I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way: (Dis)Locating The Naturalized Body In Professional Cycling’s Banned Erythropoietin Use Between 1990-2010 (2/6)

Part Two: Background. The history of drug testing in sports is specifically a history of regulating physical bodies.

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

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.

BACKGROUND: DRUG TESTING AND GENDER SEGREGATION

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