Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors to this Volume
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Kalarippayattu is Eighty Percent Mental and Only the Remainder is Physical’: Power, Agency and Self in a South Asian Martial Art
- 2 Empowering Yourself: Sport, Sexuality and Autoeroticism in North Indian Jori Swinging
- 3 Indigenous Polo in Northern Pakistan: Game and Power on the Periphery
- 4 ‘The Moral that can be Safely Drawn from the Hindus' Magnificent Victory’: Cricket, Caste and the Palwankar Brothers
- 5 The Peasants are Revolting: Race, Culture and Ownership in Cricket
- 6 The Social History of the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, 1829–2003
- 7 Warrior Goddess Versus Bipedal Cow: Sport, Space, Performance and Planning in an Indian City
- 8 ‘Nupilal’: Women's War, Football and the History of Modern Manipur
- 9 ‘Playing for the Tibetan People’: Football and History in the High Himalayas
- 10 Community, Identity and Sport: Anglo-Indians in Colonial and Postcolonial India
- Notes
- Bibliography
2 - Empowering Yourself: Sport, Sexuality and Autoeroticism in North Indian Jori Swinging
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors to this Volume
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Kalarippayattu is Eighty Percent Mental and Only the Remainder is Physical’: Power, Agency and Self in a South Asian Martial Art
- 2 Empowering Yourself: Sport, Sexuality and Autoeroticism in North Indian Jori Swinging
- 3 Indigenous Polo in Northern Pakistan: Game and Power on the Periphery
- 4 ‘The Moral that can be Safely Drawn from the Hindus' Magnificent Victory’: Cricket, Caste and the Palwankar Brothers
- 5 The Peasants are Revolting: Race, Culture and Ownership in Cricket
- 6 The Social History of the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, 1829–2003
- 7 Warrior Goddess Versus Bipedal Cow: Sport, Space, Performance and Planning in an Indian City
- 8 ‘Nupilal’: Women's War, Football and the History of Modern Manipur
- 9 ‘Playing for the Tibetan People’: Football and History in the High Himalayas
- 10 Community, Identity and Sport: Anglo-Indians in Colonial and Postcolonial India
- Notes
- Bibliography
Summary
The Gymnasium, Jori-Clubs, Sexuality and Culture
In The Mythology of Sex Sarah Dening argues that the Hebrew prohibition against eating the ‘sinew of the hip which is upon the hollow of the thigh’ should be understood symbolically as a prohibition against the practice common among neighboring tribes whereby a new king would eat the penis of his predecessor in order to imbibe his power and authority. Dening and others point out that the ‘thigh’ was a biblical euphemism for the penis and that the penis was clearly associated with the power to rule and proclaim the truth. In the Genesis story God wrestles with Jacob and ‘touches the hollow of his thigh’.With this almighty ‘goose’ God metaphorically ‘eats Jacobs penis’ thus setting in place the rationale for the dietary prohibition, making himself the King of Kings, the one true God. In this myth sex, sacredness, power and sportive competition are linked together both figuratively and literally. The homoerotics of touching if not actually eating penises is also evident. Homoerotics are most clearly reflected in the classical Greek gymnasium, an institution that can arguably be held accountable for putting ‘civilization’ in modern Western history. Gymnasiums in Athens were places where men went to become men and develop themselves into citizens of the city state. For Plato and Aristotle they were institutions of embodied knowledge, to an extent that tends to get forgotten in the disembodied philosophical abstractions of the modern intellectual academy, where departments of philosophy and physical education are decidedly separate and unequal.
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- Information
- Subaltern SportsPolitics and Sport in South Asia, pp. 47 - 60Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2005