ABSTRACT
The tears flowed freely when Laure Manaudou finished third in the 400m freestyle at the French Olympic Trials in April 2008. As she left the pool, clothed in last season’s Arena swimsuit, Manaudou valiantly searched for reasons for her first loss in this, her pet event, in nearly four years. Rather than considering her form, disrupted preparation or even the emotional stress caused by the release of unauthorised nude photographs, the Frenchwoman set her sights, and her discontent, firmly on the seamless, ultrasonically welded, corseted contours of Speedo’s new Fastskin LZR Racer. The release of this latest elite swimming costume was met, unsurprisingly,
by international controversy. Dismissed as ‘technological’ or ‘swimsuit doping’, and even ‘doping on a hanger’ (Lord 2008), swimmers, coaches and journalists revisited the moral panic that arose in 2000, when Speedo first revealed its redesigned racing suits. Appearing more nineteenth than twenty-first century, the neck-to-ankle outfits initially caused an outcry for the promises they made to enhance an athlete’s performance in the pool, and, as a result, Fastskin was not unanimously accepted by the international swimming community. Athletes, coaches and administrators were either fervently in favour of the new design or questioned its legality in the face of FINA’s, the international governing body, rules that stated no ‘device’ that aids ‘speed, buoyancy or endurance’ may be used (Hiestand 2000: 10C). Concerns about the suit broadly revolved around issues of ‘natural’ versus ‘unnatural’ enhancement and replicated, in style, discussions throughout the 1980s and 1990s about performance enhancing drugs. Whilst ‘skins’, in their various guises, are applied to the body to effect an
improved performance, other technologies with more specific functional purposes can also be attached to competitors. Athletes with missing limbs, for example, are retrofitted with artificial replacements to enable their participation in events designed for bodies with full mobility and functionality. Amputees can affix ‘running feet’, swimmers can replace their missing hands with ‘fins’ and those with limited lower body function can race in a custom-designed chair.Whilst somemay argue that these ‘devices’ provide an ‘enhancement’ to
the disabled athlete, they have not, until recently, been subject to the same level of controversy as those applied to the able-bodied athlete. Given concerns about ‘unnatural’ enhancement in sport, is may seem
extraordinary that both Fastskin and prosthetic devices are, to a large degree, embraced by the sports community as necessary and, indeed, desirable technologies. Whilst the artificiality of both are clearly apparent – prosthetic limbs are not designed to resemble the fleshy original and the swimsuits are not fashioned after the human sheath – they are nevertheless regarded as a kind of natural artifice: a suitable and acceptable stand-in for the real thing rather than an inappropriate extension of the body’s natural capacity. Each of these technologies clearly offers competitive advantages to the user; an amputee would certainly be incapable of running a 200m race without a prosthetic leg, whilst swimmers hope to shave split seconds off their times costumed in an artificial skin. Yet neither is regarded universally as an illegal enhancement, and is instead welcomed as suitable applications of technology to the exercising body. Their status as prosthetic devices, supplements that add to, but do not fully integrate with, the body, allows these technologies to reside comfortably alongside the body without any threat to its integrity or to the legitimacy of the resulting performance. Despite the acceptance of both, there is, nevertheless, a material differ-
ence between wearing various ‘skins’ and affixing replacement limbs or utilising racing chairs, for ‘enhancing what is already nearly perfect and repairing what is seriously damaged are qualitatively different undertakings’ (Hood 2005). The former offers the wearer an advantage over their competitors, whilst the latter provides the very means to compete. In this instance, according to Shilling (2005: 178), the body is not simply enhanced, because prosthetic limbs and similar technologies are thought to ‘restore rather than extend people’s capacities’, and are thus less confronting than those that seek to go beyond what the ‘natural’ body is capable of. Technologies that mimic the form and function of missing limbs or a heart, for example, do not confound our understanding of the body, whilst the replacement of body parts by higher order technologies (The Bionic Man/Terminator) provide a fearful foray into the realm of science fiction’s cyborg. Athletes who utilise artificial limbs are not usually conceived as ‘unnaturally’ enhancing their bodies, and are not vilified in the same way as athletes who take drugs, as long as they remain within the confines of their own arena. Instead, the use of even radically enhancing prostheses that mimic the movement of wild cats, for example, can still be regarded as returning the body to a state of ‘normal functioning’. Yet, as these artificial appendages become more advanced and augmented with bionics, there is the potential for them to be regarded as more than simply bodily restoration, reaching a point where they cease enabling participation and begin producing performances beyond the expected physical capacity of the athlete. Unlike performance enhancing substances, apparel or prosthetics pro-
voke fewer concerns that the boundary between nature and artifice is being
irreconcilably blurred. Whilst the ingestion of banned pharmaceuticals is thought to disrupt the purity of the athletic body, the application of technologies to its surface does not threaten the body’s integrity in the same way. It would seem that the very externality of these devices confirms the discrete athletic body as legitimate and, above all, natural. In a sense, then, the purity of the body is ensured by the stability of its exterior border, the site where inside and out is established, where the body simultaneously begins and ends: its skin. Protecting the integrity of the skin is paramount, for skin represents the border between outside and in (Connor 2004). It is simultaneously a site of containment, the physical casing that prevents our body from falling apart and a barrier preventing contamination from without. As a recent British advertisement for petroleum jelly confirms: ‘skin is amazing … it’s your waterproof barrier. A defence against disease’ (Vaseline 2007). Within the context of sport, skin, then, becomes the final line of defence in the vigilant maintenance of an athlete’s purity, but may also conceal the chemical and technological turbulence within. Occasionally though, the skin is insufficient to mask the ‘true’ nature of the body it encases and reveals the inner workings of the body. At the same time, the surface of the body may be marked from the outside, as subjectivities are inscribed onto the body. Skin, in this sense, functions as a kind of tabula rasa that is filled with the changing ideological frames of the culture in which the body finds itself (Benthien 2002). The application of alternative skins onto the body is thus significant, as it not only covers the body’s own exterior boundary but delivers an additional surface that is ideologically laden. This chapter contrasts the application of external technologies to the
surfaces of athletes with concerns about the material integrity of the body. Using Fastskin and athletic prostheses as examples, it probes fears of bodily penetration that reside in efforts to maintain a natural, pure sporting body through the application of artificial body parts to ‘optimise’ sporting performance. It offers insight into the conception of technologies that are applied to the surface, rather than ingested into the body. Finally, it examines the insecure relationship between the pure body and the technologically enhanced cyborg as evidenced through the potential dissolution of borders between able-bodied and disabled sport.
