ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book outlines the historic, trans-disciplinary, theoretical, self-reflexive, political, and praxis-oriented dimensions of physical cultural studies (PCS). It illustrates the empirical diversity of physical culture, incorporating discussions of leisure, health, movement, exercise/fitness, dance, lifestyle, and high-performance sport-related practices. The book offers complex examinations of moving bodies as classed, raced, gendered, sexual and sexualized, (dis)abled, and aged, as well as the various ways that bodies press back upon existing social structures. It expresses the institutionalized bodies as medicalized and scientized, technologized, spiritualized, aestheticized, healthized, mediated and commodified, spectacularized and eroticized, and disciplined and punished, across an array of global, national and local contexts. The book illustrates that physical cultural practices are also manifest across a broad expanse of empirical dimensions. It addresses the mutual constitution of bodies and spaces across a range of different scalar units.
