Abstract

This work is a philosophical, sociological and spiritual critique of women's physicality and involvement in sport as well as an attempt to construct an ethic of love in sport and movement contexts. It examines mind/body/spirit connections and the relationships between physicality, consciousness, epistemology and ontology. Physicalities cultivated through sport and physical education have significance far beyond those realms because of the dialectical relationship between bodies and consciousness; that is, the ways in which we enact ourselves as physical bodies in the physical world have implications for the ways in which we come to understand our world as well as the ways in which we construct knowledge . ;This work explores how feminist scholars of sport write about the development of a physicality that is active, forceful, purposeful and space-occupying as a necessary condition for the liberation of women from sexist oppression because women are subordinated in a significant way through the objectification of their bodies. These writings suggest a preference for women's adoption, as an expression of bodily subjectivity, of an athletic physicality that appears to be modeled on the dominant athletic physicality practiced by men. Such a physicality may be constituting of and constituted by an ethic of domination. ;It critiques the politics of classical liberalism which often undergird the struggles of women in sport and physical activity who choose to adopt a masculinist physicality as a resistance to their bodily oppression. What such women may be forfeiting are the liberatory and humane possibilities in physicalities that are expressive, receptive, open, yielding, gentle and flexible. ;Finally, it presents a synthesis of Western and Eastern perspectives on the body, ethics and spirituality as one possible path toward transforming dominant sport and movement practices to make them more liberatory and humane. An ethic of love--which sees all as connected, does not distinguish subject from object, and is open and compassionate with self as well as others--could undergird as well as evolve from such physicalities and help to produce genuinely transformative practices in sport and movement