When the chalkdust settles: Reflections on specialized childhoods by retired elite women gymnasts.

摘要

Despite the known consequences of concerted cultivation, research in the sociology of childhood tends to portray involvement in children's activities as extracurricular and universally beneficial. Sociologists have paid little attention to the subset of kids who participate in activities at very intense levels. We know little about the social forces that influence kids to pursue their craft as a full-time job, often at great expense to their physical and emotional health, and about the longer term implications of this childhood lifestyle. This study, based on participant observation and ethnographic interviews with thirty retired Olympic caliber women gymnasts who competed between 1980 and 2000, examines gymnasts' recollections of their paths from extracurricular to elite levels of competition, the pressures that put their bodies at high risk for injuries and eating disorders, and their transitions out of the sport and into adulthood. In the analysis, I argue that the meanings generated from retired gymnasts' "specialized childhoods" have significant implications for their transitions to adulthood, including the active pursuit of balanced careers and family lives as a corrective to their own intense childhood experiences. Whereas current understandings of childhood focus almost exclusively on class influences, the case of specialized childhoods illustrates that other embodied experiences, namely the cultivation of talent and the treatment of one's body in response to that talent, play significant roles in the formation of habitus.