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Skill and masculinity in Olympic weightlifting: Training cues and cultivated craziness in Georgia
Author(s) -
SHEROUSE PERRY
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12266
Subject(s) - masculinity , coaching , athletes , psychology , georgian , femininity , affect (linguistics) , embodied cognition , social psychology , applied psychology , communication , physical therapy , computer science , linguistics , medicine , philosophy , artificial intelligence , psychoanalysis , psychotherapist
At the Georgian Weightlifting Federation in Tbilisi, Georgia, a mainstay of coaching is the training cue, a shouted word or phrase that coaches use to prompt weightlifters to perform in a certain psychological, physical, or technical way. In this practice, coaches cultivate and naturalize dimensions of physiology and psychology, aligning masculinity with animality, lack of restraint, and emotional surfeit, and femininity with gracefulness, control, and good technique. Although Olympic weightlifting remains stereotypically hypermasculine, coaches compliment female weightlifters’ technique as superior to men's and train their athletes to integrate masculine “nature” and feminine “culture” in the expression of physical strength. In doing so, coaches do not instill fully formed subjectivities but manage embodied forms, using exclamatory cues to disaggregate the athlete into action, affect, and anatomy. [ post‐Soviet sport , masculinity , coaching , weightlifting , strength , technique , Georgia ]