As per prev tags - Throwing Like a Brazilian: On Ineptness and a Skill-shaped Body, by Greg Downey
Is the most thoughtful and coherent interrogation I've read of how physical skills are developed, and how the development of skills is located in cultural expectation, teaching, support, and self-concept, as well as physically shaping the body through practice.
It spins off from a response to a feminist touchpoint essay of the 1980s, "Throwing Like a Girl" by Iris Marion Young, which examines the stiffness and lack of whole-body engagement in girls asked to throw a projectile, and relates this to the pressures of self constraint and self-conscious over-awareness of the body forced on girls.
Downey approaches the topic from noticing that the Brazilian capoeiristas he's training with - who are extraordinarily physically skilled across a range of specific skillsets - are not very good at throwing or catching projectiles. And, more specifically, that the way in which they throw when asked to - stiff, without whole body engagement - exactly matches what Young (and others) have characterized as "throwing like a girl".
Which means that it's not (or not only) a function of self-consciousness, or of an undeveloped sense of body integration - rather, it's the way people throw at the very early stages of learning to throw a projectile.
Which makes the question, then, what is it about the author's own (North American) society, that produces such a disparity in learning experiences between boys and girls - such that even girls who have nominally been taught to throw a ball, have broadly not actually been taught past the very first steps, by ages where their male peers have?
And how is it that this difference in experiences is so obscured, that people fail to recognize the points at which it occurs?
The essay delves into the specifics of these questions with a lot more depth and nuance than I can summarize here. Overhand throwing is a complex skill which is developed in many stages, using this process as a case study, Downey looks at factors ranging from access to coaching through difficult parts of the process, to gendered differences in the opportunity for rowdy, whole-body play.
I really reccomend reading the whole essay. I can't find a fully online version of the whole text, but the website "academia.edu" will let you download it with a free account (use a junk email, they send spam.)
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