A player is not just interfacing with the game, they’re interfacing with the people watching it, too.<\/p>\n
Training the Body for China<\/em> is a work of clear purpose. Brownell’s examination into the nationalistic undertones behind sports and performance attempts to cleanly create a narrative where the individual player is subject to the whims of the larger “player” environment — that is to say that participation in competition means more than just a win or loss for the players on the field.<\/p>\n While games have always been nationalistic (see: my art of contest choice below) Training the Body for China<\/i>\u00a0discusses the strange politics behind what it means to become a loaded symbol\u00a0for a game <\/em>through her fame as an American on a Beijing team.<\/p>\n Brownell’s ideas of Body Culture and how it plays with nationality and nationalism brought to mind the Maoist propaganda of ideal, “productive”, full-faced women. By creating a nationally ideal symbol, the Chinese effectively cultivate a necessity, and need, to strive for sports wins, which ultimately lead to cultural capital in the form of legitimized competition.<\/p>\n Brownell’s assertions felt interesting in Tandem with the pictures about Polo in this week’s Art of Contest reading. Mainly in the sense that Polo is a game of cultivated cultural odor, depicted often as an upper-class game, something reflected in the fact that the players were, historically, upper-class people capable of affording horses. Yet the aesthetic experience of Polo slowly became an emulation of this image, and as a result crops up even in environments steeped in culture opposing (in the case of India) or vastly different from its perceived origin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A player is not just interfacing with the game, they’re interfacing with the people watching it, too.<\/p>\n