I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way: (Dis)Locating The Naturalized Body In Professional Cycling’s Banned Erythropoietin Use Between 1990-2010 (4/6)
Part Four: “Natural” is Discourse. 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.
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
“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).
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