Highly skilled athletes are produced by technologies of training which seek to create the athlete as a singular identity. Yet the disciplinary model of modern sport is consistently disrupted by the diversity and hybridity of the participants. Using Foucault's work on disciplinary power as a theoretical framework, Debra Shogan, an academic in sports ethics and a coach of high performance athletes, examines the ways in which athletes are produced through technologies of training and the ethical issues which emerge when demands to improve performance envelopes athletes, coaches, administrators and sports scientists in decisions about how far to push the limits of performance. Making the case for a new, postmodern sports ethic, Shogan shows how the juxtaposition of hybrid athletes with the homogenizing technologies of sport discipline opens up spaces for questioning, refusing, and perhaps creating new ways of participating in sport.

Debra Shogan is a social theorist and critic whose work has focused on the parameters of the ethical domain. She is the author of Care and Moral Motivation (OISE, 1988); A Reader in Feminist Ethics (Canadian Scholars' Press, 1993); and The Making of High Performance Athletes: Discipline, Diversity, and Ethics (University of Toronto Press, 1999). Dr. Shogan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta.

Debra Shogan's profile page