Le Parkour: The Body as Politics (original) (raw)
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Space and Subversion: An Analysis of Authenticity in London Parkour
This dissertation examines the practices of Parkour in London from experiential and theoretical viewpoints through frameworks of cultural authenticity, subculture and exploration of the city. I assess how debates in Parkour relate to these areas in order to explore the concepts of genuine Parkour practice, its unique way of actively connecting with the city and its relation to wider society. By drawing on qualitative methods including interviews, go-along observation and discourse analysis, I argue that authentic Parkour practice transcends many of the debates in popular dialogues and is ultimately determined through one’s experience of the practice. Similar to other urban subcultures like skateboarding and urban exploration, Parkour does have a subversive element in its playful utilisation of spaces that are designed for other uses, but opposing dominant culture is not part of its ideology. Additionally, I assert that while commercial interests have influenced the Parkour scene, the experience of Parkour for many practitioners remains unaffected due its rhizomatic nature. Thus, the subcultural development and nature of Parkour is unique and provides fresh perspectives on narrative construction in the city.
The present article is part of a vast research and publication project whose main purpose is to reveal some of the essential characteristics of the phenomenology and semiotics of belonging in contemporary societies and cultures by analyzing the way in which such characteristics are manifested through various kinds of physical and conceptual (dis)placements across the frontiers of belonging. The article proposes a phenomenological and semiotic reflection on the dialectics between two opposite agencies. On the one hand, the agency of political power as it is expressed in the utopia of controlling the frontiers of belonging through centralized urban and architectural planning; on the other hand, the urban phenomenon of parkour as a sum of individual agencies that seeks to defy such political power, its utopia of centralized control, and the urban frontiers of belonging that it brings about by means of a practice (and a performance) of physical (dis)placement through space consisting in systematically challenging its urban and architectural structure. Such dialectics also embodies a confrontation between the utopia of artificially recreating the ‘natural’ conditions of development of the urban space and environment of belonging (for instance, through the urban and architectural planning of new towns in the 1960s and 1970s) and the opposite utopia of recuperating the feeling of a ‘natural’ movement through space by defying the matrix of motor possibilities offered and constraints imposed by the urban fabric. These opposite utopias wind up revealing each the contradictions of the other: on the one hand, parkour unmasks urban planning and architectural utopias, showing that they are nothing but a travesty for the need to perpetuate an exploitative system of material and symbolical production and re-production; on the other hand, the liberating trend of parkour is soon cannibalized by media, show, and business trends that turn it into a stereotype of itself. As a result, parkour can be considered both as the urban trend that, invading the environments of belonging created and entrenched by centralized political and planning power, brings about new paths of nomadic belonging in the urban fabric; and as the urban fashion that, invaded by the logics of media, show, and commercial exploitation, turns those same liberating movements into routines, into new confirmations of the political-spatial status quo.
2018
In 2017, Jeffrey Kidder from Department of Sociology at Northern Illinois University published Parkour and the City. The book gives a comprehensive and in-depth insight into the discipline of parkour as it is practice and has evolved in the United States. Kidder ́s book thereby fills a need for studies in parkour to be sensitive to the local context. Furthermore, Kidder uses parkour as a sociological lens to zoom in on the conditions of postmodern urban life and the potential (bodily) responses to them, and thereby shows how sport always has broader social connections and significance. To show my respect for and appreciation of the book, I have chosen to do devote a full article to discuss and evaluate the book. The review is structured after the chapters in the book and rounded off with a call for culturally sensitive and comparative studies in parkour as well in lifestyle sports in general.
Parkour, Deviance, and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City: An Ethnography
Taking us on an ethnographic journey into the spatially transgressive practice of parkour and freerunning, Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City attempts to explain and untangle some of the contradictions that surround this popular lifestyle sport and its exclusion from our hyper-regulated cities. While the existing criminological wisdom suggests that these practices are a form of politicised resistance, this book positions parkour and freerunning as hyper-conformist to the underlying values of consumer capitalism and explains how late-capitalism has created a contradiction for itself in which it must stoke desire for these lifestyle practices whilst also excluding their free practice from central urban spaces. Drawing on the emergent deviant leisure perspective, Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City takes us into the life-worlds of young people who are attempting to navigate the challenges and anxieties of early adulthood. For the young people in this study, consumer capitalism’s commodification of rebellious iconography offered unique identities of ‘cool individualism’ and opportunities for flexibilised employment; while the post-industrial ‘creative city’ attempted to harness parkour’s practice, prohibitively if necessary, into approved spatial contexts under the buzzwords of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’. Therefore, Parkour, Deviance and Leisure in the Late-Capitalist City offers a vital contribution to the criminological literature on spatial transgression, and in doing so, engages in a critical reappraisal of the evolution of the relationships between work, leisure, identity and urban space in consumer capitalism.
2011
Through a meeting of practice and theory this thesis shifts the locus of attention from the spectacle to the everyday practice of parkour. Using documentary filmmaking with anthropological intentions and extended access over a six year period, this thesis explores the subjective everyday lived performances and essence of parkour, as experienced by a select group of experienced practitioners, as well as those who were involved in parkour's creation and development. Parkour is a multidimensional phenomenon that can be experienced as an art, training discipline, sport, set of values, and practice of freedom, depending on an individual's motivations, cultural understanding and exposure to the history of the practice. The research establishes that parkour is an imaginative and particular way of thinking; remapping the landscape with 'parkour vision'. Parkour transforms how one experiences, moves, connects and participates in the environment, challenging notions of normative behaviour, socialisation, identity and self-determining actions through explorations of, as well as expressions of the self. The results of which are a means to find a more authentic deeper inner sense of self, producing feelings of inclusion and an enhanced sense of freedom through the creation of an autonomous social body. Parkour encourages self-reliance and mutual cooperation whilst enabling participants to reclaim the wonderment and magic of the human experience, valuing confrontations of fear, pleasure and pain in transcending the real and imagined boundaries of one's own limitations, play and freedom of expression. This thesis explores themes such as shared cinema, collaborative filmmaking, participant observation and issues of representation. Parkour is discussed theoretically from the perspectives of Eichberg's work on body cultures, Foucauldian relations of power and technologies of the self, alongside Merleau Ponty's phenomenology, Csikszentmihalyi's optimal flow experience, Wellmann's insights into networked individualism and Charles Taylor's work on the search for an authentic self and the complexities of a modern identity. This thesis contributes to the growing field of research into body cultures and the continually evolving culture of parkour.
Crossing the symbolic boundaries: parkour, gender and urban spaces in Genoa
Modern Italy, 2015
This paper shows how girls and women who practise parkour cross the gendered divisions of space, sport and other symbolic territories that are brought into play by so-called risk-taking sports, and how it may therefore be considered a subversive action. The strategies of negotiation produced by such symbolic crossings are examined via the concepts of reproductive and resistant agency and of gender manoeuvring. In particular the concept of gender manoeuvring will be used to examine the mechanisms of inter- and intra-gender inclusion and exclusion which, within subcultures, pass through a recognition of authenticity. Indeed, in the culture of parkour the question of authenticity emerges when media dissemination produces a split into two distinct practices: art du déplacement and freerunning. The traceuses cross this boundary because of their different origin (they are from the streets as opposed to the gym), thereby building within their gender further discourses on authenticity.
the contemporary sublime and the culture of extremes: parkour and finding the freedom of the city
Amanda du Preez the contemporary sublime and the culture of extremes: parkour and finding the freedom of the city biography Amanda du Preez completed her Doctoral studies at the University of South Africa in 2002 with the title Gendered Bodies and New Technologies. The thesis has one founding premise, namely that embodiment constitutes a non-negotiable prerequisite for human life. Over the past 15 years she has lectured at the University of Pretoria, University of South Africa, the Pretoria Technikon, and the Open Window Art Academy, on subjects ranging from Art History, Visual Communication, and Art Therapy to Open and Distance Learning. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Pretoria, in the Department of Visual Arts, and teaches Visual Culture and Art History. In 2005 she co-authored South African Visual Culture with J. van Eeden (Van Schaik: Pretoria). The following publications are forthcoming: Gendered Bodies and New Technologies: Rethinking Embodiment in a Cyber Era (Unisa Press) and Taking a Hard Look: Gender and Visual Culture (Cambridge Scholars Press). Her field of expertise includes gender and feminist theories, virtual and cyber culture, bio-politics, new technologies, and film and visual culture.
The following paper aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary field of enquiry addressing the ways in which lifestyle and informal sports can inform policy debate and development at various levels. It will do so by considering the ambivalent position that parkour is taking within policies of urban and community re-branding enacted in Turin, Italy. Parkour in Turin is an increasingly structured discipline often endorsed by events celebrating the city’s vibrancy, and by local projects that target youth, and promote social participation. However, this discipline implies also a spontaneous and irreverent engagement with urban spaces that often creates frictions and conflicts between traceurs (parkour practitioners) and other actors in relation to what constitutes the public, how it should be used and by whom. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research with a group of 20 traceurs predominantly of migrant origins, this study focuses on the participants’ ambivalent engagement with one project promoting social participation through sports in Turin’s urban spaces. Building on the ethnographic material, this paper addresses the emerging relationship between social projects, informal urban practices and emerging forms of creative urbanism. The discussion focuses on the ambiguities and fault lines of urban agendas incorporating lifestyle and informal sports in their (neoliberal) vocabulary of community and place regeneration. However, this paper calls also for the necessity to engage with spontaneous, informal physical practices as a way to acknowledge, and support existing, contested negotiations of citizenship and belonging in urban spaces.
The Paradox of Parkour: An Exploration of the Deviant-Leisure Nexus in Late-Capitalist Urban Space
2017
The cultural lifestyle sport of parkour maintains an ambiguous position at the nexus between deviance and leisure. It conforms to consumer capitalism’s commodified norms of ‘cool individualism’, risk-taking, and the creation of ‘deviant’ identities, whilst remaining a spatially transgressive practice that is continuously excluded by the spatial guardians of the hyper-regulated city. Drawing upon ultra-realist criminological theory and a critical rethinking of leisure, consumerism and urban space, this thesis explains parkour’s ambiguous position by suggesting that there is a fundamental paradox at the heart of parkour’s spatial practice that is a product of late-capitalism’s own making. As Post-Fordist Western societies shifted toward a consumer-oriented economy, consumer capitalism had to stoke the desire for cool and alternative identities such as parkour that tapped into subjectivities increasingly oriented to socio-symbolic competition and individualistic distinction. Simultaneo...