Race and sports

This essay is Part Four of the Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies series. The introduction that follows below is the same for all five essays.

One of my great academic mentors, who would almost certainly prefer to remain unnamed in this article, had a fundamental belief in common with me: that sports matter. But while we certainly cycled along the same roads, both metaphorically and literally, it became clear that we were approaching a similar topic from slightly different directions. Over five weeks in 2016, we explored these directions, with research conducted at Tufts and MIT.

Here follows a series of brief essays, hastily written in conversation with Dr ——–‘s own examination of sport as a cultural phenomenon. These five essays are unedited, but organized in a way that, I hope, leads one to find something of a coherent narrative, and a path to how the long-form essay I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way came about.

Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies
Sports, socialization and the construction of gender | Sex differences and sex segregation | Sex and drug testing | Race and sports | Not for girls: Muscles and contact sports

Race and sports

Sport is a site in which femininity is not only acted out, but acted upon. The readings linked below, and hopefully this short essay too, talk us through a series of displacements that leave female athletes embodying complicated and shifting intersections of competing social relations.

At its core, we can reduce this phenomenon to the idea that the absence of middle-class femininity operates symbolically as an absence of any femininity—though we should be wary of understating the discursive defeminization that operates even on this comparatively privileged class. It should be clear that this model femininity created a vacuum within which working-class women first, then black women, were able to perform, and even excel, for the United States. As such, there is a productive element to this discourse; we might even optimistically argue that it is a discourse that has freed marginalized athletes from some the of the burden of the gender order in the sporting arena, even as it has further marginalized them in a broader cultural sense.

Concepts of nation, and in particular the Cold War, have further complicated this discourse. Consider the African-American athlete’s complex reframing in contrast with discursively masculinized East German Soviet athletes. Sport’s construction of femininity is thus a process of absence and exclusion that can never fully elevate women as a marginalized group, but may confer benefits of normative femininity to subjects relationally, based on their position within intersecting hierarchies of class, race, nation, and sexuality.

Multiple layers of othering determine femininity, and as such the discursive power of femininity remains clearly hierarchized, even if we optimistically consider black athletic success as challenges to this order. Perhaps it is enough that the Williams sisters find success as black women, and that they’re recognized as women and people in a more “complete” way by black communities than in the dominant white discourse, but it remain a long journey to substantially altering this gender order.

Related reading: