I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way: (Dis)Locating The Naturalized Body In Professional Cycling’s Banned Erythropoietin Use Between 1990-2010 (5/6)
Part Five: The discourses surrounding banned performance-enhancing techniques perpetuate gendered and raced narratives of natural difference. 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.
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
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.
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