Swimming, Nature and the Sociotechnical: The 'Fastskin' Controversy.

Zoë Sofoulis, School of Cultural Histories and Futures, University of Western Sydney

z.sofoulis@nepean.uws.edu.au

Part of the ideology of the beach is that it is a site to encounter nature, and to expose our bodies to the elements of air, sand and water. But in Australia our aquatic obsessions are not confined to the coastal beaches: swimming pools, whether domestic, public, or attached to schools, are probably the main sites where children learn to swim, and where large numbers of Australian adults keep fit doing laps. Despite the obviousness of the pool as a technology, a certain ideology of naturalness still carries over to it, and activities within it. It is as though the pool were a parcel of beach conveniently packaged for urban, suburban or rural consumption.

The assumption that swimming is somehow 'natural' rather than 'technological' was challenged when Speedo released a full-body swimsuit which was claimed to improve efficiency and swimming performance times. Debate amongst concerned parties centred around the idea that such suits were 'unnatural' or 'technological,' and as such violated the notion of swimming as an Olympic sports reliant on the unaided body, not like archery, bicycling or tennis, which involve a human-technology ensemble.

I will argue that aside from the 'container technologies' of pool and swimsuit which are obvious to sports spectators, there are many other technologies and techniques that contribute to shaping the swimming body in training and competitive performances. Underneath the Fastskin suit is a swimming body that is not 'natural' but already produced as a socio-technical construct, formed by various kinds of relations and networks between humans and non-human agents within and outside the pool. The theoretical work of the paper is to help shift debate from the dualism of 'nature versus culture (or technology)' to the Latourian monistic notion of 'sociotechnical hybridity'.