Seeing Your Sporting Body: Identity, Subjectivity, and Misrecognition

Abstract

This article draws on the work of two poststructural theorists, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, to illustrate that although it is possible to posit identity from an exclusively discursive account (Foucault) or an exclusively psychoanalytic account (Lacan), it is necessary to put such accounts into conversation to more productively engage in the process of identification. Through use of an advertisement (in which a female athlete sees herself in a mirror) and an analogy to the scientific laws of reflection, this article illustrates that in order to see oneself (identify) one must recognize something in, on, or through their body, and this recognition of the body is always a misrecognition that might more appropriately be called identification. This article is therefore a reading of identification through the productive exploration of the woman on both sides of the mirror, highlighting both discursive and psychoanalytic accounts of her subjectivity. The pervasiveness of the body within these accounts is notable because it highlights the possibilities of the body as a point of articulation between discursive and psychic accounts of identification. The article also illustrates that even when identity is acknowledge as constructed, fragmented, and multiple, it is still meaningful, material, and political.

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