ABSTRACT
As physical cultural studies is primarily focused on the practices and experiences of the (in)active body, we suggest that there exists within physical cultural studies (PCS) an inherent concern for ‘community’. As both an academic keyword and a concept and term readily used within everyday experience, community often connotes a multiplicity of meanings that are at once commonly understood and yet remain relatively opaque. While daily life may be characterized by discourses of community, the term is increasingly used in reference to vastly different groups of people and places in regards to scale, size, levels of social cohesion, and political identification. Whether a specific collection of homes and the families that live in them (e.g. a residential ‘community’), or a broad understanding of political unity based in part on ideas about gender and sexuality (e.g. the LGBTQ ‘community’), the word itself has increasingly been invested with multiple definitions and intentions, including in regards to sport, recreation, leisure and other forms of bodily movements and practices.
