Located within a cultural space situated firmly in the political, technological and historical context of our contemporary moment, and predicated on the contention that all texts are dialogic (Johnson et al., 2004); I read physical cultural technologies as constituents of the powerful techniques of self regulation and self surveillance of the young female body. "We Cheer" acts as a discursive technology; a non-centralised, capillary-like force which works to 'conduct the conduct' (Rose 2000a) of subjects.Emanating from these media are digital discourses through which young girls are learning, not only how to move their bodies appropriately, but how they have to be in order to fit the mould and 'join the squad'. As a powerful and pervasive public pedagogy "We Cheer" (re)establishes the position of the neoliberal girl norm; that is a girl whose body is representative of her being (hetero)sexy, middle class, white and a young consumer-citizen.

Within this paper, we address how the 'knowledge market' positions certain ways of knowing over others. We suggest that this questions the very worth and perceived value of the social sciences of sport, let alone allowing for discussion of the contemporary relevance, quality, position and potential impact of the field. To counter what we perceive as a regressive orthodoxy, we explore the dangers that can arise from narrowly conceived (yet often hegemonic) globally accepted structures, discourses and epistemes and suggest a slow counter: an approach couched in slow pedagogy and that can offer often competing approaches within the context of neoliberal educational rationalities. Through discussing how we have negotiated these conditions within our own institution, we propose what we imagine is a provocative vision of the potentialities of the field. In so doing, and while we are not suggesting this is the way 'sport studies' should or ought to be, we suggest that a slow sports studies can open up the critical potential of the field, promote democratic (body) knowledge, and ensure the University as a space for vibrancy, innovation, critique, debate and equality. In the balance of this paper, we argue that failure to fully acknowledge and support the contribution of socially, culturally, philosophically, and historically focused research and understanding, precludes the actualization of the expansive intellectual promise, impact, relevance and potentialities of the academic study of sport. Sport, as a field of academic study-and when we refer to 'sport' we are not just referring to an over-determined focus on elite professional sport, but including all manner of being 'physical' ranging from exercise, to movement, dance, physical activity and sport-can never be substantial (possessing some fixed, immutable essence), rather, it is unavoidably relational, and always in process. Its contemporaneous iteration provides a persuasive-if illusionary-semblance of fixity within what is, in actuality, an ever-changing world. As such, our argument in this paper is predicated on this very point: when we research, teach, read about, play, learn, engage with being physical we are not doing so in a manner isolated from a broad range of important social issues. Rather, in the broadest sense, the omnifarious planes of physicality represent a "pressure point of complex modern societies. viii " These planes are "sites" or "point(s) of intersection, and of negotiation of radically different kinds of determination and semiosis"; a place where social forces, discourses, institutions, and processes congregate, congeal, and are contested in a manner which contributes to the shaping of human relations, subjectivities, and experiences in particular, contextually contingent ways. In the more specific sense, being physical comprises a litany of "events", the moments of "practice that crystallizes diverse temporal and social trajectories" ix through which individuals negotiate their subjective identities. Following Frow and Morris x , the physica...

Located within a superficially depoliticized 'more government' predicated on the technocratic embedding of routines and institutions of neoliberal governance, reality television operates as a 'cultural technology' concerned with the conduct of conduct, or more specifically, with the calculated direction of conduct to shape behaviour to certain ends. Focused on physical fitness and weight loss, we focus on the globally successful reality tv format, The Biggest Loser (TBL), as a highly politicised space that educates subjects and disciplines the non-compliant; part of a moral economy that differentiates between 'good' and 'bad' citizens. We read TBL as a powerful public pedagogy that circulates techniques and provides the platforms for a government of the self; a component in the neoliberal reinvention of 'welfare' that promotes choice, personal accountability and self-empowerment as ethics of citizenship while, at the same time, masking social forces that position people into the dejected borderlands of consumer capitalism. Contributing to the 'biopedagogies' of weight, TBL classifies the obese, overweight and physically unfit as personal moral failures, immoral and irresponsible citizens, socially, morally, and economically pathologised outsiders.

Within this paper, we address how kinesiology-in a similar fashion to other disciplinary enterprises-has become enmeshed with the dictates of the market, privatization, efficiency, flexibility, and the accelerated rationalization of society, associated with the advent of late capitalism. Hence, we outline how these market considerations implicitly and explicitly privilege centrally controlled, efficiency oriented, rationally predictable, and empirically calculable ways of knowing, and of knowledge generation (Ritzer, 2004). We propose that these processes not only further wed kinesiology, the University, and implicated subjects (students as well as Professors) to the logics of the capital, but also place such concerns over human needs, civic and moral responsibilities, public values and critical contents (Giroux, 2010). These non-rational and incalculable pedagogical outcomes are crucial foundations for democracy, political freedom and equality (Brown, 2006), yet are apparently devalued in contemporary kinesiology as in other formations of (higher) education. Pace Ritzer (2006), we thus expose the epistemological McDonaldization evident with kinesiology, which we argue has resulted in a field stymied by what elsewhere has been described as its "inconvenient truth" (Andrews, 2008); namely, the intellectually and humanity limiting scientific doxa apparent and embodied within the constitution of kinesiological departments, curricular, journals, and, indeed, the kinesiology academy itself.

Within this paper I conceptualise practices of the body that are learnt and deployed as part of feminised body work within the cultural context of girls' leisure. These are practices of the body that are engaged by young women in ways that allow them to (re)construct their subjectivities as well as 'negotiate a physical sense of themselves' (Garrett, 2004, p. 223). Therefore this paper begins by mapping the theoretical foundations upon which the analysis of femininity is couched. Predicated upon debates that distinguish between the girl as a passive, duped recipient of culture's pedagogical signs and the girl as an active, autonomous 'freely choosing,' 'freely consuming' citizen, I draw out the ways in which young girls' body practices can shed light on the complex relationship between 'choice,' agency, consumption and subjectivity. Drawing on data collected from workshops and focus groups, I locate consumption, body management and beautification as constituents and simultaneously constitutors of leisure time. I thus offer insight into the ways in which a group of twenty thirteen year old girls who attended a private (fee paying) school in the West of England account for, maintain, develop, and in places resist, localised appearance cultures. Structured around certain leisure activities-reading magazines, shopping for clothes, eating, engaging in physical activity, applying beauty products, makeup and hair styling-this paper concludes by highlighting the ways in which wider cultural discourses are having embodied effects and are being consumed, not without consequence, as commonplace everyday preoccupations.

This paper explores issues of sport, sponsorship, and consumption by critically interrogating the mass-mediated “coming out” narratives of professional golfer, Rosie Jones, and professional basketball player, Sheryl Swoopes. Both athletes came out publicly as gay in light of endorsements received by Olivia Cruises and Resorts—a company that serves lesbian travelers—thus marking a significant shift in the relationship between lesbian subjectivity, sport, and sponsorship. A concern with a neoliberal-infused GLBT politics underscores our analysis, and a close reading of these narratives raises complex questions about the corporatization of coming out and the existence of lesbian celebrity in sport.

Driven by a desire to interrogate and articulate the role and place of the body in the study of sport, this paper encourages those who are incited by a richer understanding of the physical to expand and elaborate upon the fleshy figuration that guides the research projects and practices/strategies of the present. This call for papers is an opportunity to unpack the methodological impetus of “body work” (Giardina & Newman, 2011a) and to locate it within the nexus of dialogues that expressly seek to reengage an eclectic body politic at precisely the time when the body is a site of continuous scrutinizing and scientific confession. As researchers we grapple with and problematize method(ologies) in light of the conjunctural demands placed upon our scholarship and so I reflect on a recently conducted project and the methodological moments that it brought to light. Conceptualized in terms of a physical performative pedagogy of subjectivity, I tentatively forward a discussion of what moving methods might look and feel like and thus I question why, when we research into physical, sporting, (in)active experiences, do we refrain from putting the body to work? Why do we not theorize the body through the moving body?

This article adds to the limited literature on coming out and on lesbians in sport by highlighting the presence of lesbian sporting celebrity on Showtime's series The L Word. Through a reading of The L Word's character/professional athlete, Dana Fairbanks, we explore the economic impetus and the racial and classed undertones of corporatized coming out narratives. We devote considerable effort to unpacking Fairbanks' articulation that she wishes to be "the gay Anna Kournikova" and speculate on the consequences of this utterance for both real lesbian sporting celebrities and the lesbian fans that necessarily follow Fairbanks' corporate-sponsored coming out.