'Games Climbers Play': Critical Sensuality in Movement, Ethics, and Sport

Rock climbing access to public, protected, outdoor areas has increasingly become a matter of organized intervention. Tensions between a free, creative, and rebellious 'spirit', and the challenges of growing a sustainable sport abound in climbers’ recreational experiences. Climbing ‘well’ is thus a problematized experience – a site of subjectification in which who belongs in environmentally and culturally sensitive places is established through an ethical stylization of conduct. Exploring how dominating norms intertwine with liberatory possibilities in the ‘games’ of climbing ethics, I argue for critical sensuality as a conception of how critical work emerges as an aspect of climbing ‘well’. This position will be supported through consideration of Foucault’s ethical genealogies in conversation with phenomenological, feminist, and critical sport approaches. Further, fieldwork undertaken in contested climbing spaces will engage with the bodily experience of ethical subjectification, as co-generated in narratives, interviews, and climbing practice.