Skill and masculinity in Olympic weightlifting

Training cues and cultivated craziness in Georgia

Bibliographic Data

ID2260733
AuthorsPerry Maxfield Waldman Sherouse (0000-0001-6567-3095, Princeton University, corresponding author), Perry Sherouse (Department of Anthropology Princeton University 121 Aaron Burr Hall Princeton NJ 08544)
Year2016
Volume43
Issue1
Pages103-115
Publication date2016-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Ethnologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/amet.12266
OpenAlexW2282669671
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited30

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

Affect (linguistics · Athletes · Coaching · Embodied cognition · Femininity · Georgian · Masculinity · Physical therapy · Psychoanalysis · Communication · Doping in Sports · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society

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