I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way: (Dis)Locating The Naturalized Body In Professional Cycling’s Banned Erythropoietin Use Between 1990-2010 (1/6)

Part One: Introduction. Modern illicit performance-enhancing techniques serve to reify the idea of a “natural” body.

Introduction | Background: Drug Testing and Gender Segregation | Case Study: The Transformation of the Natural Body in Cycling’s Epo Era | “Natural” is Discourse | The Discourses Surrounding Banned Performance-enhancing Techniques Perpetuate Gendered and Raced Narratives of Natural Difference | Conclusion | Bibliography

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 paper 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.

Introduction

Related