the Frankfurt School launched the Neo-Marxist sports critique (Rigauer 1969) and developed alternative approaches to movement studies and movement culture (Lippe 1974; Moegling 1988). Historical studies about the body in industrial work (Rabinbach 1992), in transportation (Schivelbusch 1977), and in Fascist aesthetics (Theweleit 1977) as well as in the philosophy of space (Peter Sloterdijk 1998/ 2004) had their roots in this critical approach. Philosophical phenomenology (→Phenomenology (philosophy)) paid attention to the body, too. Helmuth Plessner (1941) studied laughter and weeping as fundamental human expressions. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) placed the body in the centre of human existence, as a way of experiencing the world, challenging the traditional body-mind dualism of René Descartes. Gaston Bachelard (1938) approached bodily existence via a phenomenology of the elements and of space, starting by "psychoanalysis of fire". Based on phenomenological traditions, Michel Foucault (1975) studied the configurations of knowledge in the post-1800 society, launching the concept of modern panoptical control (→Panopticon). The body appeared as object of military discipline and of the panopticon as a mechanism of "the biopolitics of power". Foucault's approach became especially influential for studies in sport, space, and architecture (Vertinsky/ Bale 2004) as well as for studies in the discipline of gymnastics and sport (Vigarello 1978; Barreau/ Morne 1984; Vertinsky/ McKay 2004). While Foucault's studies focused on top-down strategies of power, Pierre Bourdieu directed his attention more towards bottom-up processes of social-bodily practice. For analysing the class aspect of the body, Bourdieu (1966/67) developed the influential concept of habitus as an incorporated pattern becoming social practice by diverse forms of taste, distinction and display of the body. Some of Bourdieu's disciples applied these concepts to the study of sports and gymnastics (Defrance 1987). In Germany, influences of phenomenology induced body culture studies in the historical field. The Stuttgart school of Historical Behaviour Studies focused from 1971 on gestures and laughter, martial arts, sport and dance to analyze changes of society and differences between European and non-European cultures (Nitschke 1975, 1981, 1987, 1989, 2009; Henning Eichberg 1978). These approaches met with tendencies of the late 1970s and 1980s, when humanities and sociology developed a new and broader interest in the body. Sociologists, historians, philosophers and anthropologists, scholars from sport studies and from medical studies met in talking about "the return of the body" or its "reappearance" (Kamper/ Wulf 1982). The new interest towards the body was soon followed up by the term "body