No Grain, No Gain: Vegan Athletes' Self-Perception of Corporeality

This thesis deals with the corporeality of vegan athletes. It aims to clarify how the members of a specific vegan athlete community perceive their corporeality. It also describes the corporeality shaping process and how the process is affected by the community and by the shared body practices - mainly vegan diet and sports activities. The main concepts concerning this issue are habitus, embodiment, and the mindful body. This thesis's key ideas derive from Merleau-Ponty's views on corporeality, Csordas' embodiment, and Scheper-Hughes's and Lock's mindful body, which provided an analytical framework for this research. The research highlighted the importance of a strong community, which vegan athletes build. They can then act on the bodies of the community members and thus make bodies presenting veganism as sufficient. It is a sport that plays a crucial role in this, as it keeps bodies healthy and makes them strong. Sport thus functions as a defense for their practices, which are in the community's eyes the right way of living and respond to the current environmental crisis and immoral abuse of animals. It is the effort to defend and present veganism as sufficient that influences the practices shared in the researched community. These practices subsequently affect the formation and perception of the..