Biopolitics of Swimming and the Re-articulation of Able-Bodiedness

In this book, Touko Vaahtera explores how bodies of latent potential, a cultural attachment to the idea of body as potentiality, carries with it hierarchizing hopes about better bodies. Vaahtera combines disability studies, cultural studies, feminist science studies, transgender studies, post-colonial studies, and Foucauldian genealogy to offer a provocative approach that interrogates capacities and capabilities as obvious frameworks for thinking about the body.

Vaahtera explores how swimming skills emerged as a specific biopolitical question in Finland, a country that has been described as the Land of a Thousand Lakes. Through a profound cultural analysis focusing both on Finnish cultural texts on swimming as well as manifold more globalized texts, Vaahtera considers how the legacy of eugenics and colonialism, the hopes of civilization, and homogenizing assumptions about bodies frame how we think about human capacity.

Offers new approaches to disability theory Interrogates the assumptions of capability and capacity Engages with disability studies, gender studies, feminist studies, & Foucauldian studies, among others

Auteur

Touko Vaahtera is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland. They are the editor of Troubling Educational Cultures in the Nordic Countries (2017).

Texte du rabat

In this book, Touko Vaahtera explores how bodies of latent potential, a cultural attachment to the idea of body as potentiality, carries with it hierarchizing hopes about better bodies. Vaahtera combines disability studies, cultural studies, feminist science studies, transgender studies, post-colonial studies, and Foucauldian genealogy to offer a provocative approach that interrogates capacities and capabilities as obvious frameworks for thinking about the body. Vaahtera explores how swimming skills emerged as a specific biopolitical question in Finland, a country that has been described as the Land of a Thousand Lakes. Through a profound cultural analysis focusing both on Finnish cultural texts on swimming as well as manifold more globalized texts, Vaahtera considers how the legacy of eugenics and colonialism, the hopes of civilization, and homogenizing assumptions about bodies frame how we think about human capacity.

Contenu

1 Introduction: Re-articulation of Able-Bodiedness.- 2 Bodies of Latent Potential.- 3 Miscellaneous Ambitions around the Fit Citizenship: Genealogy of the Ability to Swim.- 4 The Real Body and the Repressive Hypothesis of the Body.- 5 Able-Bodied Belonging: Human Beings as Part of the Animal World.- 6 Epilogue.