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Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies

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.

Sports, Socialization and the Construction of Gender

Sport is complementary to the gender binary as a site in which pre-existing conceptions of gender are confirmed. Rather than act in isolation, sport ensures that the larger structure of the gender paradigm is stabilized through a series of normalizing practices. This phenomenon is well illustrated by three readings that analyze men, women, and children (ed. note: see ‘Related Reading’ below). 

Sport, then, is not simply a place in which natural sexed differences flourish, nor is it the sole place in which discourses of masculinity and femininity are dispersed. Michael Messner (2000) explores the ways participatory sports complement the already-grounded gender experiences of children as young as four years old, using segregated leagues, gendered team names, and traditionally gendered coaching roles to construct a gendered structure that emphasizes sexual difference while understating the shared similarities between its male and female athletes. Youth sport plays a productive role in forming rigid, yet transparent, gender boundaries, yet parents are as eager to downplay sexual similarity as sport’s structure is to facilitate its difference.  

Young (2005) and Messner (1990) expand on this theme by studying adult athletes, who certainly do not enter the sporting arena having discarded their gendered identities. For Young, feminine performance in sport does not confirm masculine superiority, but rather self-fulfills cultural expectations of feminine modality. Messner (this time discussing violence) casts his gaze to masculine homosocial desire, exploring sport’s role in the belabored production of what Martha McCaughey might refer to as “caveman masculinity.” 

The gender binary resides in sport’s structures, but it may be more accurate to consider sport a scaffold for a broader cultural experience of gender: one in which children expose their expectations of gender difference for adult confirmation; where women perform their objectified bodies in line with gendered motilities that only serve to reinforce the very physical distancing that produces these limited performances in the first place; and where men condition themselves through thousands of hours of physical and mental training, then consider the results a natural state. For each example, sport acts on the gender binary as a counterweight, providing the lexicon with which confirmation of gendered difference can be located. In short, sport is a mirror we use to reflect back our own expectations of gender, but it helps that this mirror is so willing to show us what we want to see. 

Related reading:

Sex differences and sex segregation

Coerced sex segregation does not protect women, but ghettoizes their sports and reproduces narratives of masculine physical and mental superiority. Yet plans to fix this inequality need to acknowledge that this is a discursive negotiation that must be handled with care. 

How, then, are we to fix coerced physical sex-based segregation? The obvious answer is to simply stop it, perhaps using the legal system to extend discrimination laws to sporting environments in the same way as other workplaces. Even ignoring the problems with liberal legislation (though it does seem important in this context to note that such measures are discursively productive, often sustaining the differences they aim to tackle and so failing to enact substantive change), the truth is that immediate integration would be a difficult task in the current sporting environment. Quite simply, the current disparity at the highest levels of sport may be such that integrating women into sports as shared spaces would reinforce rather than counter the discourse of male superiority. Thus, the moment of integration is vitally important. The vicious cycle of integration is such that there’s a sense that women would have to prove they belong at the highest level, even if legislation existed to grant them that right. 

The truth is that, despite emotional reasoning from its advocates, there is very little argument for sex-based segregation. Sports often delight in grimaces, and attempts to protect women from the rigors of sport betray the expectation that women are incapable of enduring the very conditions that serve as a foundation for sporting endeavor, or else simply refuse to accept attempts to renegotiate female bodies away from being seen solely as objects of desire. That this renegotiation requires evidence is an unfortunate fact of the discourses surrounding sports. 

Related reading:

Sex and drug testing

The gendering of doping is a useful lens through which to understand the social stigma and legislative processes that inconsistently operate in the pursuit of a “fair” sport. Yet while masculinized products like testosterone are seen to feminize men, there is currently no unambiguously feminized doping product. Will this change when female performances exceed those of male athletes? 

By thinking of doping in gendered terms, we can better understand how anti-doping narratives collide with concepts of naturalized bodies, with “fairness” becoming synonymous with the preservation of the dominant discourse on sexual dimorphism. As such, it is useful to think of doping rules functioning to protect the naturalized gendered body as a concept, rather than protect individual bodies from health dangers caused by doping products (though the latter is often alluded to, and certainly does fall within the remit of anti-doping agencies). 

If we are to imagine a world where female athletes have reached the endurance capacity repeatedly predicted by sports scientists, and as such surpassing current male performance, can we also see a world in which the doping products currently used by endurance athletes become synonymous with unnaturally raising men to women’s athletic level? For example, Erythropoeitin is a drug that causes the body to produce oxygen-carrying red blood cells at a rate and density far higher than can be achieved without medical intervention. It is easy to draw an associative chain from blood to the heart, which sits in contrast with the head. Do we then reach a feminized drug, which can serve to elevate male biology to perform at a comparable level to the female body? And does the drug disrupt the gender order, even if it helps reproduce male superiority (or at least mitigate its decline)? Or does the metaphoric heart lack the evocative power of the genitals and erogenous zones altered by steroids? Perhaps sporting equality will open up a new lexicon for doping.

Related reading:

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:

Not for girls: Muscles and contact sports

Within female bodybuilding there is an incomplete divide between compliance and resistance. This incomplete divide complicates attempts to theorize the practice: we cannot read it purely as a challenge to the gender order, nor solely as a site in which gender binaries are reinforced through performance. 

The performative nature of the bodybuilding contest is not restricted to displaying the physical body, but is performative in gender terms too. In a curious reflection of the modality described in Young’s Throwing Like a Girl, female bodybuilders in these contests strike feminine poses. Yet, unlike Young’s findings, this feminine body comportment motility is inscribed within the rules of the sport. Female bodybuilders are expected to dress differently, act differently, and, crucially, even look differently: Scott points out that female bodybuilders have special dispensation to undergo breast augmentation, despite this appearing entirely counter to the idea of building a body through action. The body of the female bodybuilder must be surgically altered to retain the “natural” shape expected of women. 

Yet it is precisely this performativity that makes bodybuilding such a disruptive practice from a gender perspective. Muscles are usually coded male (despite no dimorphic musculature structure existing) and so the presence of muscles on a female body, as well as the mundane codified acts that female bodybuilders must undertake in order to reassure observes of the athlete’s femininity and physical sex, render visible the fragility of the gender order. Coles argues that, like drag performers, the female bodybuilder operates tangentially to the visual register, complicating it through compliance, and thus resisting a normalized position in the gender binary. 

Related reading: