Copyright

Susanne Gannon and Stefanie Weiss

Published On

2024-04-22

Page Range

pp. 237–254

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

10. Lift Up Your Arms! Elite Athletes and Cold War Childhoods

Chapter of: (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War(pp. 237–254)
This chapter turns to configurations of athleticism, child bodies, and the instrumental uses of sport as a form of soft power. We work with memory stories of children selected to become elite athletes within the diverse geopolitical timespaces of the Cold War in East Germany, Romania, and Hungary. We follow trajectories of selection, training, and injury as we trace formations of sporting subjectivities as discursive, affective, relational, and material. In close readings of each of the stories, we consider desire and longing for sporting success, the investments of state institutions and individuals in producing elite sporting bodies, and how we might think the body through ever-present risk and intimations of freedom. In our analysis, we introduce theoretical resources on risk, memory, and the carnal body to help us to think differently about the memories and processes of collective biography as a methodology.

Contributors

Susanne Gannon

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2182-3615

Susanne Gannon grew up in Australia during Cold War times, influenced by western perspectives and popular culture imports from the USA. As a teacher and a researcher, much of her work has involved trying to unpick taken-for-granted ways of thinking and being in the world, including childhood experiences. Collective biography has become an important and versatile methodology for pursuing this work in the company of others. Her books drawing on collective biography are Doing Collective Biography (co-edited with Bronwyn Davies, Open University Press, 2006), Pedagogical Encounters (co-edited with Bronwyn Davies, Peter Lang, 2009), and Becoming Girl: Collective Biography and the Production of Girlhood (co-edited with Marnina Gonick, 2014, The Women’s Press).

Stefanie Weiss Santos

(author)
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-8374-5560

Stefanie Weiss was born in Nürnberg, Germany to a German father and Mexican mother. After moving over the Atlantic several times during the first six years of her life, her family settled in Mexico where she currently lives. She is an actress and for many years directed a professional acting school, has a Master degree in Educational Research Sciences, a Bachelor of Psychology, and a Bachelor of Acting. She has been acting for the last twenty-four years, but her other passions are research and teaching. Currently, she also directs the project ‘Open Space Theater for Domestic Workers’ where, for the first two years, she worked according to the methodologies of the construction of collective memories and the construction of collective biographies. She has translated thirteen German plays into Spanish, seven of which have been published, as a way of contributing to the dissemination and enjoyment of German drama in Mexico.