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.

“This wonderfully written book subjects swimming to a much-needed queer and disability analysis. Vaahtera asks us to reconsider the innocence of the question— can you swim?—and to explore together wider societal assumptions that we hold over ourselves and others associated with capacity, capability, and ability.” (Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies and Education, University of Sheffield)

“Tackling urgent questions regarding the biopolitics of transnational and local bodily 'capabilities,' Touko Vaahtera challenges us to examine how we oriented towards able-bodiedness. Focusing on a wide range of cultural texts, and challenging what we might understand as both culture and text, this book offers a queercrip methodology for analysing the intersectional politics of embodied, collective living. It opens up how we read, understand and experience collective bodily norms and their contexts, whilst offering specifically queercrip ways of imagining alternative modes of being.” (Donna McCormack, Author of Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing; School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde)

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).