ABSTRACT
Pleasure can take place within many realms: emotional, intellectual, visceral, social, physical, the list goes on. Pleasure itself is a very complex set of overlapping ideas about what it means to enjoy aspects of life. This chapter examines the intersections of pleasure with contemporary sporting practices and cultures. It traces the historical, philosophical and academic threads regarding pleasure-both in a global, non-sporting sense and in a specifically sport-related sense. The broader project regarding pleasure and sport, then, may be understand as primarily existential, detailing an organizing principle of social life, and examining a key productive force in the constitution of identities, moral codes, governmental strategies and the development of cultures and associated relations of power. As George Ritzer has rightly pointed out, the disenchantment of many things both cultural and personal has gradually eroded even people recognition of pleasure, especially in a consumerist society.
