Immersion

Marathon swimming, embodiment and identity

Karen Throsby

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526100474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Immersion is about the extreme sport of marathon swimming. Drawing on extensive (auto)ethnographic data, Immersion explores the embodied and social processes of becoming a marathon swimmer and investigates how social belonging is produced and policed. Using marathon swimming as a lens, this foundation provides the basis for an exploration of what constitutes the 'good' body in contemporary neoliberal society across a range of sites including charitable swimming, fatness, gender and health. The book argues that the self-representations of marathon swimming are at odds with its lived realities, and that this reflects the entrenched and limited discursive resources available for thinking about the sporting body in the wider social and cultural context. The book is aimed primarily at readers at undergraduate level and upwards with an interest in sociology, the sociology of the body, the sociology of sport, gender and the sociology of health and illness.

II

The good body

5

Who are you swimming for?

When I told people back in 2010 that I was swimming the English Channel that summer, one of the most common responses was to ask: ‘Who are you swimming for?’, or even just the declarative statement, ‘I’ll sponsor you’. When I said that I wasn’t doing it for charity, responses ranged from surprise to disbelief to overt disappointment in me: ‘You really should’, ‘You might as well’. Others simply handed me money anyway (which I returned with thanks, asking them to donate to a charity of their choosing). I had actively chosen not to ‘swim for…’ for a combination of reasons: I didn’t want the extra pressure on the swim; it felt like an unnecessary complication for a swim that was already bound up in a research project; and I was uncomfortable with the trading of status-bearing displays of physicality for money. But my reasons are less significant in the context of this chapter than the fact that I have to have reasons; indeed, I have been back and forth about whether to even put forward my reasons in this chapter since to do so feels like a justification for something I’m not sure requires justification. This, then, provides the starting point for the chapter – not so much the act of swimming for charity, but rather, why it’s so hard not to. How can we understand the normative congealing of the relationship between charitable fund-raising and marathon swimming? What social and identity processes and relationships are enacted (and resisted) through the practice of ‘swimming for…’, and to what effects?

The phenomenon of the ‘charity challenge’ is now a thoroughly ingrained part of contemporary neoliberal society. Perhaps the most high profile examples can be found in charity spectacles such as Live Aid or Comic Relief, where compassion is mobilised as entertainment (Tester 2001, cited in Moore 2008: 39). Mass-participation urban marathons are another popular site of charitable fund-raising, awash with charity-branded clothing and banners (Nettleton and Hardey 2006), and block-bought guaranteed entries sold on to runners by charities in exchange for four-figure fund-raising pledges (see also, Snelgrove and Wood 2010; Coghlan 2012). Another growing dimension to the ‘charity challenge’ is adventure philanthropy (Lyons and Willott 1999; Stanhope 2005), where individuals engage in adventurous activities such as trekking, sky-diving or long distance cycling in exchange for donations to a charitable cause. Coghlan and Filo describe this as an extension of the charity sporting event, with both ‘requiring a registered participant to raise funds and complete physical activity, with proceeds benefitting a designated charity’ (2013: 123). Volunteer tourism constitutes a further related dimension to these charitable practices, where individuals travel overseas to work as volunteers on charitable projects (Vrasti 2013; Mostafanezhad 2014; Snee 2014). The charity sporting ‘thon’ (Moore 2008), adventure philanthropy and volunteer tourism are most commonly orchestrated either via dedicated businesses, commercial organisations that have successfully aligned themselves with charitable fund-raising or by charities themselves, often in close concert with commercial sponsors (King 2001, 2006; Moore 2008). However, there is also a booming trend in independent charity challenges, often involving significant endurance endeavours such as cross-continent cycle or running challenges, or lengthy ocean crossings in kayaks or rowing boats. These frequently involve a significant investment of time and resources both before and during the challenge and a publicity strategy to raise funds to support the costs of the adventure as well as to raise charitable funds (Stanhope 2005).

As a charitable venture, marathon swimming falls somewhere between these different manifestations of the charity challenge. It is not a mass participation sport, and while the activity itself is externally organised and regulated, this is not done primarily with charitable fund-raising in mind. For example, neither the CS&PF nor CSA websites host fund-raising pages or offer fund-raising advice. Nor have charities themselves identified marathon swimming as a rich fund-raising source. This reflects the relatively small numbers of swimmers, the sport’s low profile, the expense of undertaking a swim of that scale when weighed against the possible gains, and the lack of spectacle inherent to the sport (as discussed in the previous chapter).¹ But regardless of its lack of institutional connection with specific charities (as, for example, with Race for the Cure and Race for Life and their connection with breast cancer (Klawiter 1999; King 2001, 2006)), or with charity in general, in the popular imagination, marathon swimming and charitable fund-raising are intimately (and normatively) connected.

The main body of this chapter begins with a brief discussion of the social and cultural context within which charitable swimming has come to make normative sense, and then, drawing primarily on interview data, I explore the ways in which the marathon swimmers I met negotiated the concept of ‘swimming for…’. The first section explores the ways in which, for some swimmers, not ‘swimming for…’ was simply unthinkable. The second section, following Titmuss’ (1971) work on blood donation explores charitable swimming as an exchange, and the third section addresses the alliances of suffering that are constructed through fund-raising websites in order to connect the act of marathon swimming with particular charitable causes and interrogates their depoliticising effects. The final section explores the resistance that I encountered to ‘swimming for…’ in the course of the research. Through this analysis, I argue that the act of ‘swimming for…’ is a readily intelligible and sincerely intended means of constructing the good body/self, but that this simultaneously flattens out different forms of suffering and depoliticises social inequalities and ill health. Furthermore, the celebration of the endurance sporting body, and its reward through sponsorship, over-emphasises individual accomplishment whilst understating the privilege that facilitates those status-bearing acts. I argue that these elisions and exclusions are made possible by the inextricability of charitable swimming from the cultural logics of neoliberalism, by which we are not coerced, but to which we have become emotionally attached in ways that make ‘swimming for…’ make perfect sense (Vrasti 2013; Mostafanezhad 2014; Snee 2014).

In making this argument, I share Vrasti’s concerns in her critical study of volunteer tourism that I will appear misanthropic and callous; in her book she recalls being chastised for writing a ‘mean’ thesis (2013: 4). My intention here is not to impugn the motives, sincerity or values of those who choose to swim for charity. Nor do I doubt that many recipient good causes have benefitted from charitable swimming, especially in the context of the retrenchment of welfare provision and the increased demands on charities to fill the subsequent gaps (Nettleton and Hardey 2006: 48). Nevertheless, as Vrasti argues, it is important to ask these questions because these practices are so hard to critique. The goal, then, is not to provide solutions, but to question received ideas of progress and justice ‘together with the power relations that allow them to pass as normative truth’ (2013: 4). This chapter aims to think critically about the ubiquity and normativity of ‘swimming for…’, and to interrogate what gets obscured by the win–win scenario of charitable swimming.

Charitable swimming

The sedimented relations between marathon swimming and charitable fund-raising arise out of a cluster of social factors that are very particular to the neoliberal present: first, the intensifying elision of health and fitness with good citizenship (Lupton 1995); and second, the rise of the body/self as an individualised, reflexive project (Shilling 1993). In 1994, Conrad coined the term ‘healthicisation’ to describe the normative cultural linking of health and morality (Conrad 1994). Significantly, for Conrad, it is not simply a state of health and wellness (however defined) that is virtuous, but rather, virtue lies in the act of working on the body (and in being seen to work on the body). Regardless of specific health outcomes, he argues, ‘merely engaging in wellness activities is a virtuous activity’ (Conrad 1994: 397). But over the subsequent two decades, the virtuous nature of wellness has increasingly taken the form of an obligation, with an intensifying emphasis on personal responsibility for health, particularly in relation to the proliferating roster of ‘lifestyle’ measures that are deemed to be within the remit of the individual (Fitzpatrick 2001; Hansen and Easthope 2007; Ayo 2012). For example, the contemporary ‘war on obesity’ is one of the most entrenched sites of ‘lifestyle’ moralising, with the nagging ‘commonsense cure’ (Ebbeling et al. 2002) of ‘eat less, exercise more’ dogging the visibly fat, regardless of the absence of a firm evidence base for its effectiveness as a weight management strategy (Gard and Wright 2005; Mann et al. 2007). Fatness is habitually presumed to be inevitably and expensively unhealthy, rendering those who are visibly fat failed citizens, regardless of specific health metrics (Aphramor 2005; Jutel 2005; Evans 2006; Murray 2008).

But the attribution of individual responsibility for health extends far beyond the prime example of obesity, reflecting broader shifts towards individual responsibility both for the management of risk through proactive intervention and for the construction and constitution of the embodied self. In a world defined increasingly by uncertain future risks, individuals are exhorted to act reflexively to know and manage risk (Beck 1992; Giddens 1999). This can be seen, for example, in the rise of new ‘pre’-illness medical conditions that are identified in ostensibly healthy people but which require action to forestall the threatened descent into illness (Dumit 2012). To fail to act, even in the absence of certainty in relation to personal risk, is to invite illness, which in turn constitutes a failure of individual responsibility. These specific responsibilities in relation to health reflect wider trends within late modernity towards ‘increased self-reflexivity, an interest in self-identity and emotional disclosure, a process of individualization, the emergence of Lifestyle Politics, and a heightened risk consciousness’ (Moore 2008: 12). The body itself is central to this framework as a project to be worked on in the construction of a coherent and socially meaningful identity (Shilling 1993), and the field of health in particular provides a powerful vector for these trends. Going to the gym (Crossley 2006) or losing weight (Heyes 2006), for example, as practices coded as ‘healthy’, not only intervene in the material body’s size and composition, but also its moral status; the body that is being worked upon in socially sanctioned and intelligible ways is a ‘good body’. By extension, then, the individual who undertakes an endurance sporting event is already occupying a morally privileged position, investing in the embodied self in socially sanctioned ways that are conventionally understood as generating health and well-being. As Nettleton and Hardey argue: ‘the care of the self through the cultivation of fitness appears at least symbolically to provide for the care of others’ (2006: 447).

But there are also limits to this attributed moral status, since the individual has to walk a blurred line between the required investment in the self and the solipsistic indulgence of overinvestment. As King notes in relation to the rise of the ‘thon’: ‘to exercise solely for one’s own pleasure or health or for purely aesthetic ends is framed as narcissistic’ (2006: 49). The act of swimming (or running, etc.) for a cause offers a means of negotiating this tension, diluting the appearance of excessive self-investment through public displays of philanthropy. In this way, charitable swimming emerges as an exchange that is never purely altruistic, but is also an expression of people’s relationship to society (Titmuss 1971). This is made explicit by Stanhope in his book Blood, Sweat and Charity – a how-to text for organising charity challenges:

Charity challenges are powerful vehicles for realizing personal goals and raising vast sums of money for charity. They inspire goodwill, raise awareness for important issues, help people find outlets for loss and dissatisfaction and bring out the best in people. (2005: 11)

This construction of charity challenges as able to achieve positive outcomes that benefit fund-raising athletes, sponsors and recipients shores up charitable swimming as a venture that is both expected and diversely profitable. This cements the logics of charitable swimming, making it hard to imagine not swimming for charity.

‘It just makes perfect sense…’

One of the most striking features of participants’ responses to my questions about charitable swimming was the difficulty that many had in articulating why they had chosen to swim for charity. For many, and especially for those who had invested significant time and energy into fund-raising, not swimming for charity was simply unthinkable:

I could not do something like a Channel swim without attaching it to a charity … And it just makes perfect sense for me to use the Channel swim as a vehicle to make a difference for other people. (Bill, UK English Channel swimmer)

For many of the participants in my research, the notion of not swimming for charity was unthinkable; as Bill observes in the extract above, it ‘just makes perfect sense’. In the interview, he looked at me quizzically when I asked why he had decided to swim for charity; he shrugged his shoulders in incomprehension at the question and laughed at the implicit suggestion that he might have otherwise chosen not to. That it ‘makes perfect sense’ to Bill to connect the two activities speaks volumes about the extent to which particularly endurance sport and charitable fund-raising have become normatively linked. For Bill, to not swim for charity would be a missed opportunity to do a good thing that runs counter to his sense of himself as a compassionate individual and a passionate charity challenge fund-raiser.

A very small number of swimmers expressed strong and enduring loyalties to particular charities, arising out of a difficult life event, health crisis or personal loss. In these cases, fund-raising activities often took on a memorial quality, or served as a display of gratitude or reciprocity towards a service from which they had personally benefitted. But it was much more common for participants to swim for a charity, or portfolio of charities, to which they had relatively tenuous connections and loyalties. These relationships were generally the result of ‘shopping around’, personal connections with people involved with particular causes or by direct solicitation from charity activists in the wake of local media coverage or blog posts – a proactivity that highlights the growing professionalisation of charities, which increasingly have to compete for resources in light of the retrenchment of welfare systems and the growing demand for their services (Klawiter 1999; King 2001, 2006; Nettleton and Hardey 2006; Moore 2008). Don, for example, described his own process of charity selection:

With regards to picking the charity, I had no charities in mind as such. It was [a friend], one of my support team, it was his idea because his wife is involved with [the charity], and he said, ‘Would you fancy doing it for them?’

In this case, the specific charity was less important than the fact of charity involvement itself. As Don explained: ‘I did not want to do it for myself, I wanted to achieve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s foreword
• Introduction
• I Becoming and belonging
• II The good body
• References
• Index