Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality

Jennifer Hargreaves, Eric Anderson, Jennifer Hargreaves, Eric Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138694064
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136326950
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality brings together important new work from 68 leading international scholars that, collectively, demonstrates the intrinsic interconnectedness of sport, gender and sexuality. It introduces what is, in essence, a sophisticated sub-area of sport sociology, covering the field comprehensively, as well as signalling ideas for future research and analysis. Wide-ranging across different historical periods, different sports, and different local and global contexts, the book incorporates personal, ideological and political narratives; varied conceptual, methodological and theoretical approaches; and examples of complexities and nuanced ways of understanding the gendered and sexualized dynamics of sport. It examines structural and cultural forms of gender segregation, homophobia, heteronormativity and transphobia, as well as the ideological struggles and changes that have led to nuanced ways of thinking about the sport, gender and sexuality nexus. This is a landmark work of reference that will be a key resource for students and researchers working in sport studies, gender studies, sexuality studies or sociology.

1

SPORT, GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Surveying the field

Jennifer Hargreaves and Eric Anderson

Introducing the Handbook

When Senior Commissioning Editor, Simon Whitmore, invited us to edit this Routledge Handbook of Sport, Gender and Sexuality for the Sport and Leisure list, we grasped the opportunity to produce—in a single publication—a notable resource for academics, and an informative and interesting book for sport professionals and general readers. The result is a handbook that is wide-ranging across different historical periods, different sports, and different local and global contexts. It incorporates personal, ideological and political narratives; varied conceptual, methodological and theoretical approaches; and examples of complexities and nuanced ways of understanding the gendered and sexualized dynamics of sport.

To accomplish our task, we sought chapters from established scholars who have made important contributions to the field of sport, gender and sexuality, as well as from emerging scholars who are breaking new ground. We also looked outside the field of sports studies to those from other disciplines and to some outside academe. We wanted to reflect the growing interest in sports studies in countries outside the West, but found difficulty securing enough contributions to give a truly global feel to the Handbook. The lack of literature in the developing world in the specific field of sport, gender and sexuality, and the problem of writing in English for non-English speakers, were major barriers. However, we have allocated one section of the Handbook to countries from across the world, and there are contributions about non-Western countries in other sections as well. The chapters are original, written specifically for this Handbook. The outcome is an eclectic range of contributions and topics.

Featuring the sport, gender and sexuality nexus

From the mid-nineteenth century, when modern sport in the West took an organized form, right up until the present day, it has been a distinctly gendered activity. So, it is to be expected that using gender as a conceptual and organizing principle for a handbook about sport provides essential knowledge about sport’s fundamental character. However, because sport has been dominated by men, the focus on gender is very often equated with the story of “women in sport” and their struggles over many years for equality with men.

In this Handbook, we have included several contributions about women’s sport based on rich empirical data. But we recognize that gender is a very complex and changing social category of analysis both in relation to the “opposite” sex and within one’s sexual category. Thus, it is insufficient only to show evidence of male and female differences and women’s accomplishments. Crucial to gender’s complexity is its close relationship to sexuality, both in terms of cultural practices and sport specifically; so that we cannot discuss one without the other.

In Western societies a gendered dichotomy between males and females—known as the gender binary—has been socially constructed in accordance with commonsense interpretations of biological sex differences. We are influenced in all aspects of our lives by the gender—masculine or feminine—to which we are socially ascribed at birth. Because of the strength of the association between the male and masculinity and the female and femininity, even though “gender” (a cultural category) and “sex” (a biological category) are not synonymous, in commonsense discourse they are used interchangeably. Together, they have produced dominant ideas of males and females, masculinity and femininity; ideas that were cemented into sport during its early history and subsequent spread from the West to other countries throughout the world.

But gender is not innately connected to one’s physical anatomy, but, more accurately, to the interconnections between sex and gender, and to one’s sense of biological self and personal identity (both of which may vary from what is socially ascribed). The different chapters of this Handbook thus recognize the complexities of both sex and gender in different sports and varied social contexts. This is the same with sexuality; it may vary widely from the heterosexual–homosexual binary commonly ascribed.

Taking account of all fifty-two chapters, it is clear that there is huge gender and sexual diversity in sport; a diversity which reflects the personal preferences of sportsmen and women and breaks down commonly-understood norms of gender and sexuality. It is clear, too, that patterns of male and female participation, concepts of self as male or female, and biological or assigned sex, alongside sexuality, have changed historically in ways relating to scientific, cultural, social and political ideas and practices. This Handbook incorporates numerous ways in which the gendered character of sport is inseparable from sexuality and how gender and sexual identities have influenced, or been influenced by experiences in sport.

Consider, for example, that sports are closely aligned to the moving physical body, to its musculature, strength, speed, skill, agility and artistry. Unsurprisingly, because sports clothing is typically sparse, and/or clings to the body, the “actual” body can be seen or imagined. In the associated practices of changing and showering, the body is stripped naked for fellow athletes, trainers and friends to see. It is not unexpected that the capacity for human beings to enjoy the sensuous nature of the moving body and to have erotic feelings is commonplace in sport. For example, increasingly, and explicitly in the case of athletes in soft-porn poses photographed for publicity calendars, the bodies of sportswomen and increasingly sportsmen are openly sexualized (Coad, 2008). The aim is to build on the public acclaim of successful athletes in order to infuse desire, even arousal, leading to the successful commercialization of the sexy sporting body. The experiences of sexuality in sport have meaning because they are linked to those in society at large. We are bombarded by images and discourses of sexuality and by cultural ideas of beauty and fitness which become part of taken-for-granted, everyday life.

We want to emphasize that the socially constructed sporting body is readily experienced as sensuous, eroticized and sexualized, by both performers and spectators. But we want to emphasize, too, that for most people the immediate focus of sports participation or viewing is not sexuality—it is the love of the game, the hope of staying healthy, or to win medals. But for many who love sport, its sexualized culture has presented barriers to participation.

Until relatively recently, the complex characteristics of sport, gender and sexuality were always framed according to heterosexual norms, putting pressure on many young males and females with different sexual orientations to compare their own body-types and identities with those of mediated images of young, beautiful and desirable (by implication heterosexual) bodies, not infrequently leading to a hatred of having their own bodies on view and even to a loathing of sport in general. Through history, fear of homophobia has encouraged most players with non-normative sexual orientations to hide their differences, to pass as straight. Homosexuality has been systematically vilified in sport, with consistent attempts to negate homoeroticism in sex-segregated sports by framing same-sex desire as taboo (Pronger, 1990). In recent years, however, notably in the West, a rapidly growing recognition of sexual diversity and greater tolerance of homosexuality has led to a relative lessening of homophobia (Anderson, 2009) and bisexual phobia (Ripley, Anderson, McCormack and Pitts, 2011) in sport. But in many countries outside the West, homosexuality remains illegal and frequently sanctioned by criminal prosecution, including the death penalty. In these cultures, gay and lesbian sportsmen and women stay deeply closeted, fearful of exposure for their safety. Troubles and struggles have been amplified for those who are transgendered or intersexed athletes. It is only just now that the West is beginning to recognize that sexual diversity is more than just homosexuality, it is also biological diversity.

Many chapters of the Handbook highlight the multiplicity and complexity of both gendered and sexual orientations in sport. Although simplified notions of gender and sexuality (male–female and gay–straight) were dominant in early social accounts of sport, their complexities should be fundamental to the practice and analysis of all sports and physical cultures in future research.

Gender and sexuality in sport scholarship and practice

It is because the formation of modern sport occurred in the West, and it was in universities in particular in Canada, the UK, and the USA that pioneering research was carried out and publications and courses in sport studies occurred, and that the generalizations we make about sport in this chapter, unless otherwise identified, concern Western contexts.

A wealth of popular writing about sport has been in evidence for many years (going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century). There were sports reports, histories, autobiographies, biographies, films, and novels. Together, they amount to a long tradition of celebrating men’s sports and men’s lives in sports, especially those that arguably reflect the essence of sport’s hypermasculinity: cricket, rugby, soccer, American football, ice hockey, baseball, boxing, and horse racing. But with very few exceptions, there was a failure to systematically record the history of women’s participation in sport.

The huge imbalance between the public’s recognition of men’s and women’s sports incorporates, in the first place, a long-established commonsense ideology that males, by their very natures, are more suited to take part in energetic and aggressive forms of physical activity than are females. Secondly, it reflects the power of men to dominate sport participation, mediation, management, and finance.

Unsurprisingly, when sport history and sociology became newly-accepted academic disciplines in the 1970s, the gender imbalance was repeated, and though increasingly residual, is still in place today. In sport history texts accounts of men’s sports, written by men, have overwhelmingly predominated, and in sports sociology, men’s participation was the main focus of analysis. Women tended to be relegated to a separate chapter of their own, and not integrated into the general theoretical arguments. Citing several sports academics from North America and Western Europe who constitute the early social theorists of sport—all of whom are men—John Hargreaves (1982) has argued that the main thrust of their approach—either explicitly or implicitly—was functionalist (pp. 34–35). He maintained that they viewed sport as a means of helping in the formation of “stable identities or personalities” and thus supportive of existing social arrangements. Social divisions such as class, gender and sexual orientation were in general treated as descriptive categories of difference and not as relations of power.

It was also in the 1970s that the first wave of female sports academics addressed the marginalization of women in sport and in the academy. Ann Hall, an early pioneer of sport feminism explains:

Despite the growth of the sociology of sport in the 1970s, it was clear that girls and women were not represented in the studies and literature. By 1976 there were 13 texts and anthologies (all from the United States) with a sociology of sport focus. Of those, only three had a separate chapter or section devoted to females, and of some 200 separate articles in the anthologies, fewer than one tenth were written or co-written by women. The material on females in these texts and anthologies represented less than 3 percent of the total content. This made me angry.

(1996: 6)

Hall and other “angry” female colleagues in the field responded by positioning women as the subjects of research, articles and books. Their early work was important for putting women “on the map” with detailed accounts of male domination and gender inequalities. Over the following years, the concern for a more critical and insightful analysis was fuelled by developments in sport sociology and theoretical trends in mainstream sociology and cultural studies, as well as radical advances in feminist analysis (Lorber, 1998).

In the USA, sport feminist intellectuals were also lobbying for social and legal reforms in order to achieve equality of opportunity between the sexes. In 1972, Title 1X of the Education Amendments Act was passed. It was intended to remove advantages on the basis of sex in programmes receiving federal funding. The effect was an immediate and dramatic increase in resources and participation rates for school-age girls and undergraduate students. But later, following the integration of men’s and women’s sport departments and programmes, the men secured most of the senior coaching, leadership and decision-making positions, reaffirming their dominance (Hargreaves, 1994). Soon after, in 1975, the UK Sex Discrimination Act, and then the work of the UK Sports Council, made arguments for gender equality more powerful, leading to improvements in opportunities for females in both the public and private sectors of sport.

Legislation in most Western countries has resulted in improved opportunities and, significantly, has made women more aware of sporting possibilities. Increasing numbers of women were prepared to struggle for cultural and legal equality in sport. Those theorizing about sport and those working in practical sport (often the same people) were becoming more demanding and more sophisticated in their arguments and strategies. Their efforts were influenced by advances in women’s rights and the growth of a Western feminist movement. In effect, cross-fertilization between theory and practice was born.

The 1980s and 1990s women’s movement

By the 1980s, there was growing interest in theoretical ideas that took account of social relations of power. In 1982, Sport, Culture and Ideology was published, edited by Jennifer Hargreaves and based on an interdisciplinary conference of the same name. An important theoretical rationale for the conference was the emergent and fast-growing field of cultural studies, and in particular, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, which was used to explain the contradictory features of connections between culture (sport), ideology, and economic and political aspects of the totality. The book was a critique of the empiricist, atheoretical tradition of historical and comparative studies of sport, a compilation of “facts” characteristically taking primacy over interpretation. Described as “a watershed text” for sport scholarship in the social sciences, it provided a more complex way of understanding sexual divisions and male dominance in sport.

Two chapters were specifically about women. First, “Women and leisure” (Griffin et al.: 88–116) was written by a group of four committed feminists who described patriarchy as “a situation of dominance of men over women … based on at least two major facets: control over women’s sexuality and fertility, and the sexual division of labour”. They stressed “the importance of race, gender and class as fundamentally structured in relations of power” and went on to highlight the importance of “the ways in which these relations interweave” and “are constructed and expressed through dimensions of age, physical ability, and so on” (p. 89). Sensitive to the “specific view of women”, they explored the social conditions that, characteristically for women more than men, militate against time and autonomy for leisure (sport). Second, “Women in sport in ideology” (1982: 117–135), was a revised version of a paper given by Paul Willis at the “Women and Sport” conference at Birmingham University in 1974. Willis argued that because biological beliefs about gender differences in sport appear as “natural”, we take them for granted. “The natural”, he explained, “is one of the grounds of ideology...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Sport, gender and sexuality: surveying the field
• PART I Historical perspectives: links between past and present
• PART II Views from countries across the world
• PART III Diversity and division
• PART IV Gender conformity and its challenges
• PART V Homosexuality: issues and challenges
• PART VI Questioning and transgressing sex
• PART VII Power, control and abuse
• PART VIII Gender and sexuality in the mediation of sport
• Index