Doing military fitness: physical culture, civilian leisure, and militarism

Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal competencies of ex-military personnel, military-themed fitness classes and physical challenges have become an increasingly popular civilian leisure pursuit in the UK over the last two decades. This paper explores the embodied regimes, experiences, and interactions between civilians and ex-military personnel that occur in these emergent hybrid leisure spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that commercial military fitness involves a repurposing and rearticulation of collective military discipline within a late modern physical culture that emphasizes the individual body as a site of self-discovery and personal responsibility. Military fitness is thus a site of a particular biopolitics, of feeling alive in a very specific way. The intensities and feelings of physical achievement and togetherness that are generated emerge filtered through a particular military lens, circulating around and clinging to the totem of the repurposed ex-martial body. In the commercial logic of the fitness market, being ‘military’ and the ex-soldier’s body have thus become particularly trusted and affectively resonant brands

The human body as field of conflict between discourses

The approach to AIDS as a disease and a threat for social discrimination is used as an example to illustrate a conceptual thesis. This thesis is a claim that concerns what we call a medical issue or not, what is medicalised or needs to be demedicalised. In the friction between medicalisation and demedicalisation as discursive strategies the latter approach can only be effected through the employment of discourses or discursive strategies other than medicine, such as those of the law and of economics. These discourses each realise different values, promote a different subject, and have a different concept of man. The concept of discourse is briefly outlined against concepts such as the linear growth concept of science and the growth model of science as changes in paradigm. The issue of testing for AIDS shows a conflict between the medical and the legal discourse and illustrates the title of our contribution: the human body as field of conflict between discourses

Berg-en-See street boys:merging street and family relations in Cape Town, South Africa

Despite a wealth of research exploring street children's lives, this has tended to focus on the micro-scale, rarely drawing connections with wider society. Yet, it is rare for street children to sever all ties with home and this paper explores these connections by taking a relational approach to the production of street life. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with 12 boys living on the streets in a coastal suburb of Cape Town, the paper identifies that street children are part of powerful inter- and intra-generational relations that connect them to their families: interdependent but sometimes forced and contested. The paper concludes by identifying that street children are not isolated on the street, but rather positioned relationally in between street and family life building relations within and across spatial boundaries. This has implications for the way in which we conceptualise street children's lives and adds to wider theoretical understandings of childhood as relational

The impact of standards-based reform on special education and the creation of the ‘dividual

An urban Pre-K through 5th grade school referred to as Westvale Elementary School was the focal point for this research study. Westvale was located within an urban district in New York State that was host to approximately 20,000 students. Both the school and the district were labeled as failing under the No Child Left Behind Act. Foucauldian conception of biopolitics and Deleuzian notion of the ‘dividual are the theoretical frameworks used to make meaning of qualitative data collected for this study. Interview, observation, and document data revealed how the structures of a biopolitical society hierarchized, segregated, and geographically shifted certain demographic groups of students throughout the school district based on their potential to succeed on high stakes examinations. Teachers and administrators were also linked to the demographics of the students they taught and mandates of standards-based reform (SBR) often required the turnover of school personnel, causing frustration and stigma for educators and students alike. Mandated teacher and leader evaluations were also found to increase fear of teaching students with disabilities because they were viewed as ‘dividuals within the biopolitical system that SBR exacerbated

Enduring war: Heroes’ Acre, ‘the empty throne’, and the politics of disappearance

War memorials are a common and often controversial part of the commemoration of past wars. In order to better grasp their importance for the way war endures below the surface of peace, this article stages an ethnographic encounter with a Namibian monument: Heroes’ Acre. The memorial embodies the official Namibian narrative on past wars by emphasizing a nationalist and quasi-religious symbolism, a framing that has been challenged by a number of writers pointing to the need for going beyond the state discourse. This article complements and complicates the way Heroes’ Acre appears in discourse by focusing on the interstices and absences at the site. By drawing upon my own visit to the monument as well as theoretical engagements, most notably Georgio Agamben’s discussion of ‘the empty throne’, I read Heroes’ Acre as a place where political power functions through emptiness, as it allows the future of war to endure in the present. Engaging particularly with the empty graveyard at the site, I argue that its emptiness needs to be understood as a guarantee for war – not in case it occurs – but as a ready-made symbol of glory, always virtually there, waiting to be fulfilled.</p