ABSTRACT
Poststructuralism emerged as a primary epistemological orientation in the sociology of sport in the last decade of the twentieth century, bringing with it a profound shift in the content and approach of much scholarship in the field. Existing overviews of poststructuralism elaborated by sociologists of sport and others locate its origins in post–World War II France and explain its emergence as a diffuse set of responses to a range of modes of thought: structuralist, Marxist, and existentialist, primarily. The major legacy of Claude Levi-Strauss’s work for poststructuralism thus lay in his belief that the subject was constituted and directed by objective universal structures that exist beyond the subject’s consciousness, a stance which helped undermine modernists’ notion of individual autonomy and agency. The work of another French critic, Roland Barthes, is often recognized as representing a key shift, or a bridge, from structuralism to poststructuralism.
