ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an unavoidably personal and, some may argue, parochial genealogy of physical cultural studies (PCS), recognizing there are as many motivating factors behind people’s turn to physical culture as there are discrete expressions of PCS in practice. Physical culture, and therefore PCS, encompasses a breadth of empirical sites and a depth of empirical dimensions/scales. Within its empirical reach, PCS includes activities ranging from sport through fitness, exercise, recreation, leisure, wellness, dance, and health-related movement practices. The concurrent turn to the body within the wider academic community, and the attention paid to the processes, practices, and politics of embodiment, have spurred a rethinking of physical culture as a relevant and resonant empirical domain. PCS is concerned with a process of theorising the empirical, in identifying, interpreting, and intervening into the ways physical culture–related structures and institutions, spaces and places, discourses and representations, subjectivities and identities, and/or practices and embodiments are linked to broader social, economic, political, and technological contexts.
