Abstract
This book 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.” It investigates how such biopolitical aims transformed swimming skills into a civic skill in Finnish society. The book shows how this specific local case opens up a possibility for analyzing the cultural mechanisms that stabilize the imaginary of capability as an obvious framework for thinking about the body—as well as interrogating how bodies have emerged as potentially capable. This chapter contextualizes these problems in the current theories of the body by looking at the interrogation of ableism in disability studies and intervening in the framework of debility/capacity and notions on plasticity.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
My perspective draws on Fiona Kumari Campbell’s (2009, 5) definition of ableism as a “network of beliefs, processes and practices that produce a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human.”
- 3.
- 4.
See Irni (2017) for how the notion of risks functions in the context of embodiment.
- 5.
For “critique” see Foucault (1997) “What is Critique?” and Foucault (1990) “Practicing criticism” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and other writings 1977–1984. For “critical disability studies,” see, for example, Tremain (2005), Meekosha and Shuttleworth (2009), Shildrick (2012), and Goodley (2012).
- 6.
Campbell (2009) mentions, for example, rehabilitation practices that emphasize mobility over the lessening of pain, passing, and sexual politics, which cannot imagine disability to be desirable.
- 7.
- 8.
Deleuze (1988, 49) draws on Spinoza’s definition of affect: “By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished.”
- 9.
My emphasis.
- 10.
Italics in original.
- 11.
My italics.
- 12.
See Foucault and Deleuze (1977 [1972]).
- 13.
- 14.
See Haraway (1997) for culture as meaningful. In this book, I use the term culture in three senses. In my general approach, I view culture as an activity that shapes understandings through language and practices and that regularly takes different forms. Culture is not a coherent arrangement of meanings. It is heterogeneous and constantly changing. The second sense of culture denotes cultural products (e.g., Nelson et al., 1992). In this book, cultural texts enable me to trace articulations. By using the term cultural text, I emphasize how various kinds of products articulate how it is possible to make sense of the world. The third sense of culture in my approach entails how culture is also an idea that has been used in struggles about meanings; that is, there are politics around culture. I will explore how culture functions in the articulations about bodies—for example, how the idea of a Finnish national culture relates to specific assumptions about embodiment.
- 15.
The term “methodological nationalism” defines a presumption that assumes the nation-state to be always a self-evident context in a research (Roche, 1992; Beck, 2007; Kettunen, 2008; Vuolajärvi, 2014). On the one hand, the term “methodological nationalism” highlights how transnational policies can frame the level of the nation-state, and for these reasons some scholars, such as Maurice Roche (1992), have suggested that methodologically accurate social sciences should not always assume the nation-state to be a suitable context for all kinds of investigations. On the other hand, the term has also more critical aims that challenge the state as a central and self-evident context and pay attention to how the aims of the social sciences have been intertwined with biopolitics. In particular, as Niina Vuolajärvi (2014) observes, historically, the social sciences have aimed to collect information about a population in order to control it, and this technique necessitated methodological nationalism. Methodological nationalism does not only concern the social sciences. Cultural theorists can also echo its logic if they do not challenge the idea of a national culture. My viewpoint emphasizes the critical approach of the term methodological nationalism and interrogates how the idea of a national culture can be maintained through assumptions about embodiment. In addition, my methodological approach challenges the assumption that scholars should echo the gaze of the state and formulate their research objectives in accordance with the logic of national borders.
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Vaahtera, T. (2022). Introduction: Re-articulation of Able-Bodiedness. In: Biopolitics of Swimming and the Re-articulation of Able-Bodiedness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06274-2_1
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