of the body and “health” practices. Finally, we examine the participants’ fluid subject-positions: On one hand, they construct themselves as neoliberal subjects re-citing elements of dominant neoliberal discourses (self-responsibility for health, traditional femininity, and obesity) but, on the other hand, they at times construct themselves as “timid” poststructuralist subjects expressing awareness of, and “micro-resistance” to such discourses.

This article outlines a theoretical model for the analysis of the impact of sport globalization on national sport systems based on an extensive review of the literature on globalization in general and of globalization of sport in particular. In the first section of the article, working definitions are provided. The second section presents each issue composing the “web of issues”; these issues are defined, and empirical data related to sport are used to support the discussion. The model is an attempt to regroup and consider all of the important factors in the tensions between the local and the global. Two central questions cut across the issues raised in the web: (a) how sport is contributing to and being transformed by globalization and (b) how the globalization of sport affects sport at the nation-state level. The article concludes that globalization transforms sport by inducing trends of homogenization as well as national diversity; sport also contributes to globalization in that it is a vehicle for global mass consumption culture.

A number of changes have occurred recently in the administration of fitness and amateur sport in Canada. The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent to which the federal government has adopted a neo-corporatist political approach to manage the number of interest groups in both fitness and amateur sport. Our analysis demonstrates that indeed several steps have been taken to ensure the coordination of interest groups in proposed changes to be made to the delivery of fitness and amateur sport. These steps well reflect neo-corporatist trends as they meet the three essential criteria for this political form. Through our assessment of a number of recent government and para-government documents as well as particular changes occurring within government, we explain how neo-corporatism has replaced pluralism in the domain of sport and fitness in Canada.

This paper is an introduction to the topic of Michel Foucault and the sociology of sport. First, we discuss the concepts used in the works of Foucault that have had the greatest impact in sociology of sport. Second, we present a brief review of the important articles in sociology of sport that have been inspired by Foucault’s approach. This exercise allows us to provide indices of the influence of the Foucauldian perspective on the sociology of sport: directly, by allowing us to situate the body at the center of research questions, or indirectly, in the context of the development and use of contemporary social theories.

In this article, we critically examine the clinical guidelines for obesity in pregnancy put forth by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC) that are underpinned by the rules of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), a system of ranking knowledge that promises to provide unbiased evidence about the effectiveness of treatments. While the SOGC guidelines are intended to direct health practitioners on ‘best practice’ as they address pregnancy weight gain with clients in the clinical context, we question their usefulness, arguing that despite their commitment to objectivity, they remain mired in cultural biases that stigmatize large female bodies and associates them to ‘unfit’ mothers.

Le projet « vers l'équité» a pour objectif de développer, en partenariat avec les gens du milieu, des outils et des stratégies d'intervention pour créer un environnement non sexiste offrant aux jeunes filles francophones au Canada les mêmes opportunités qu'aux garçons. Les résultats d'une enquête nationale en la matière sont présentés. The "towards equality" project bas as its aim, the development, in association with the people involved, of the intervention tools and strategies for creating a non-sexist environment offering young French-speaking Canadian girls the same opportunities as boys. Tbe results of a national study on this subject are presented.

This study focused on the phenomenon of physical contact, as experienced by female basketball players (N=14) on a Canadian varsity team. In this article are presented the results of the construction and contextualization phases of the social phenomenological method (Denzin 1984) used in the study. In the construction phase, elements of the physical contact phenomenon are interpreted and used for its construction. Emotions and the self are considered as foundations and upon them are laid three basic structures which provide a skeleton of the phenomenon: the phenomenological field, the body, and the symbolic interaction. In the contextualization phase, the constructed phenomenon is put back in the lives of the women basketball players. It is shown how a player particularly feels her emotions in basketball situations and how emotionality transforms her in a way that few other lines of action can. In conclusion, it is argued that physical contacts, as expressions of a wide variety of emotions, provide occasions for the unfolding of a player's real self and meaning and represent experiences through which a player may learn not only who she is, but who she can be.

This essay asks how we might best elaborate an ethics of authentic practice. Will we be able to agree on a set of shared terms through which ethical practice will be understood? How will we define ethics and the subject's relation to authoritative structures of power and knowledge? We begin by further clarifying our critique of evidence-based medicine (EBM), reflecting on the intimate relation between theory and practice. We challenge the charge that our position amounts to no more than 'subjectivism' and 'antiauthoritarian' theory. We argue that an ethical practice ought to question the authority of EBM without falling into the trap of dogmatic antiauthoritarianism. In this, we take up the work of Hannah Arendt, who offers terms to help understand our difficult political relation to authority in an authentic ethical practice. We continue with a discussion of Michel Foucault's use of 'free speech' or parrhesia, which he adopts from Ancient Greek philosophy. Foucault demonstrates that authentic ethical practice demands that we 'speak truth to power.' We conclude with a consideration of recent biotechnologies, and suggest that these biomedical practices force us to re-evaluate our theoretical understanding of the ethical subject. We believe that we are at a crucial juncture: we must develop an ethics of authentic practice that will be commensurable with new and emergent biomedical subjectivities.

No exit? Have we arrived at an impasse in the health sciences? Has the regime of 'evidence', coupled with corporate models of accountability and 'best-practices', led to an inexorable decline in innovation, scholarship, and actual health care? Would it be fair to speak of a 'methodological fundamentalism' from which there is no escape? In this article, we make an argument about intellectual integrity and good faith. We take this risk knowing full well that we do so in a hostile political climate in the health sciences, positioning ourselves against those who quietly but assiduously control the very terms by which the public faithfully understands 'integrity' and 'truth'. In doing so, we offer an honest critique of these definitions and of the systemic power that is reproduced and guarded by the gatekeepers of 'Good Science'.

Une très grande majorité de danseuses et de danseurs doivent composer avec des problèmes de santé affligeant le déroulement de leurs activités professionnelles au point de mettre prématurément un terme à leur carrière. Si la médecine de la danse contribue grandement aux connaissances sur la fonctionnalité des corps des danseurs, cet article porte plutôt sur les enjeux socioculturels propres au milieu de la danse contemporaine et susceptibles d’influencer les discours et pratiques de santé en danse. Notre étude met ainsi en lumière les demandes contradictoires faites quotidiennement aux interprètes, ces derniers devant concilier les exigences d’un corps en santé, fonctionnel et équilibré à celles d’un corps poétique, capable d’abandon et d’invention, le tout, sans l’existence d’un filet de sûreté adéquat en matière de conditions de travail. A large majority of dancers must manage health problems affecting the course of their professional activities, to the point of ending their career prematurely. While dance medicine has contributed greatly to the development of knowledge on the functionality of dancers’ bodies, the present article rather focuses on the socio-cultural issues at stake in the contemporary dance milieu and that can potentially influence health discourses and practices in dance. Our study thus uncovers the contradictory demands negotiated daily by dancers; the latter having to reconcile the requirements of a healthy, balanced and functional body to those of a poetic body capable of invention, freedom and release all this without the presence of an adequate safety net in terms of working conditions. Una gran mayoría de bailarinas y bailarines debe transigir con problemas de salud que afectan el desarrollo de sus actividades profesionales al punto de poner un fin prematuro a su carrera. A diferencia de la medicina de la danza que contribuye significativamente a los conocimientos sobre el funcionamiento del cuerpo de los bailarines, este artículo trata lo que está en juego a nivel sociocultural propio al medio de la danza contemporánea y que es susceptible de influenciar los discursos y las prácticas de salud en el medio de la danza. Nuestro estudio revela que los intérpretes reciben cotidianamente demandas contradictorias y deben, de este modo, conciliar las exigencias de un cuerpo sano, funcional y equilibrado con las exigencias de un cuerpo poético, capaz de abandonarse y de inventar, todo ello sin contar con una red de contención segura en lo que a condiciones de trabajo se refiere.