The body as prisoner of “the healthy life”: the construction of a medico-sporting ethics of subjugation

Abstract

Definitions of health elaborated from the site of knowledge-power of bourgeois medicine reflects the socio-political tensions that are generated between different social groups in the struggle for social hegemony. In this struggle, the unequal availability of symbolic resources results in the imposition of forms of relationship with the body that have been developed by the ruling class, and are legitimated and naturalized with the support of technical discourse. In this context, sporting and bodily practices become allied with a life style imposed by the dominant class, and become a major ingredient in the definition of a social and political order that coincides with capitalist demands linked to the production/consumption binomy.