Heroines of Sport

The Politics of Difference and Identity

Jennifer Hargreaves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134585304
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Heroines of Sport looks closely at different groups of women whose stories have been excluded from previous accounts of women's sports and female heroism. It focuses on five specific groups of women from different places in the world: Black women in South Africa; Muslim women from the Middle East; Aboriginal women from Australia and Canada; and lesbian and disabled women from different countries worldwide. It also asks searching questions about colonialism and neo-colonialism in the women's international sport movement.
The particular groups of women featured in the book reflect the need to look at specific categories of difference relating to class, culture, disability, ethnicity, race, religion and sexual orientation. In her account, Jennifer Hargreaves reveals how the participation of women in sport across the world is tied to their sense of difference and identity. Based on original research each chapter includes material which relates to significant political and cultural developments.
Heroines of Sport will be invaluable reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sport sociology, and will also be relevant for students working in women's studies and other specialized fields, such as development studies or the politics of Aboriginality, disability, Islam, race and sexuality.

1 Introducing heroines of sport

Making sense of difference and identity

Introduction

Who are the ‘heroines of sport’? This book does not provide a simple answer. It is not a straightforward celebration of the feats of individual women, as the question might suggest. The concept of the heroic is examined through analysis of the struggles and achievements of specific groups of women whose stories have been excluded from previous accounts of women’s sports and female heroism. It focuses on five specific groups of women from different places in the world – South African women; Muslim women from the Middle East; Aboriginal women from Australia and Canada; and lesbian and disabled women from different countries worldwide. The women selected for investigation are from historically marginalized groups who have had to struggle against particularly harsh forms of discrimination to take part in sport and have constructed their own sporting identities in changing and difficult conditions. Their struggles in sport are social as well as personal, linked to specific cultural, economic, political and religious contexts and to global processes. Heroines of Sport interrogates topical and polemical situations and has a strong international dimension. It is, fundamentally, about human agency.

The question of the heroine

A culture is remembered for its heroes and heroines, and sport constructs them and influences our perceptions of them continuously. In popular consciousness, heroes and heroines are men and women who are ‘larger than life’, ‘inspirational icons’, special people with extraordinary qualities that are constructed and represented in particular ways to encourage us to admire and idealize them. In other words, heroes and heroines are socially constructed through discourses and meanings and values that change over time. But heroes are more easily defined than heroines and there is greater social importance attributed to the production and celebration of male heroism. Bob Connell (1987: 249) argues that hegemonic masculinity is naturalized in the form of the hero who is conventionally strong, aggressive and brave. Muscular tension is associated with human endeavour and struggle – climbing mountains and fighting dragons – and heroism is symbolized in the muscular male body. Sportsmen, then, easily transform into heroes. Athletes in ancient Greece were seen as heroes, their exploits functioning symbolically as heroic feats. Kenneth Dutton (1995: 26) explains that ‘The athlete modelled himself on the hero of myth, and in doing so took on much of the symbolism of heroic stature.’ Sportsmen today are readily heroised when they break physical barriers, endure adverse conditions, overcome seemingly impossible obstacles, drive their bodies to the limit, risk death, and go further, higher and faster than any other living men. Pat Griffin (1998: 25) suggests that ‘For many people the male team-sports hero is the epitome of masculinity: strong, tough, handsome, competitive, dating or married to the most desirable woman.’

Heroines are usually defined differently. It has been argued (with reference to literary heroines) that ‘there is a basic contradiction in the idea of the heroine. She [is] required to be both heroic – superior or exemplary in some way – and female – inferior by definition’ (Thompson 1993: 397). Selfless and courageous acts of humanity, associated with caring, kindness, motherliness and morality – essentially ‘feminine’ attributes – are ascribed to the traditional heroine. According to these characteristics, there is inconsistency in becoming a sporting heroine. ‘Yet’, Tuttle (1988: 10) argues, ‘women are often, undeniably, and visibly, heroic, even according to male definitions of heroism.’ Certainly, throughout the history of modern sport, there has always been a small number of adventurous women who have transgressed gender roles, taken up ‘manly’ sports, such as boxing, baseball, car racing, flying, mountaineering and soccer, and shown consummate skill and broken records equivalent to those of male sporting heroes. But the public response has been ambivalent. Since the 1920s, characterized as the ‘Golden Age of Sport’, the media has transformed top female performers into folk heroines and figures of international stature, and some of them became household names throughout the Western world. But according to Creedon (1994: 114), writing about the USA, they were portrayed as ‘feminine and fashionable, health conscious in their leisure pursuits, as goddesses rather than as athletic heroines’. The small numbers of women who took part in aggressive, muscular, traditional male sports had their sexuality denied, were labelled ‘mannish’ or ‘freakish’, presented as androgynous or, more usually, as ‘super-feminine’. There was always a feminizing code – as Tuttle (1988: 10) puts it – ‘to neutralize the effect of the transgressive act’. Sally Munt (1998: 3) refuses the term ‘heroine’ because of its inferior gendered status, evaluated always ‘in relation to’, and a female version of, the prototype masculine hero. I continue to use it in order to suggest that the women I am writing about can reclaim it as a specifically female term relating to their own struggles and achievements.

The small but growing volume of women’s sporting histories (e.g. Cahn 1994; Festle 1996; Jones 2000; Stell 1991)¹ illustrates clearly that women have been much more a part of the sporting lives of different nations in the world than has previously been believed, taking part in a wide range of activites. Today, throughout the West, and to a lesser extent in other parts of the world, women are bending mainstream definitions of gender and taking part in all types of sports, including masculinized sports in dramatically increased numbers. They are boxers, soccer and rugby players, bodybuilders and weightlifters, and they take part in the macho and risky worlds of free climbing, iron-man events and eXtreme sports … and so on. Sportswomen in the new millennium are breaking the physical boundaries of the past (Hargreaves 1994; Vertinsky 1990) and producing new cultural and sporting identities. They do so as part of their everyday lives. However, those who are successful become ‘ambiguous’ heroines, treated differently from men and still struggling for equal support and recognition. Take, for example, mountain climbing and the quest to reach the summit of K2 – the second highest mountain in the world after Everest. K2 is known as the ‘Killer Mountain’ – for approximately every three to four climbers who reach its summit, one will die. In August 1995, Alison Hargreaves’ name was added to the list of victims of K2 when she was swept away in violent winds on her descent from the summit. Three months earlier she had become the first ever woman (and the second person) to make a solo ascent of Everest without oxygen and she had wanted (and became) the first person to climb the world’s two highest peaks in the same calendar year. On both occasions, the fact that Alison Hargreaves was a mother of two young children was highlighted in the British media. However, whereas following the successful Everest climb her identity as a mother did not prevent the media from constructing her at the same time as a national (British) heroine, the first woman to achieve such a spectacular feat, her death on K2, described by a reader as ‘an irresponsible act’, began a furious debate about ‘motherhood, ambition and risk’ (Rose and Douglas, Observer 8/8/99). Because climbing has the potential for accidents and deaths, there has been fierce opposition to female participation, and because Alison Hargreaves was a mother of two young children the debate focused on whether she should have been on K2 at all. She had behaved like a man, arguably putting her sport and the excitement, danger and fame it entailed before her children and her role as a mother. Her heroism was conditional upon her safe return to her children. No such condition is placed upon men – their deaths are the purest symbols of heroism. No comparable comments about fatherhood were made in the British press about the four men who died on the mountain the same day.

Controversy surrounds the differential treatment of men and women in sport: the glorification of male achievements and the downgrading of women’s achievements. Gendered heroism is being constantly challenged by women who are appropriating the narratives of maleness and transforming themselves from victims into superstars. According to many feminists, to claim an identity that used to be exclusively male in a macho, sexist culture is symbolically heroic. However, what is often forgotten is that the fierce concern for equality props up the violence, corruption, commercialization and exploitation that plague men’s sports. Jeff Benedict (1997: 217) argues that, ‘At a time when society is searching for legitimate heroes, the traditional credentials of heroism – courage, honesty, bravery, self-sacrifice – are being replaced by visibility, wealth, and fame.’ Furthermore, there is a trend for hypermasculine sportsmen who are the perpetrators of extreme violence and serious abuse to be allowed to continue their careers as public heroes (1997: 217). There is no evidence that female sports stars are equivalently violent, but they are constructed via the same imperatives of the sports industry and the same ideologies of aggressive and exploitative competition that construct the male sport hero. The modern-day popularized heroines of sport are trained and marketed for entertainment and spectacle; they are the products of a system which consistently induces them to abuse their bodies, tempts them to use unsporting and damaging performance-enhancing agents, and produces them as sexualized commodities for a global audience. In many respects, modern-day heroines of sport are manufactured clones of each other.

The liberal sport feminist position which argues for equality of participation and resourcing on a par with men through the removal of the social impediments that prevent female participation, has failed systematically to challenge the established and destructive principles of mainstream sport (M.A. Hall 1996: 90–1; Hargreaves 1994: 26–9). Liberal feminism, then, implicitly supports the creation of commodified and glamorized heroines of sport, a position which is opposed by radical sport feminists who question sport’s global relations of power and exploitation and the values upon which the production of modern-day sport heroes and heroines is based. For example, Helen Lenskyj – a Canadian academic – takes an openly radical feminist stance. She opposes the destructive values inherent in the dominant model of competitive, aggressive sport, in particular the ideology of violence inherent in elite male sport (1992, 1994). She is one of a growing body of women – including academics, campaigners, journalists – whose relationship to sport is based on ethical and welfare criteria. Working outside the mainstream facilitates the creation of new models of sport authentically connected to power, knowledge and emotional life. For example, sport has been integrated into the women’s health movement. ‘Race for the Cure’ (USA); ‘Against the Tide’ (USA) and ‘Race for Life’ (UK) are fun runs and fun swims that encourage a positive, healthy and holistic approach to exercise, raise consciousness about cancers that affect women, and raise money for research. These are shared political activities that bring into the open women’s experiences of their bodies and that treat the body as subject, in contrast to the objectified body of the heroine of elite sport. They make the knowledge and experience of bodies important and central to identity, but in ways that feature sensuous pleasure and control rather than commodification, denial or estrangement. In this perspective, competitive individualism is replaced by a shared culture of caring and ethical lifestyle.

Women have also been active in the fields of humanism and biopolitics. For example, the movement known as ‘Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet’ has supported a campaign to stop sports goods manufacturers using cheap child labour in developing countries (Green Guide 21/3/97). They have also opposed the environmental hazards associated with golf courses that despoil the land and habitat and spread contamination to surrounding areas. There is a struggle in sport between environmentalists and those who wield economic and political power. Women are active in this struggle and have played a crucial role in questioning the modernist conception of progress and the domination of nature by rich developers. In many and varied locations, sport is a despoiler of nature. The Himalayas – including Mount Everest and K2 – are examples of sport locations that are being systematically despoiled by the increasing numbers of ‘package climbers’ – including women – who are part of a growing sport leisure industry. But remarkably few of our ‘media heroines’ of sport connect their roles as stars with politics and ethics. Most of them have been ‘selfish heroines’ who seek individual glory and financial gain; most of them have failed to speak out openly to oppose the damaging features of modern-day sport – even the ones that may affect their own specific sport or event. The main thrust of women in sport has been to follow the men and to ignore the ‘dark side of sport’. Because popular heroic narratives are so concerned with the creation and representation of the individual, collective struggles and achievements are underplayed and often ignored. Women who take a stand – often against fierce opposition – and argue for new uses of sport that are humane and intrinsically enriching, and who speak out and take action on such issues as health and the environment, are generally little-known actors. They are the ‘unsung heroines’. There is a strong argument for returning to the 1970s’ anti-individualistic feminist principle that commodified heroines/stars should be replaced by ‘real’ women (Munt 1998: 2).

As well as masking the harmful features of modern sport, popularizing the individual heroine tends also to legitimate inequalities. The production of the heroine implies that the system allows success and makes everything possible. Her visibility exhorts us to believe that she is representative, not just of something special, but of ‘our’ nation, ‘our’ community. But women are not homogeneous. The creation of heroines of sport withdraws attention from the general position of the majority of women in sport; it masks the differences between different groups of women both within nations and between nations. Constructing heroines removes guilt. This book looks closely at different groups of women about whom very little is known and very little has been written. By telling their stories, the significance of diversity and difference among women in sport becomes apparent and, specifically, the categories of difference relating to class, culture, disability, ethnicity, ‘race’, religion and sexual orientation. Heroines of Sport recognizes the complexities and multiplicities of late capitalist/postmodern/postcolonial societies and engages with recent debates around ‘identity politics’ and the ‘politics of difference’, with the particular as opposed to the general.

Exclusion, difference and identity

Most histories and sociologies of sports, as well as popular books on sports, are written by men about male sports. But even when women are the focus of attention, another process of exclusion is taking place. On the one hand, deriving from the project of ‘modernity’, is the unified conception of women – as distinctly different from, and subordinate to, men – reflecting a struggle against patriarchy as the major mechanism of power and oppression. Much of the early sport feminism adopted this oppositional form of discourse, framed by the gender equity debate. It is what Ellen Staurowsky (1998b: 7) describes as ‘adversarial, in both tone and nature, as seen in linguistic devices such as the “battle of the sexes”, a “dispute”, a “fight”, and a “tug-of-war”’. Intrinsic to this approach was the concept of ‘women in sport’, implying that sportswomen are a homogeneous group with a common, shared culture. Since the dominant female sports culture is assumed to be White, Western, middle-class, heterosexual and able-bodied, women who come from minority groups and from countries outside the West have been marginalized, and their experiences, problems, struggles and achievements have been excluded from mainstream history and practice. The concept of homogeneity systematically excludes particular groups and discourses by treating them as ‘Others’. The method is to treat White, Western, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied women’s experiences as the norm and other women’s experiences as ‘different’. Cassidy et al. (1995: 32–3) explain that universalizing whiteness in feminism:

includes thinking, imagining, and speaking as if whiteness described the world. Racism, for example, engenders white solipsism by allowing White women the power to make it seem as if their own experience is wholly representative of all women’s experience. Black women, Native women, disabled women, in fact, most other women, are left out without anyone noticing they are absent.

Avtar Brah (1991: 171) asks the question, ‘How may “difference” be conceptualized?’ In answer to her own question, she goes on:

At the most general level ‘difference’ may be construed as a social relation constructed within systems of power underlying structures of class, racism, gender and sexuality. At this level of abstraction we are concerned with the ways in which our social position is circumscribed by the broad parameters set by the social structures of a given society. … Difference may also be conceptualized as experiential diversity. Here the focus is on the many and different manifestations of ideological and institutional practices in our everyday life.

Brah is pointing here to the way in which difference is constructed at different levels – at the level of the subject and at the level of institutions and politics. Heroines of Sport recognizes both and explores the relationship between the two. It recognizes that a sense of difference and patterns of exclusion arise from diverse mechanisms of power and oppression which are complexly articulated one with another. The construction of some groups of women as outsiders which stems originally from structures of domination and subordination can result in very personal and poignant experiences. The sense of exclusion can be strongly felt even within radical programmes specifically aimed at inclusion, explained here by an Aboriginal sportswoman who was a member of an ethnically mixed team on a sports scholarship: ‘I just feel different … it’s to do with belonging … Mainstream women make us feel different. They don’t have to say anything … it’s just the way they talk about the world and the way they talk to us – you know not with us.’

In the 1960s, the powerful sense of difference and exclusion experienced by Black Afro-Americans, as a result of personal and structural oppressions, initiated the growth of civil rights and Black power struggles. They in turn fostered the development of other ‘new’ social movements, including the women’s liberation movement and the gay and lesbian liberation movement (see Chapter 5). Previously clear-cut distinctions between the private and the public were broken down and the lives of people from oppressed or marginalized groups became inescapably politicized. The new social movements were connected to people’s lived experiences, and through difference and sameness a radical form of identity politics developed. Zaretsky (1995: 244) explains as follows:

Sparked by the African-American and other freedom struggles, and by the women’s liberation movement, a new type of politics emerged in the United States, Canada and Europe in the 1960s. ‘Multiculturalism’, ‘class, race and gender’, ‘identity politics’ and the ‘politics of difference’ are among the concepts and slogans it has generated. Its defining idea is that no superordinate group appellation, such as ‘man’, ‘humanity’, ‘the working class’ or ‘the American people’, should be used without recognizing the differences that exist within the aggregate – such differences as male and female, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing heroines of sport: making sense of difference and identity
• 2 Race, politics and gender: women’s struggles for sport in South Africa
• 3 The Muslim female heroic: shorts or veils?
• 4 Aboriginal sportswomen: heroines of difference or objects of assimilation?
• 5 Sporting lesbians: heroic symbols of sexual liberation
• 6 Impaired and disabled: building on ability
• 7 Struggling for a new world order: the Women’s International Sport Movement
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index