Sports, socialization and the construction of gender

This essay is Part One of the Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies series. The introduction that follows below is the same for all five essays.

One of my great academic mentors, who would almost certainly prefer to remain unnamed in this article, had a fundamental belief in common with me: that sports matter. But while we certainly cycled along the same roads, both metaphorically and literally, it became clear that we were approaching a similar topic from slightly different directions. Over five weeks in 2016, we explored these directions, with research conducted at Tufts and MIT.

Here follows a series of brief essays, hastily written in conversation with Dr ——–‘s own examination of sport as a cultural phenomenon. These five essays are unedited, but organized in a way that, I hope, leads one to find something of a coherent narrative, and a path to how the long-form essay I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way came about.

Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies
Sports, socialization and the construction of gender | Sex differences and sex segregation | Sex and drug testing | Race and sports | Not for girls: Muscles and contact sports

Sports, Socialization and the Construction of Gender

Sport is complementary to the gender binary as a site in which pre-existing conceptions of gender are confirmed. Rather than act in isolation, sport ensures that the larger structure of the gender paradigm is stabilized through a series of normalizing practices. This phenomenon is well illustrated by three readings that analyze men, women, and children (ed. note: see ‘Related Reading’ below).

Sport, then, is not simply a place in which natural sexed differences flourish, nor is it the sole place in which discourses of masculinity and femininity are dispersed. Michael Messner (2000) explores the ways participatory sports complement the already-grounded gender experiences of children as young as four years old, using segregated leagues, gendered team names, and traditionally gendered coaching roles to construct a gendered structure that emphasizes sexual difference while understating the shared similarities between its male and female athletes. Youth sport plays a productive role in forming rigid, yet transparent, gender boundaries, yet parents are as eager to downplay sexual similarity as sport’s structure is to facilitate its difference.

Young (2005) and Messner (1990) expand on this theme by studying adult athletes, who certainly do not enter the sporting arena having discarded their gendered identities. For Young, feminine performance in sport does not confirm masculine superiority, but rather self-fulfills cultural expectations of feminine modality. Messner (this time discussing violence) casts his gaze to masculine homosocial desire, exploring sport’s role in the belabored production of what Martha McCaughey might refer to as “caveman masculinity.”

The gender binary resides in sport’s structures, but it may be more accurate to consider sport a scaffold for a broader cultural experience of gender: one in which children expose their expectations of gender difference for adult confirmation; where women perform their objectified bodies in line with gendered motilities that only serve to reinforce the very physical distancing that produces these limited performances in the first place; and where men condition themselves through thousands of hours of physical and mental training, then consider the results a natural state. For each example, sport acts on the gender binary as a counterweight, providing the lexicon with which confirmation of gendered difference can be located. In short, sport is a mirror we use to reflect back our own expectations of gender, but it helps that this mirror is so willing to show us what we want to see.

Related reading:

Barbie Girls vs Sea Monsters [PDF] (Messner)
Throwing Like a Girl [PDF] (Young)
When Bodies are Weapons: Masculinity and Violence in Sport [PDF] (Messner)
Beyond Muscles: What does it Mean to be Tough? (Inness)