Introduction
Sports are often overlooked as a serious field of study by cultural studies and gender studies scholars despite two factors that should be of interest to both disciplines. The first factor is that the popularity of sports makes them a hugely effective vessel through which social norms are disseminated. Whether through military training, adolescent bonding, or coming-of-age rituals, there is a historic precedent of sports occupying a vital position in the reproduction of masculinity (Whitson 1990, pp. 19-20). The second factor is that sports act on and through the body as a locus of meaning. Perhaps most importantly, sports create a social arena in which segregation based on physical sex is rigidly enforced, and this segregation carries enormous cultural significance. With this tremendous discursive power in mind, this essay addresses the role of sports in reproducing the concept of a dimorphic naturalized body through which the necessity of gender-based segregation is justified. The act of using banned performance-enhancing techniques is positioned as an artificial corrupting force on the ability of humans to perform their natural state, and this is true of sophisticated modern illicit performance-enhancing techniques which serve to reify the idea of a “natural” body. We will frame these key points with an illustrative example of the Tour de France’s “EPO era” spanning 1990-2010. This period saw a rapid transformation in narratives surrounding performance enhancement in professional cycling, centered specifically around the use of the banned drug erythropoietin (Mignon 2003, p. 232). The shifting meanings of banned performance enhancement in cycling make for an intriguing lens through which to examine how sporting narratives can redefine conceptions of the natural body and its acceptable uses in response to external societal pressure.
Since the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in 1990, gender theory has argued that the social structures of sexual dimorphism are not a natural consequence of human existence, but a multi-layered meaning system into which human beings are interpellated at birth (Butler 1993, p. 139). Binary biological distinctions are discursively produced and entered into; processes of naturalized binary categorization, and the meanings resulting from flattening humans into these categories, are social. Human bodies are therefore malleable and culturally constructed from a series of associations, negotiated relationally to participatory acts that bestow privileges relating to a person’s proximity to masculinity and femininity. Sports operate as a socially productive site through which masculinity and femininity are coded onto the body, bestowing or rescinding retracting gendered qualities to male and female athletes (Whitson 1990, pp. 19-20). In sports, the concept of “natural” is synonymous with the inevitability of female athletic inferiority (Sabo & Messner 1990, pp. 5-9), a narrative which is disseminated and regulated through gendered segregation, gender testing, and anti-doping programs.
In examining the role of sports in contributing to perceptions of natural bodily states, we find that the core assumptions underlying sports are centered on a binaristic view of gender difference. This is especially true in the perpetuation and reproduction of sporting themes of natural masculine athletic superiority. Because historic feminist academic studies of performance-enhancing techniques have focused closely on androgens, there exists a gap in the literature about how contemporary blood-doping methods may reproduce gender norms.
Androgens used in conjunction with weight training result in larger muscular gains than achievable without supplementary assistance. Although androgens are found in bodies of all sexes, they are often considered male sex hormones, with advantageously masculinizing effects on the body. Because their effect is perceived to act at the level of physical sex, their use is usually considered oppositional to “natural” bodily states (Davis & Delano 1992, p. 2), disrupting gender norms and transforming women into men (ibid.)
Recombinant human erythropoietin (often referred to as EPO) is a drug injected into the bloodstream that increases the body’s hematocrit (the ratio of red blood cells). A hematocrit increased from 43% to 51% will result in “a 7% rise in VO2max [the maximum volume of oxygen that an athlete can consume during exercise] and a 9% increase in time to exhaustion in a brief, incremental cycling test” (Eichner 2007, p. 390). Although other methods of increasing natural erythropoietin production exist, including altitude training and hypoxic tents, only erythropoietin and similar “blood-doping” techniques can significantly increase hematocrit above the “40%, good for a long life” (Eichner 2007, p. 389) level found in most people. There is currently a lack of literature that connects erythropoietin with feminist studies into sporting bodily transformation under androgens. Yet, by facilitating discussions of natural and artificial bodily states, narratives around erythropoietin appear to reproduce naturalized ideas about the body that are broadly in line with accepted social norms.
Cycling is a particularly rich case study because the sophisticated medicalized drugs used reproduce binary concepts of natural bodily states even as they veer away from traditional masculinizing narratives of performance enhancement framed by androgen use (Davis & Delano 1992). By closely studying the Tour de France, we can explore erythropoietin’s role in the dichotomization of gender and the reproduction of the naturalized body. As the technologies of performance enhancement become more sophisticated, and cultural discourses shift in response, we can locate gendering processes formerly associated with androgen use becoming reproduced within the narratives surrounding blood-based performance enhancing technologies. Drug testing is a layer of regulation through which discourses of sexually dimorphic bodily states are reified, and this process of naturalization makes the socially-constructed segregation of male-coded bodies from female-coded bodies appear inevitable.
The discourses surrounding banned performance-enhancing techniques perpetuate gendered and raced narratives of natural difference. Historically, the use of drugs in sports has been associated with androgen use that was professed to advantageously masculinize the body, with the perceived side-effect of disrupting physical sex (Davis & Delano 1992). Anti-steroid campaigns built on the existing social divisions between masculinity and femininity to produce fear of an unintended physical gender inversion: women would begin to look like men, and men would grow breasts (ibid.). This narrative is so deeply engrained that one could argue performance enhancing products are capable of becoming coded into the gender order, most clearly illustrated by the coding of testosterone as a “male hormone” despite being present in all bodies.
Background: drug testing and gender segregation
The history of drug testing in sports is specifically a history of regulating physical bodies. While drug testing and gender testing may seem relatively disparate processes to sports fans in 2017, for much of sporting history they have served the same purpose (Wackwitz 2003; Ritchie 2003), especially overlapping in testing women for the masculinizing effects of androgens. Davis and Delano (1992) discuss how the “natural” body becomes entwined with binary conceptions of physical sex in anti-steroid advertising campaigns, relying on the imagery of rigid and desirable gender norms, and protecting the sexed body from contaminations that distort it from its naturalized state. This is an explicitly regulatory process with the effect of defining and regulating “natural” bodies along gender segregated lines (Wackwitz 2003; Ritchie 2003). It is built on the privileging of a view of nature that reflects societal gender norms, and its phrasing of the deviation from these norms as a negative consequence serves to regulate gender norms and the performativity of the physically sexed body no less than it renders drug use undesirable. Drug-testing and anti-doping campaigns assume the existence of a natural body, one that is binary-sexed and susceptible to contamination, corruption, or alteration by external forces. Similarly, gender segregation in sports is predicated on two factors. The first is that there exists a natural body. It is assumed that there is a given state for bodies—particularly in the sense that there are two rigid, distinct sexes into which all bodies can be categorized—and that this state is broadly in line with existing social expectations of bodily comportment. The second factor follows on from the first as an implied masculine athletic superiority, or at least, an assumption that the two categories of bodies are naturally suited to different physical tasks. (Brookes 2002, pp. 123-127; Messner & Sabo 1990, p. 9).
While the transformation of the body by steroids is often an observable and quantifiable physical effect, the associated meanings and social stigma surrounding the uses and effects of steroids are entirely conditional on the gender order within which the body exists. Feminist scholars have examined the role of drug testing for steroids as a regulatory process that preserves the gender order, and have also studied the effects of androgens as tools with which to subvert the gender order, but there exists a gap in academic literature about how the more sophisticated contemporary blood-doping methods may reproduce existing ideas about gendered biological characteristics. The lack of scholarly research into the relationship between gender and contemporary banned performance enhancing methods creates a vacuum where the logical continuation of these studies should be.
This paper explores the competing layers of sporting discourse through which these regulatory processes are discursively reified, in turn making the segregation of male-coded bodies from female-coded bodies appear a natural inevitability, rather than a contingent effect of existing social orders.
Case study: the transformation of the natural body in cycling’s EPO era
Cycling is a sport often associated with sophisticated performance enhancing techniques that are banned by governing bodies and local state laws (Weaving 2008; Mignon 2003; Maso 2005; Eichner 2007). As such, it is the focal site of complex discussions around illicit performance enhancement, natural bodies, and the extent to which the state can intervene on bodies. Because the history of drug use in professional cycling is not static, but rather one with many varied discursive shifts (Maso 2005, p. 146; Mignon 2003, p. 232), we can use it to understand the changing connotations of artifice and nature that reflect perceptions of the natural body. The transfiguration and modernization of blood-doping techniques, the transformation of cycling sporting narratives, and the reconstruction of European law occurred between 1990 and 2010, and this paper will analyze them with a close focus on the 1998 “Festina Affair,” which made cycling’s erythropoietin use public and led to the introduction of new laws affecting the body. This study will highlight that medicalized performance-enhancing techniques have been used to provoke discursive shifts in the perception of “natural,” especially in how it relates to bodies. Cycling is a particularly useful case study because it brings together many separate narratives of technological, medical, and social interventions.
Before diving into the case study, it is necessary to acknowledge that the “natural” body is a shifting discursive object subjected to a meandering series of regulations in the name of sporting fairness. Concerns about improper bodily usage and external technological intervention are common in many sports. The Fosbury Flop is a ubiquitous, efficient, and easily-taught high-jump technique pioneered by Dick Fosbury in 1968, who discovered he could reach greater heights by jumping backward over the high-jump pole rather than the then-conventional sideways method. However, its invention was the site of debate. Athletes, coaches, and the sport’s governing body were concerned by whether the athlete was using their body in a “natural” way (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, pp. 179-180). The technique also raised fears that the necessity of landing pads in backwards jumping meant some athletes were receiving technological assistance (ibid., p. 181). Yet it may have been the technology itself that changed the way bodies were used in the sport. While it was true that some jumping techniques benefited more from this technology, it was the risk compensation allowed by the introduction of soft landing pits that scripted Fosbury’s new approach to jumping (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007; Bernstein 2009; Davis 1990). The cultural conditions that allowed the Fosbury Flop to be permitted came as a result of shifting systems of meaning surrounding what it meant to use the body naturally in high jumping and which artificial interventions could be accepted as part of the sport (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, pp. 179-181). This insight into high-jumping allows us to consider that dependence on technology is a negotiable intervention capable of becoming naturalized and separated from an artifice that is historically associated with the unfair.
A similar process of negotiation occurred with the introduction of klapskates in the speed skating events at the 1998 Winter Olympics. Klapskates are hinged in such a way that ice friction is massively reduced during the skater’s movement (Houdijk et al., 2001) and plantar flexion of the foot is improved to provide greater contact with the ice (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 182). The technological innovation was met with controversy because the skates improved performance while fundamentally changing the physical actions used in the sport (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007). This new approach to the sport changed the way athletes in speed skating utilized their bodies, in turn producing the perception that natural talent and the process of physical training had become devalued by technology. “The distinction between a natural, human performance on the one hand and technology on the other was created as a result of moral discomfort” (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 185).
Cycling, too, had its klapskate moment. The invention and proliferation of the derailleur, which allowed riders to change gears and freewheel without pedaling, was met with the same concerns about technology devaluing “natural” human performance. Henri Desgrange, professional cyclist and editor of L’Auto newspaper, made his resistance to artifice intruding on bicycle racing clear in an editorial the year before he founded the Tour de France:
“I still feel that variable gears are only for people over 45. Isn’t it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft. As for me, give me a fixed gear!” (Henri Desgrange, L’Auto in 1902, quoted in Edwards and Leonard 2009)
The privileging of the “natural” in sports is inherent to the functioning of sports as a site of fair competition. Sports are predicated on the sporting arena being perceived as a site of fairness (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 175). This means that sporting events must construct an equal grounding for their competitors: athletes must compete on the same track, leap the same hurdles, and be subjected to the same rules. It is from this position that the “natural” inequality of individual competitors is made visible, and the best athlete can be identified (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 175). That the equality of the sporting event is artificial does not matter, only that the inequality it demonstrates is perceived as natural. In short, inequality must be individualized and centered on the body rather than systemic, and this provides the basis for the physical biological difference upon which sports operate and of which they serve as proof. The natural is a site of negotiation, and its oppositional artifice is not a literal technological fiction but a shorthand for the intervention that redefines the nature of the obstacle sport is trying to overcome (van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, p. 175).
It should be clear that certain interventions are disruptive to the sporting narrative of natural physical difference. Technological or medical means of improving one’s performance run the risk of undermining the premise of fairness upon which the sporting competition is built, and therefore render void the illusion of innate natural inequality produced by the sporting feat. One may question whether such interventions cannot change meaning if they are only as artificial as the equality they serve to disrupt; the answer is that they do. Klapskates eventually became integrated into speed skating, and the use of performance enhancing drugs in cycling gradually became stigmatized throughout the 20th century.
The history of illicit performance enhancement in cycling is not static, but rather one with many varied discursive shifts that reflect perceptions of the natural body. Products used in a rider’s “preparation” included “pills and cocaine” (Maso 2005, p. 142), amphetamines (ibid.; Voet 2002 p. 9), “cocaine for the eyes” (Mignon 2003, p. 230), “chloroform for the gums” (ibid.), strychnine (Mignon 2003, p. 231), anabolic steroids and growth hormones (Maso 2005, p. 143), a cocktail of “amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine, heroin, painkillers and sometimes corticosteroids” (Voet 2002, p. 9), and “Easter Egg” testosterone balls (Voet 2002, p. 13). The use of these products was not considered a doping issue, but rather something considered part of the competition (Maso 2005, p.141; Mignon 2003, pp. 232-233) necessary for the “convict-laborers of the road” (Mignon 2003, p. 230) to complete their work: “Christ had only 14 stations of the cross. We have 15. We suffer from start to finish. Do you want to see what we run on? […] We run on dynamite.” (Henri Pelissier, quoted in Mignon 2003, p. 230)
It was in the 1920s that the meanings attached to performance enhancement first began to transform. Drug use would remain permitted in cycling, but became explicitly separated from what was considered a normal requirement: Tour de France organizers would pay for “normal medical care” but the “cost of ‘stimulants, tonics, and doping’ had to be paid by the riders themselves” (Maso 2005, p.142). Yet, for many years, it was the perceived necessity of performance enhancing substances that served as evidence of the spectacle of the competition (Mignon 2003; Maso 2005). Cycling was a mediasport (Brookes 2002) that existed more in grandiose newspaper reports than on the road (Maso 2005; Wille 2003). Until broadcast technology caught up, neither fans nor journalists could watch an entire race from point-to-point (Maso 2005; Wille 2003), and cycle sport was a fictive process that regaled its fandom with stories of Homeric efforts of superhumans overcoming insurmountable obstacles (Maso 2005, p. 141). That such heroes required illicit performance enhancing techniques in order to overcome such obstacles was not surprising to fans, and served only to verify the significance of the feat.
Many substances used in a cyclist’s preparation were banned later in the 20th century. The utilization of performance-enhancing techniques became separated from the “larger than life” (Maso 2005, p. 141) conceptualization of the sport that had allowed race organizers, journalists, and fans to turn a blind eye to what was considered necessary medical intervention. The first doping inspections took place on June 28, 1966, combining medical and the state regulatory apparatuses: two physicians visited riders, accompanied by the police. During these meetings, the physicians not only collected urine for testing (Maso 2005, p.146), but also conducted “hasty medical examinations” (Maso 2005, p. 145) as though the effect of the drug would be visible on the body. In the eyes of the Tour de France, the media, doctors, and the French police, drug use was now a public health issue. These controls functioned as a state-sponsored examination of the body, enforced by police, with the intention of by ensuring the bodies permitted to compete fitted within the state’s definition of natural.
The 1990s saw a new era of performance enhancement (Eichner 2007; Mignon 2003) that abruptly progressed beyond the crude “home-made” (Mignon 2003, p. 232) methods that had been consistently used during the sport’s first 100 years. The “reversal of curiosity towards applied research” (Mignon 2003, p. 233) that began in the 1960s led to the introduction of the sophisticated blood-booster erythropoietin in 1987 (Maso 2005; Eichner 2007), and its use immediately became systematic and medicalized (Mignon 2003, pp. 232-233; Eichner 2007; Maso 2005). There is a consensus that the practice was so prevalent at the start of the 1990s (Eichner 2007; Maso 2005, p. 145; Mignon 2003) that it was impossible to be a professional cyclist without agreeing to a team’s “medical preparation” program (Kimmage 1998, pp. 233-236).
This period led to many contested narratives of what constituted an authentic athletic performance, with naturalized ideas of the body acting as the basis for new rules in cycling. The evolving narratives of banned performance enhancement in cycling illustrate that medicalized performance-enhancing techniques in cycling are not inevitably oppositional to the “natural”. Rather, they can be used to provoke discursive shifts in the perception of what is permitted to be natural.
The transformation of narratives surrounding drug use and the natural body in cycling has been a framing for the theoretical groundwork that will be undertaken in the rest of this paper. While there is a risk of diluting this framing by delving too deeply into the mechanisms of the Tour de France, it is important to discuss two further factors before we move on. The first is the Festina Affair, a high-profile doping scandal at the Tour de France that led to new anti-doping laws and a shift in narratives surrounding drug use in cycling. The second is the way in which tests for erythropoietin were conducted.
The Festina Affair began in a layby in Belgium the day before the 1998 Tour de France. Willy Voet, the masseur for the Festina cycling team, was stopped at a police border control targeting Tour de France vehicles with his team’s supply of erythropoietin in his car and a mixture of heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines in his bloodstream (Voet 2001). The unprecedented border checks were “a coup de force” (Mignon 2003, p. 238) by France’s new Communist Party government, which intended to create “an affair obliging people to break the law of silence” (ibid.). The Tour de France was owned by a subsidiary of the Amaury Group publishing house (Mignon 2003; Wille 2003), which was locked in a dispute with a printers’ union that funded the Communist Party (Mignon 2003, pp. 238-239). While it is unlikely that the Festina Affair was entirely an act of malicious political retribution, the scenario at least indicates an ideological stake in ending the state’s policy of overlooking the Tour de France’s illicit activities. The Affair’s intent was to bring cycling’s use of medicalized performance enhancements into the public eye, and it kickstarted an immediate series of legislative processes and police raids on the hotels of teams competing in the race. Of the 189 riders who started the race, only 96 finished.
The Festina Affair is an enlightening illustration precisely because it makes visible the extent to which performance-enhancing techniques are a domain in which meaning is produced, as well as the extent to which these meanings are malleable. With changing politics in France, banned performance enhancing techniques became a necessary shorthand for broader cultural meanings with wide-reaching sociopolitical impact, and this came to a head in 1998 with conceptions of the natural body at the center. The Festina Affair provides a fascinating insight into the ways in which concepts of ‘the natural” pervade from society into sport and are then reintegrated from sport back into society.
The Festina Affair created a new lexicon of state medical invention and policing of appropriate body modification in the name of performance enhancement. Understanding the resulting transformation of discourses surrounding the Tour de France as a sporting contest is also useful in identifying the privileging of a concept of “natural” that is assumed to be inherently good. We can therefore locate how such discursive shifts in the seemingly benign sporting concept of the natural body can physically affect lived experience: medicalized performance enhancement acted as a proxy for the state to act on bodies as a result of complex interactions surrounding a political dispute that pitted local unions against a globalizing corporation. A series of medical, sporting, and political moments evolved to produce a naturalized body that appears inevitable rather than contingent on the negotiation of all these factors.
A year after the Festina Affair, the winner of the 1998 Tour de France, Marco Pantani, was eliminated from the Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) and banned from competing in the sport for failing a “health check.” Although functioning as a doping control, this test did not have the technology to successfully detect the presence of artificial erythropoietin in the body. Rather, the test indicated the possibility of the banned drug’s use by measuring blood hematocrit levels, separating blood and plasma in a centrifuge to determine whether the sample contained more than 50% red blood cells (Voet 2001, pp. 5-6), a number determined to be the maximum limit of what a body could produce naturally (ibid; Eichner 2007). The test was easily circumvented (Voet 2001, pp. 5-6) and was therefore inefficient at reducing erythropoietin use, but its intent in separating bodies into categories of natural and unnatural, and pathologizing the latter as unfair, is remarkable in a sport that until just a few years before had reveled both in the grimaces of its competitors and in the lengths to which they would go to in order to compete. Pantani could not be banned for using drugs. Instead, he was removed from the race and suspended for racing because his body did not meet the sport’s definition of natural.
The “natural” body, with all its qualifiers and complex history of gendered and racial differentiators upon which social policy has been constructed, was a privileged object from the moment the potential to identify the use of erythropoietin became a possibility. As such, the body, with all its gendered and racialized associations, became the concept through which cycling as a sport and France as a state realigned their notions of the natural, the medical, and the illicit.
“Natural” is discourse
Performance enhancing techniques are able to interact with the legitimation of bodies relationally to social norms because concepts of nature are not objective truth, but rather a discursive process. What is considered a natural biologically given state is actually produced and regulated in an archipelago of interacting structures, ranging from the state to the personal to the social. This section will first discuss how hegemonic perceptions of “natural” are codified as genetically innate rather than contingent, then examine how the human body is a malleable concept built upon this culturally constructed natural difference. Finally, it will explore how these factors interact in the world of sports to create a rigorously regulated naturalized body hegemonically bound to normative values.
Social notions of natural difference have been imposed upon bodies throughout history. Evelyn Hammonds and Rebecca Herzig’s The Nature of Difference (2008) is a detached case study into science’s negotiation of race as a natural phenomenon. Beginning with a series of evolving dictionary definitions of race from 1886 to 2005, the book anthologizes historical racialized body measurements without comment, inviting readers to observe the ever-shifting parameters through which the desperation to assign and measure race as a natural concept has played out over the course of hundreds of years. This method exposes the evolving assumptions of biologically raced bodies as a positionality from which dominant discourses can be reproduced: even early 20th century anthropological studies into “natural” raced athletic difference failed to reach a conclusion of inherent athletic ability resulting from the phenotypic differences of raced bodies. W. Montague Cobb (1936) measured thighs and calves of competitors in sprinting and long-jump competitions, concluding there was a lack of homogeneity in “record-breaking legs” (Cobb 1936, pp. 185-187). “Genetically we know they are not constituted alike. There is not one single physical feature, including skin color, which all our Negro champions have in common which would identify them as Negroes” (Cobb 1936, p. 189). Nor was this assumed African-American racial sprinting superiority reflected in the ratios of black vs. white success at specifically athletically-minded institutions (Cobb 1936, p. 187). Natural athletic superiority was at best a unique bodily anomaly, rather than inevitable as a result of racial difference.
Assumptions of innate racial difference continue to simmer beneath the surface of a contemporary America dominated by what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call a neoliberal “colorblindness” (Omi & Winant 1994, p. 117). This dictates that “racial considerations [are] never entertained” (ibid.), and racial prejudice in society is an individual aberration rather than the systemic result of discursive power structures. While acknowledging racial difference under this system is discouraged, observing it appears to continue unabated. Eastern European Judaism, for example, has been bound to an ethnic genealogy in such a way that religious markers are visible in the results on popular consumer DNA tests. Similarly, there is an evolving definition of race that accounts for the desire to retain concepts of racial difference in response to scientific failures to quantify and qualify race as a significant biological, rather than social, structure. An example of this are the ways Islam becomes functionally raced even in the face of denials that it deserves the social protections accorded to racially protected groups (Selod & Garner 2015, pp. 11-12). Race, ethnicity, class, and gender are an interweaving web with illusionary or contingent connections to nature that serve as a justification for, rather than as a cause of, social difference, and these disparate groupings of oppression often operate in similar ways toward similar results.
In sports, the body is codified as an object that is naturally subject to sexual dimorphism (Dunning 1999, p. 221; Seiler et al. 2007, p. 534). Physical sex is not the socially performed role of a culturally-constructed gender, yet it requires a similar productive negotiation of hegemonic meanings on the mythological level (Lacan pp. 1132-1133). Judith Butler discusses the interpellation of physical sex at the moment of birth by highlighting the phrase “it’s a boy” as an act of recognizing and naming physical sex both as a category and an ideological framework (Butler & Salih 1993, p. 139). This matters because of its use in clarifying that the natural state of bodies isn’t necessarily binaristic along lines of physical sex. That is not to pretend that the penis is the same as the vagina, nor indeed is it to deny that a majority of people—but certainly not all—are statistically able to be broadly categorized within one of two physical sexes with little disruption of personal identity nor of the structure of these social categories. Rather, it is to acknowledge that the nature of physical difference is constructed, imprecise, and inconsistent, with artificial borders that define these performative roles and restrain expressions of modality through discursive and regulatory processes.
Understanding sex as something that acts upon the body, rather than a natural state of the body, allows us to comprehend the role that naturalized states like physical sex play in the reinforcement of social norms that benefit, reify, and perpetuate existing structures of power.
“By defining women as ‘Other,’ men are able through the shortcut of definition to dispose of their bodies, to make themselves other than their bodies—a symbol potentially of human decay and transience, of limitation generally—and to make their bodies other than themselves.” – (Butler 1987, p. 28)
It follows that in sports a “doped” body is a contaminated body, one which doesn’t conform to normative concepts of nature and the gender and race orders that are associated with the “natural” body.
What is coded as a “natural” body is not a natural inevitability at all, but discursively constructed as a gendered and raced object laced with intricate layers of meaning. As such, the idea of a binary distinction between all human bodies is simply philosophically and biologically absurd. The natural state assumes the inevitability of a binary that exists only statistically; while this may be a logistical reason to segregate a sporting event into two broad types of competitors, it does not encompass the multitudes of lived and biological experiences that exist, and certainly should not indicate that the body is naturally subdivided into two different categories based on genitalia. That one is interpellated not only into gender performances but physical sex itself (Butler & Salih 1993, p. 139) allows us to understand the use of the body as a result of social hegemonies that are enforced discursively and often regulated through the apparatus of the state. While gender scholars have adequately explored how gender is performed to such an extent that the performative nature of gender is now broadly understood, it is necessary to discuss how feminine bodily modality is also performed according to social boundaries.
Human bodies are malleable and culturally constructed, and social bodily norms are based on cultural positionality rather than innate genetic difference. Sports are one of the most significant participatory practices through which masculinity is produced (Whitson 1990, pp. 19-20). Male bodies that cannot excel at sporting acts are coded feminine and often pathologized by being associated with non-heterosexual sexualities (Whitson 1990, p. 26). The norms of masculine bodily comportment are specifically coded to separate bodies that can adequately perform these norms from those that cannot.
Yet even adequately performing these bodily expressions of sporting prowess is itself a socially-determined negotiation; feminine bodily comportment produces a modality incompatible with sporting success, resulting in a self-fulfilling assumption of female sporting inadequacy (Young 1990, p. 33). Restrained or weakened feminine modality is a result of cultural expectations and learned behaviors, rather than an essential difference that sees timidity and frailty occur naturally (Young 1990, p. 40). This is true whether participating in sports or riding the subway: feminine modality dictates that women don’t commit their whole bodies to actions, are restrained in their actions (for example, standing still waiting for a ball to arrive, rather than running to meet it in softball), and will occupy less space than men both with their bodies and their possessions (Young 1990, p. 32). Feminine use of space, and the body, is restrained as a result of existing social structures that dictate how one behaves if one is a woman; often these behaviors are not explicit, but learned based around social expectations of femininity.
In a similar way, bodily appearance itself is used to communicate gender, sex, race, class, and age. The body is inscribed with physical visual markers with which to construct the discursive meanings that constitute “natural” and “artificial” coded performances of the sexed body. Muscularity in particular is a masculine-coded property of bodies, and one that is predominant in sporting imagery (Whitson 1990, pp. 21-22) even if it often remains elusive in the reality of sporting bodies (Sabo and Messner 1990, p. 6), and extremely unnatural in the observed bodies of non-athletes, whether male or female. Regardless of the statistical likelihood of specific types of muscular bodies, the fact that musculature is coded male creates another binaristic view of bodies that does not represent the lived experiences of those occupying either category of body. Just as feminine modality is constructed by a system that simultaneously assumes and dictates timidity, inadequacy, and a reluctance to utilize space as thoroughly as men, so too is the muscular body a social construction. Seiler et al.’s (2007) study into male and female anaerobic Olympic performances suggests that social assumptions of sexually dimorphic difference in physical strength are overestimated. We should consider that muscularity is not entirely biologically linked with physical sex, and that it is also regulated by sporting governing bodies. The muscular female body is coded as sexually and socially undesirable, and is therefore a physique whose possession is disincentivized. As such the weak and slight female body is enforced by social norms that privilege the perceived naturally-weakened state of the female body and exclude or ignore bodies that fit outside the acceptable binary oppositions of physical sex.
This enforcement is not only discursive. Muscularity in athletes who were assigned female at birth is often cause for suspicion about both illegal performance enhancing drug use (Heggie 2010, p. 158) as well as transsexual or transvestite transgressions of gender segregation (ibid.). Prior to sophisticated drug testing, the muscular female body indicated deviance and served as sufficient cause to exclude female athletes from competition on the basis of drug use or gender transgression (Heggie 2010; Wackwitz 2003; Ritchie 2003; Davis & Delano 1992). Because muscles are coded masculine, women are encouraged to perform femininity by not being muscular. This is particularly visible in the ways bodybuilding cultures act as a homosocial site in which exaggerated masculinities are reproduced (Andreasson 2015, p. 546). There is a drag of the body itself in female bodybuilding. The criteria for judging competitions mandate that women’s muscles are not too big, and therefore that the body must be feminized (ibid.). This seems a particularly absurd requirement for a competition designed to celebrate and reward the biggest muscles. We can see, then, that the “natural” body in sports is not innate, but performed and regulated in much the same way as gender is in broader social spheres.
The way “natural” is understood should be especially complicated in sports, where exceptionality in performance, training, nutrition, and equipment play a major role in producing the best athletes. Indeed, surpassing the limits of natural performance is precisely the aim that sports intend to achieve (Brookes 2002, p. 5). However, an underlying perception of a natural order of bodies (and natural difference between different types of bodies in particular) runs as an undercurrent that instead serves as hegemonic justification for the gender segregation that permeates the majority of sports. Sports operate as sites of fairness from which “natural” bodily inequalities can be expressed (Van Hilvoorde et al. 2007, pp. 174-176), and therefore the reproduction of concepts of natural difference are not unexpected consequences of sporting narratives but rather their underlying purpose. Sports are a domain in which gender roles, and masculinity in particular, are coded onto the body through participatory acts (Brookes 2002, Whitson 1990, Andreasson 2015).
The “natural” located within sports is far from innate. Sports structurally require external intervention in order to construct a field of play from which competition can emerge. One need only tentatively explore the requirements of participating in sports at a competitive level to see the extent to which they differ from what we would call natural behavior. The lifestyles required to facilitate elite sporting performance involve unnatural diets that differ from natural observed, socially dictated, or biologically necessary eating habits, often requiring frequent high-Calorie feeding and close attention to nutritional macros, not to mention training habits that are similarly incompatible with “natural” human behavior.
The athlete’s body is also far distanced from what might otherwise be considered a natural state in other circumstances. Size is crucial in many sports, and because power-to-weight ratio is such a reliable measure of cycling success, many professional cyclists are underweight by BMI standards (Lucia et al. 2001; VeloNews.com 2016). Leg muscles and fitness are honed for endurance capacity, and all other muscles are superfluous, leaving an extremely thin body with disproportionate thighs (Lucia et al. 2001). Similarly, it is not uncommon for metal structures to replace and/or supplement broken bones in cyclists’ bodies following significant crashes.
The natural body as an object is therefore extremely elusive in professional sports. Lifestyles, bodies, mentalities, and narratives are all produced and/or supplemented in order to compete in situations that appear inherently incompatible with natural states of existence. One must consider the natural as the discursive weight of a social perception of how bodies are permitted to be performed.
Athletic performance and muscularity require dedication and hard work, and it is the elusiveness of these sports-related markers for the vast majority of people that precisely imbues the athletic performance and the athletic body with such positive associations. Nevertheless, these performances and bodies are coded masculine even though they’re attained by very few men. As such, sports are a participatory site through which masculinity is conferred, as well as a visual medium through which masculinity can be defined for observers. David Whitson (1990) argues:
“Indeed, demonstrating the physical psychological attributes associated with success in athletic contests has now become an important requirement for status in most adolescent and preadolescent male peer groups.” (p. 19)
Competitive sport is a participatory act that bestows masculinity, which is not natural or innate, but something to be earned (Whitson 1990, p. 20). Donna Haraway (1989) reaches a similar conclusion with regard to the coding of masculinity—and, by proxy, the heterosexual matrix—in the “sporting” act of shooting. Masculinity is something conferred through participation in coded actions, yet its recipients must also fit within socially-determined roles. Haraway demonstrates how masculinizing benefits from the Akeley Expedition bypassed the women who undertook Akeley’s research, despite them ostensibly participating in the masculinity-forming practice (Haraway 1989, p. 54). It is telling that female participation in both domains is ignored, downplayed, or pathologized (Haraway 1989); sports cannot bestow benefits to bodies not coded masculine precisely because of the disruption this would cause to the natural order of sexed bodies. Therefore, we can argue that many questions of who is permitted to play are fundamentally flawed because of the shortsightedness of understanding the problem in sports, which is relational rather than distributive (Whitson 1990, p. 20). It is not simply that insufficient numbers of women participate in sports (though this is certainly an issue that should be resolved on its own terms), but rather that sports are coded as masculine spaces and regulated accordingly.
While mainstream competitive team sports are overwhelmingly masculinized spaces, there is some ambiguity surrounding endurance sports, particularly those with similar importance attached to male and female participation, like marathon running. Cycling is an intriguing case study for precisely this reason; both bodily and culturally it stands in contrast to fast-twitch musclebound team sports. Yet in all of these spheres, the natural, and in particular the nature of difference, is not an innate pre-existing objective truth rendered visible through sports, but rather a series of meanings coded onto the body through participation in productive practices. Participation is not available to all, and there is strict regulatory exclusion of women and girls enforced to keep sports segregated into two distinct sexed groupings. Nature as a fictive process preexists sports, but sports reproduce, reify, and renegotiate assumed difference while continuing to portray it as nature. Sporting sex segregation is not an effect of nature, but rather a condition that produces this nature at some cost (Paper Tiger TV 1989).
The discourses surrounding banned performance-enhancing techniques perpetuate gendered and raced narratives of natural difference
The very existence of banned performance-enhancing techniques produces conceptualizations of what constitutes a natural body. For much of sporting history, the link between performance enhancing drugs and the naturalized, sexually dimorphic body has been quite explicit: the use of androgens in sports had a transformative effect on the physical sex of the female-assigned bodies ingesting these drugs. The subsequent anti-doping campaigns surrounding these products positioned the normatively-sexed as something to be preserved from transformation or contamination (Davis & Delano 1992, pp. 5-6). Yet it is not only the sexually-transformative drugs like steroids that complicate our perception of nature: banned and illicit blood-boosting techniques are considered artificial means of significantly altering a “natural” performance or ability (Eichner 2007, p. 389). Sports operate on the level of the body, and the contamination of the sporting ideal through illicit bodily transformation is discursively at odds with this purpose. It should be clear that since athletes are often thoroughly unnatural in their activities, nutrition, and physiques, the assumed link between the ideal natural body and successful athletes is fragile. In many sports, the athlete operates as a cyborg even in the basic actions required to overcome the artificial sporting obstacle on the field of play. The positioning of certain performance enhancing techniques as diametrically opposed to the natural body is illogical at best, and specifically serves the purposes of existing class, gender, and racial orders at worst. In short, the underlying, and ultimately incorrect, assumption surrounding narratives of sports cheating is that there is a natural body to be corrupted by such techniques.
The use of drugs in sports has commonly been associated with androgens that were recognized as having masculinizing effect on the body. The perceived effect of banned or illicit performance enhancing techniques has been as an artificial intervention that disrupts traditional expectations of gender and physical sex. This is based on the premise that the existing gender order is a natural, rather than discursive, state. Steroid use renders this visible because of the transformative effect that large quantities of the drug are able to have on the bodies of both men and women, in particular in allowing its users to develop a more muscular physique. The level of muscularity that athletes are capable of attaining with androgens is beyond the “natural” level possible without the drug and therefore provides a visual, physical, and symbolic registry of the unnatural. Androgens used as a performance enhancing drug have the potential side-effect of altering their users’ physical sexes.
The anti-steroid campaigns studied by feminist scholars build on the existing social order of masculinity and femininity to produce fear of an unintended physical gender inversion that posits a corruption of the natural body through physical transformation. Nature and gender become reciprocally linked, the former granted discursive proof by the existence of the latter, and the latter regulated through complicated interlocking discourses of gender relationships built on a perception of biological inevitability of difference. It should be noted that the fear of outside agents acting on the body became the very basis for regulatory functions that acted upon the body in much more crude and intrusive ways. Initial “drug tests” examined the bodies, and in particular the sexual organs of athletes, to determine their eligibility to participate (Heggie 2010). This test was built on the assumption that binary sex was disrupted through drugs, and that the steroid user, the transvestite, the transsexual, and the “masculine” intersexual were the same from a sporting perspective. All groups were perceived to be men using subterfuge to compete and win against naturally inferior women. It should be clear that these types of test are completely irrational without the underlying assumption of inherent sexual differentiation in athletic capacity between bodies coded male and bodies coded female. The regulatory processes inflicted on participants in female sporting events during this period served to regulate the boundaries of physical sex through the inspection of bodies, and constructed a further barrier to female sporting participation.
These anti-doping processes are purported to exist with the intent of protecting female athletes from male incursions into their competitions, yet there is little historical evidence that men were trying to compete as women (Wackwitz 2003; Ritchie 2003). Rather, gender testing served to reify a natural order of masculine athletic superiority. Gender testing created assumptions of who was permitted to participate in sports, and at what level of competition. Androgen tests enforced a norm that dictated the types of bodies women were permitted to occupy. Later anti-doping efforts introduced DNA testing that further disrupted assumptions of a naturally sexual dimorphic body. By constructing quantifiable biological boundaries based on socially-constructed gendered expectations of biology, laboratory methods for testing an athlete’s sex proved inadequate: athletes with a female phenotype would often have a male genotype, for example (Reeser 2005, pp. 696-697; Heggie 2010, p. 160). The failure of DNA testing is not simply a flaw in the concept of anti-doping, but a flaw in the concept of physical sex. The very tests that were designed to designate athletes to one sex or another exposed the inadequacy of thinking of physical sex as a binary rather than a spectrum.
This gendered narrative of “natural” is so deeply engrained into the public consciousness that performance enhancing products themselves, just like bodies, become coded into the gender order. Examples of this are not difficult to locate. Testosterone is often described as a “male hormone” (Davis & Delano 1992, p. 7) despite being naturally present in all bodies, and as such the presence of testosterone becomes perceived by proxy as an artificial agent in the bodies of female athletes. Coding banned performance enhancements in this way reifies the gender order by constructing the narrative of a natural feminine physical state that is dependent on male intervention in order to compete athletically.
Banned or illicit performance enhancing techniques are considered artificial means of supplementing “natural” performance, musculature, or ability. As such, the act of using banned performance enhancing techniques, and especially drugs, is coded as participating in an artificial corruption of the natural ability of humans to perform athletically. Other means of performance enhancement (an archipelago that might include cutting-edge equipment, training techniques, and nutritional supplements that confer performance benefits), are often distinguishable only by their more positive relationship to the laws of sports (and increasingly, also to the laws of the state). This privileging often serves to reify the idea of a natural order, one in which aims of sporting fairness coincide with the regulatory processes that act upon the body and enforce existing gender norms as scientific fact, even in the face of contrasting evidence from the very tests intended to regulate sexual dimorphism. The scientific basis for quantifying the natural body is often self-fulfilling, arbitrary, and unwittingly shifting in response to social norms supposedly extant to the scientific method that produce their results. The “natural” is not neutral, but rather a positionality from which dominant discourses can be reproduced.
This is not to argue that science is inherently incorrect. Rather, it is to argue that positionality fundamentally affects the scientific narrative. Man is not in nature, but of it: to be male is to be an observer external to spectacle. Women are aligned symbolically with nature rather than culture (Haraway 1989), and it is the assumed nature of the female body that disqualifies them from sporting participation and success. This is why the male is the default, why androgens are coded male even though the hormones occur in bodies of all sexes, and why the natural order appears so disrupted by anything that challenges the superiority of masculine athletes. Banned or illicit performance enhancing techniques complicate this gender order by making visible the fragility of the sporting performance. Whether banned performance enhancing techniques act on male or female bodies, they undermine masculinity by disrupting the very values from which “nature” is produced.
The question of who has the power to make the distinctions between natural techniques and those that are artificial leads us to identify the discourses served by these distinctions, in particular those that naturalize the existing social order. It should be clear that the first anti-doping tests centered on steroids and acted on the bodies of women (Heggie 2010, p. 158). The tests searched for muscularity, which is considered unnatural for women (Whitson 1990; Heggie 2010). By focusing on locating physical outliers that might be the effect of a banned substance, such tests didn’t only preserve a natural order, but actively produced and regulated two binary conceptualizations of which bodies could be considered natural for men and women. In fact, the gendered regulation goes further, creating a circular logic where female athletic success itself functions as an indication of unnatural performance (Heggie 2010; Messner & Sabo 1990). Athleticism itself is coded as unfeminine; surpassing the established expectations of performance is unnatural, and feminine performance is thus limited by both cultural expectations, regulatory processes, and exclusion of the most athletically capable bodies.
Doping controls have created a series of regulatory strategies designed to “protect” the natural body. The underlying assumption is that there is a natural body to be altered by banned or illicit performance enhancing techniques, and this concept of the natural body brings with it a set of assumptions of biological difference. Regulations and laws related to performance enhancing techniques in sports often work in conjunction with the social norms of physical sexual dimorphism. As such we can conclude that performance enhancing techniques don’t have to significantly alter the body in order to distort conceptualizations of natural, because the nature of difference constructed by sporting regulations operates symbolically.
Performance enhancing drugs such as erythropoietin do not have a transformative effect on the parts of the body used to identify sexual difference, yet cultural discussions of illicit performance enhancing techniques do serve to reify the idea of a “natural” body upon which are inscribed associations to the race and gender order.
This assumption of the inevitability of natural difference is most visible in Seiler et al.’s (2007) study into gender disparity in anaerobic sports, which collates data on the performance differences recorded in male and female events in three anaerobic Olympic sports: running, swimming, and speed skating. The authors extrapolate a consistent improvement in female events between the years 1952 and 1988, with the effect of contracting the presumed athletic difference between male-assigned and female-assigned bodies (Seiler et al. 2007, pp. 536-537). While Seiler et al. draw no significant conclusions as to the cause of this contraction, a reduction of stigma surrounding women’s sports (Cahn 2004) and an increased participation of women from middle-class white backgrounds with more free time and better access to quality training facilities (ibid.) are two likely causes. However, from 1988 onwards, the gap between performances in male and female events rapidly began to widen (Seiler et al. 2007, p. 537).
Seiler et al.’s paper, which otherwise would stand as a useful mapping of the gendered fluctuations of anaerobic performance, instead serves as a case study for the deep roots of assumptions of natural athletic difference between binary sexed bodies. For Seiler et al., “artificial” drugs had upset the natural order of masculine sporting superiority by allowing female athletes to compete closer to male performance levels:
Assuming that technological innovations have the same impact on male and female performance, the observations of a widening gender gap during the last decade or more suggest that the nadir of gender differences in performance observed in the 1970s and 1980s was, to some degree, artificial. These observations also are consistent with the interpretation that what is suspected to have been widespread and, in some cases, systematic, doping contributed to the reduction in gender differences observed from 1952 through the late 1980s. (Seiler et al. 2007, p. 537)
One must briefly assume the logic of gender segregation in order to fully comprehend the rationale behind such a conclusion. The hypothesis that leads to Seiler et al.’s curious reading of the data is born from a long history of antidoping regulation that has led to androgens being perceived as having an advantageously masculinizing effect on the body. Seiler et al., even in studying the same converging and diverging gendered differences that appear to disprove the biological inevitability of innate athletic disparity, locate a disruption of the natural order within the use of performance enhancing drugs, unintentionally highlighting the premise of this essay: that the very concept of illicit performance enhancing techniques implies a natural body capable of being compromised or contaminated by techniques that subvert a biologically inevitable order of bodily habitation. It is particularly telling that Seiler et al. immediately draw an unprompted connection between this “nature” and feminine inferiority.
While Seiler et al. believe that the widening gender gap in anaerobic performance since 1988 is a result of (and evidence for) “the recent success of improved international doping testing in deterring athletes from using illegal performance-enhancing agents” (Seiler et al. 2007, p. 540), performance enhancing drugs were widespread at this time (Eichner 2007). “EPO [erythropoietin] was introduced into the world of sports in 1987 and was widespread by 1993, but its use could not be traced until 2000” (Maso 2005, p. 145). Seiler et al. might have just as easily argued that it may have been an increase in female participation in anaerobic sports that closed the gender gap, and the introduction of sophisticated medicalized performance enhancing technologies that reopened it. Indeed, there is a case to be made that under the existing binary gender system erythropoietin should be described as having an advantageous feminizing effect, mirroring the assumption that androgens have an advantageous masculinizing effect. It is easy to draw an associative chain from blood to the heart, which is often coded feminine. Do we then reach an advantageously feminizing drug, which can serve to elevate male biology to perform at a level of endurance comparable with that of the female body? Or does the metaphoric heart lack the evocative power of the genitals and erogenous zones altered by steroids?
This thought experiment should not be considered a robust analysis, but it brings to light the curious hegemonic interplays that shape the ways all performance enhancing techniques, rather than just steroids, are discussed. Can we imagine a world in which the performance enhancing drugs currently used by endurance athletes become synonymous with “unnaturally” raising men to women’s athletic level? It would certainly be logistically consistent within a dimorphic gender system, but anything coded feminine is rarely considered advantageous.
The “natural difference” between bodies assigned male and bodies assigned female is the basis for the gender segregation in sports that in turn ultimately serves to further legitimize the unambiguously gendered dichotomization of physical bodies in broader social contexts. Most crucially, the existence of anti-doping controls, anti-steroid campaigns, and even broader social discussions of the ethics of performance enhancement, play a vital role in propping up, defining, refining, and disseminating a socially constructed concept of “natural.” This “natural” has very specific boundaries determined by culture, science, and governing bodies, and is often enforced by law. While we may argue that there is no necessarily intrinsic link between a benign “natural body” and the dimorphic biological assumptions that construct systems of inherent naturalized difference, we can see that it is a function of the naturalization of socially constructed meanings attached to the body to reinforce and reproduce these biological assumptions (Gould 1996). In short, we can locate a gendered order even within banned or illicit performance enhancing techniques like erythropoietin that deviate from the more visible disruptions of the naturalized body caused by the steroids that have been the focus of existing feminist study into sporting performance enhancement. This gendered order is illustrated in our collective failure to describe erythropoietin as an advantageously “feminizing” drug within the logic of existing system of gender coding. Biological difference is predicated on a discursive “natural order” that is reified by the rigid definitions of natural and artificial permitted by the very existence of banned performance enhancing techniques.
Conclusion
The case study of erythropoietin in the Tour de France is intriguing precisely because it acts in ways not fully explored by feminist critique, yet it nevertheless continues to reify the perceived “natural” boundaries upon which gender- and race-based oppressions make their foundations. Cycling’s evolving relationship with performance-enhancing drugs serves as a framing lens for this study, which intends to begin the process of filling a gap in how the academy understands the narratives surrounding contemporary medicalized sports cheating as a continuation of the gendering processes that began with gender verification and androgen tests.
Sports intend to produce and render visible purported natural difference through competition. The gender segregation in sports is one such realm in which assumptions of natural difference spill into the socialized construction and categorization of sexually dimorphic bodies. This segregation is predicated on two factors: 1) that there are two types of naturally different bodies that should be grouped along a binary opposition determined by genitalia; and 2) that male athletic ability surpasses female athletic ability to such an extent that competition between these two bodily categories is impossible or unfair. The nature or purpose of sexual segregation, then, is to uphold the concept of fairness from which inequality can be expressed in sporting terms. This, too, is the purpose of anti-doping campaigns and drug tests: to construct a stable site of equal opportunity from which to naturalize the inequality that thrives as a result.
In this sense, ideas of illicit performance enhancements contribute to concepts of the natural. That the natural is a discursive effect inscribed with rich social meanings, rather than simply an objective truth that governs human existence, in turn means that the disruption of these narratives is a disruption of the complex positionalities that become naturalized in the body. Certain performance enhancements are banned because they act too much in altering the body, undermining the equality of opportunity that allows sporting participation to render natural difference visible. This places social bodily norms as an extension of natural, and presumes that both must be preserved.
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