10.26262/GRAMMA.V26I0.8091
Gerakis, Panos
Carcerals and Olympic Masculinities in Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda
Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism
2019
masculinities; globalisation; Tsiolkas; Foucault; bodies; sexuality; crisis
2021-02-11
2021-02-11
2019-12-15
2021-02-15
en
Article
34-1073-8091
80-96 Pages
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
In an effort to draw attention to the masculine crisis occurring in the era of globalisation, this paper elaborates on Australian author Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Barracuda and the central character’s self-discipline and struggle into reaching Olympic achievement. The course of his rise as a potential Olympic athlete but also his fall and crisis within an institutional framework of disciplines, which often symbolically turn into nightmarish prisons, resonate with Michel Foucault’s 1975 work Discipline and Punish. The latter’s ideas about discipline and the “carceral” will help interpret Tsiolkas’s novel and further understand how the Olympics work as a mechanism of discipline and compliance towards a kind of hegemonic masculinity and its inevitable crisis.
Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, Vol 26 (2019): Mapping New Trends: Greek Scholarship in Anglophone Studies