Rediscovery of animality in the concept of sport: a posthuman perspective

TL;DR

This paper redefines sport through a posthuman lens, highlighting how esports and traditional sports reveal inhuman and animalistic elements, challenging modern human-centric views.

Contribution

Introduces animality as a core concept in redefining sport, offering a posthuman critique of traditional and digital sports.

Findings

Esports mitigate physical violence and discrimination through digital mediation, presenting a more human form of sport.

Traditional sports inherently contain inhuman and animalistic dimensions, often marginalized in modern discourse.

Incorporating animality into sport's definition challenges anthropocentric norms and opens new perspectives on inclusivity and ethics.

Abstract

The concept of sport functions as an implicit premise in almost all sport-related research and practice, yet its definition itself is seldom subjected to critical scrutiny. Traditionally, sport has been characterized by elements such as playfulness, competitiveness, physicality, and organization. However, the concept is not universal; rather, it undergoes continual transformation in response to historical and social conditions, and many studies and practices have tended to overlook this aspect. This study, therefore, seeks to critically reassess the traditional concept of sport through the lens of posthumanism, a framework emblematic of contemporary digital technological society, and to propose a new perspective for redefining sport in the present era. Examining the contemporary phenomenon of esports from a posthuman standpoint reveals that various forms of physical violence and direct discrimination are preemptively mitigated by the digital mediation that characterizes these activities. In this sense, esports may be understood as a moral and distinctly more human form of sport. Such an understanding simultaneously exposes the extent to which conventional sport inherently contains inhuman dimensions, namely an element of “animality”, as an indispensable component. This insight aligns with arguments in sport ethics suggesting that existing sports have historically demanded forms of in/trans-human performance from athletes. According to Derrida, this dimension of animality has long been marginalized within anthropocentric modernity. From this vantage point, the present study's introduction of animality into the conceptualization of sport can be seen as a deconstructive gesture that challenges the modern, implicitly presupposed image of the human, typically Western, white, and male, and opens possibilities for reimagining sport as a genuinely inclusive and ecological cultural practice. At the same time, this perspective offers a novel vantage point for reconsidering various pressing issues in contemporary sport, such as genetic doping and binary gender eligibility regulations. In other words, situating animality at the core of sport's conceptual redefinition provides a critical foundation for rethinking the nature of sport in an increasingly digitalized society.

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