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During the 1970s, a new corporal and aesthetic standard emerged in women's artistic gymnastics. No longer was grace and elegance the main feature, but acrobatic and somewhat robotic performances. These exercises were increasingly performed by highly trained and sexually immature girls. The Western audience was fascinated by the athletic and innocent-looking gymnasts. The emerging corporality and performance trend combined youthfulness und slimness with physical fitness and muscular tone, a combination that reflected the idealized woman of the 1970s. Sports photographs played a key role in distributing the "new" ideal of femininity. In this article, we consider how gymnasts' performances of the 1970s were visualized by examining a sample of professional sports photographs. We demonstrate how sports photographs construct and establish gender and body standards through their visual construction of gendered and de-gendered gymnastics performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has seen an increase in the age of elite women’s gymnasts. This article examines the older gymnastic body within the field of elite women’s gymnastics, and how gymnasts, over the age of 20, and their coaches and judges, reconstruct the field in interview accounts. While participants contested the value of differently aged and sized bodies, they also made distinctions between the capitals that were valuable in different settings such as the competition setting, a gymnast’s usual training setting or a national training camp. In order to account for these differences, we combine the work of Pierre Bourdieu with that of Erving Goffman. We argue that Goffman’s emphasis on setting adds a level of specificity to Bourdieu’s claim that fields always exist as sites of struggle through providing a way to differentiate between different value systems that may co-exist within the same field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until the late 1960s, women's artistic gymnastics consisted of mature women performing gentle ballet-type exercises that were emotionally expressive and graceful. During the 1970s, however, the gymnasts' performances and bodies changed dramatically. Young and sexually undeveloped gymnasts began to execute acrobatic- and risk-driven routines that consisted of complex air-bound combinations of gymnastics elements. The trend to acrobatics emerged in the former Soviet Union. Within this specific political context, a highly competitive, ambitious and ingenious sporting atmosphere fostered the development of the acrobatic trend in the Eastern Bloc countries and later in the West. Analyses of the 1964 and 1975 International Code of Points (Code) and specific descriptions of the physical appearance and winning floor routine of Czechoslovakian Vera Caslavska at the 1968 Olympic Games and that of Romanian Nadia Comaneci at the 1976 Games, demonstrate the differing gymnastics styles. Interviews, academic literature, popular texts and Internet sites help explain the developments. Michel Foucault's genealogical research methodology and 'analytic' of modern relations of power assist in this pursuit, revealing a particular history of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article includes narrative excerpts compiled from field notes the author collected observing six Australian women's elite artistic gymnasts and their two coaches. Using creative nonfiction and auto-ethnography, the stories' plots describe the gymnasts' daily training realities and include personal reflections on the author's gymnastics experiences and reactions to what she saw during the observations. The stories illustrate how, despite differing levels of authority, the coaches', gymnasts', and parts of her own identity and behaviors are shaped by a dominant gymnastics model. This ideal coerces the coaches and gymnasts to regulate their selves and behaviors according to its dominant characteristics. Although potentially beneficial and satisfactory, the training model's discourses and practices can have debilitating effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]