Sports Charity and Gendered Labour

Catherine Palmer

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781800434295
• eBook ISBN: 9781800434301
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In cities around the world, in parks and roadways, people are taking part in sporting charity challenges. Corporate sponsorship has transformed these events into philanthropic endeavours that bring corporate marketing strategies together with medical research and social care agendas.

Despite this growth in popularity, little academic attention has paid attention to the ways in which gendered labour shapes the nature of sports-charity events.

Sports Charity and Gendered Labour explores a series of questions about the meaning and politics of physical activity, and notions of gender, labour and responsibility.Drawing upon auto-ethnography, studies of major events, in-depth interviews, and analysis of social media, Sports Charity and Gendered Labour provides examples for teaching and knowledge sharing across analyses of gender, sport, leisure, health and wellbeing in ways that will have broad relevance to a range of audiences.

1

Sport, Gender and Charity

Introduction

This chapter introduces the context of the book, the research underpinning the subsequent chapters and the key themes developed throughout. It begins with an overview of the fitness philanthropy phenomenon around which this book is based. It then turns to some of the theoretical traditions for making sense of sport and leisure as gendered pursuits and practices and considers their analytical utility for understanding the forms of labour associated with fitness philanthropy and sports charity. This provides the necessary theoretical and conceptual scaffolding on which the empirical detail in Chapters 2–5 is then hung.

This book is about sports charity. But what is sport and what is charity? Until recently, sport in Australia was defined as

…a human activity capable of achieving a result requiring physical exertion and/or physical skill which, by its nature and organisation, is competitive and is generally accepted as being a sport.

(Sport Australia, 2020)

However, Sport Australia has developed a new plan, Sport 2030, where sport has been redefined as an umbrella term for recreational physical activity, which is more consistent with established use of the term internationally (Sport Australia, 2020). The new definition of sport includes both organised competitive sports, but also encompassing a broad range of other recreational physical activities, such as walking, riding, swimming, parkour style obstacle courses and stand-up paddle boarding. This definition is more in line with many other countries which have long since adopted a broad definition of sport which includes organised and non-organised sport, as well as other leisure-time physical activity. The Council of Europe's European Sport Charter (2001) offers a useful definition that I adopt for the rest of the book. According to the Charter:

‘Sport’ means all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim at expressing or improving physical fitness and mental well-being, forming social relationships or obtaining results in competition at all levels.

This ‘broad church’ definition is adopted as it provides touch points for fitness philanthropy. Sports charity events can range from casual to organised participation (i.e. from a walk in a park to a full Ironman triathlon); they enable participants to develop and show their physical fitness and they provide an important way of forming social relationships, both through the physical endeavour itself and through the associated activities of training and fundraising. Charity is an equally contested concept. Invariably, there is some slippage between terms such as philanthropy and charity and I use both, somewhat interchangeably, in the book. Below, I offer an overview of the origins of fitness philanthropy and its position in a broader discussion about the changing nature of charity in Western neoliberal democracies such as Australia, the United Kingdom or New Zealand.

Fitness Philanthropy and Sports Charity

Fitness philanthropy describes a socio-sporting movement that mobilises charity endeavours through mass participation sporting events. Sport Aid – a global fundraising event for famine relief, inspired by the 1985 Live Aid music event at Wembley Stadium – was the defining moment in the evolution of fitness philanthropy (Bunds, 2017; Palmer & Dwyer, 2019). Sport Aid was a globally coordinated marathon event that combined ‘humanitarian aid, and sports and united several millions of people across the five continents’ (Webster, 2013, para. 1). The running boom which occurred across Europe, North America and Australia in the 1980s (Pedersen & Thing, 2016) set the scene for the growth of mass participation running events around which most fitness philanthropy is based.

Seeing the increase in road race participants, charity organisations seized on the opportunity to join with races in an attempt to raise money (Bunds, 2017; King, 2010). In the United States, the first charity to implement the strategy of partnering with an established race was the Leukaemia and Lymphoma Society when it started its programme of Team in Training in 1988, to raise funds for research into cancers of the lymphatic system. From this early beginning, Hamilton (2013) reports that road races aligned with a cause amassed US$1.2 billion for non-profit organisations in 2012, more than double the amount from 2002. In 2015, the top 30 sports-based fundraising events were reported to generate US$1.57 billion (Peer-to-Peer Thirty, 2016). In the United Kingdom, Macmillan Cancer Support raised £3.5 million through running events alone (Macmillan Cancer Support, 2015), while in Australia, in 2016, sports charity was reported to raise AUD$1.3 billion (McGregor-Lowndes et al., 2017).

Research on fitness philanthropy has typically documented individual motivations for event participation (Bennett, Mousley, Kitchin, & Ali-Choudhury, 2007; Filo, Funk, & O’Brien 2008; Won, Park, Lee, & Chung, 2011; Won, Park, & Turner, 2010), as well as the benefits that individuals derive from participation (Rundio et al., 2014). Motives for participation in charity sport events include striving to complete an individual fitness challenge, often motivated by participants' own personal loss, grief or bereavement and the desire to support efforts to cure particular diseases, notably cancers and motor neuron disorders (e.g. Gregg, Pierce, Sweeney, & Lee, 2015; Won et al., 2010). The connections between fitness philanthropy and grief and loss are addressed more fully in Chapter 3, where I explore the emotional labour associated with sports charity through the experiences of two families who turned to fitness philanthropy to raise money for cancer charities to honour the memories of family members who lost their lives to breast and brain cancer.

Fitness philanthropy has also been positioned as a mechanism that can enhance well-being at an individual and community level. Coghlan and Filo (2016) revealed that participation in charity sport events activated character strengths such as kindness/generosity, citizenship, loyalty and teamwork, hope and optimism, and passion and enthusiasm, which in turn increased participants' well-being. Coghlan and Filo (2016) also found evidence of five domains of well-being (positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment) within the charity sport event experience, with positive emotions, relationship and meaning being the most evident.

Although these findings primarily highlight well-being benefits of fitness philanthropy at an individual level, my own research suggests that fitness philanthropy can also contribute to community well-being (Palmer, 2020b). I argue that the focus on the individual benefits of fitness philanthropy, and the outcomes for charities and philanthropic organisations, has obscured the potential that fitness philanthropy offers for understanding an emerging set of circumstances for the expression of community well-being, theorised as ‘social capital’. This perspective, then

…conceives the sport-charity nexus as broader than a fundraising imperative or a motivation for individual benefits and argues instead that fitness philanthropy is an important socio-sporting movement that mobilises well-being in increasingly neo-liberal times.

(Palmer, 2020b, p. 20)

Building on this focus on the collective outcomes of fitness philanthropy, it is also possible to theorise how the pursuit of individual well-being is implicated in ethical regards for others. Hookway (2013), for example, argues that values of self-improvement and personal authenticity can be morally productive and understood as part of a virtuous ‘politics of the self’ rather than simply dismissed as narcissistic or self-serving. Indeed, this focus on individual motivations for participation in fitness philanthropy is located in a broader discussion about the changing nature of charity and philanthropy across the contours of neoliberalism and late modernity (Palmer & Dwyer, 2019; Palmer, Filo, & Hookway, 2021). Throughout book, I draw on this critique of the links between sport, charity and philanthropy through the lens of neoliberalism as it provides an important social, political and economic context within which fitness philanthropy – and the gendered labour within – has flourished.

From this background, I suggest that fitness philanthropy serves as a growing form of civic engagement which complements more traditional understandings and expressions of philanthropy, generosity and giving. As I describe in the following chapters, such expressions of generosity are not experienced equally or evenly. Class, sexuality, ethnicity and gender all intersect in different ways, with different effects and consequences, in this new landscape of sports charity.

I noted earlier that my previous research highlighted the role of gender and gendered labour in shaping the nature of sports charity events, which I was not able to fully address in that work. Clearly, there is a long history of scholarship that interrogates the ways in which gender intersects with sport in terms of participation, representation, consumption and fandom, and sports administration, among others. It is not my intention to revisit those debates here, but to provide a context from which to consider the emergence of fitness philanthropy as a novel expression of gender in sporting and leisure practices.

Sport and Gender: Theoretical (and Methodological) Traditions

The gendered labour of fitness philanthropy implicates men and women in different ways. As such I approach the empirical material with a feminist sensitivity to women's subjectivity and experiences that also underscores some of the social and structural factors that highlight how wider gender relations also facilitate (and, to a lesser extent, inhibit) men's experiences of fitness philanthropy. In approaching both, it is not my intention to treat either men or women as a homogeneous group. The empirical chapters bring to life the incredible diversity within family structures, class, race and ethnicity and age and disability of the fitness philanthropy community. Sports charity is profoundly transforming participation in Australian sport and leisure, but we are yet to consider what these transformations might mean for everyday men's and women's experiences of sport and physical activity in Australia, as a means of opening new dialogues and exploring future opportunities for understanding the gendered nature of the activities themselves.

Feminisms and Sport

As I write this, towards the end of 2019, women in sport are enjoying a long overdue day in the sun. As Toffoletti and Palmer note ‘it would seem that there has never been a better time to be a woman in Australian sport’ (2019, p. 2). Recent changes in the Australian sport landscape have drawn the public's attention to issues of gender progress. The recognition of wider media coverage, pay parity and maternity leave, among other issues, has addressed some of the working conditions of professional women's sport. Still, there is a long way to go before meaningful equality is achieved without struggle. As Australian feminist sport scholar Adele Pavlidis reminds us, women's sporting triumphs

…do not signify the end of gender-based exclusion or discrimination. Instead, these successes are part of a continual dynamic that shapes public debate over the value of women's sport and, indeed, the value of women's participation in a range of public forums.

(2018, p. 334)

It is amidst this climate of hope and optimism and yet persistent gender inequalities that a discussion of the gendered labour of fitness philanthropy sits.

That said, there is a need to remind ourselves of the intellectual and political traditions of feminism which underpin this project. Feminist scholars have made a significant contribution to advancing our knowledge and understanding of gender and sport since the 1980s. Work has variously, and by no means exclusively, examined physical education, fitness practices, media representations of women, team sports, and action sports, sports governance and administration, and the practices that facilitate and inhibit women's full participation across this broad spectrum (Birrell, 1988, 2002; Caudwell, 2011; Hargreaves, 1994, 2000; Lenskyj, 1991; Mansfield, 2007, 2008; Mansfield, Caudwell, Wheaton, & Watson, 2017; Markula, 1995, 2003; Olive & Thorpe, 2011; Parry & Fullagar, 2013; Scraton, 1992; Scraton & Flintoff, 2002; Theberge, 1985, 2002; Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018). ¹

While feminist scholars have long been at the forefront of advancing the study of sport to address the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality and ability in framing sporting encounters and experiences, the field, however, is largely dominated by research that details the gender operations of sport across North America, Europe and the United Kingdom (what is often referred to as ‘the Global North’) leaving women's everyday encounters with sport as players, audiences, workers and media subjects across ‘the Global South’ open to further investigation. While I have an intellectual and political commitment to expanding the agenda to include the voices of women from the Global South (see Toffoletti, Palmer, & Samie, 2018), this book does, however, centre on research conducted in Australia and the United States.

While feminist approaches to sport are, in many ways, distinguished by their commitment to a theoretical approach to making sense of sport as a gendered activity, it is not possible, within the limits of this chapter, to present a detailed account of any one feminist theory. My intention instead is to located fitness philanthropy within different, but intersecting spheres of women's (and to a lesser extent girls) lives across some of the central feminist debates.

Debates surrounding the gendered character of sporting practices have changed with increasing awareness of feminist theories and a more sophisticated use of particular theories. There are several strands or waves of feminist thought which have developed out of efforts to challenge the hegemony of a variety of male cultures. Thorpe, Toffoletti, & Bruce (2017) bring into conversation these waves or strands. They draw on the perspectives of third-wave feminism, post-feminism and neoliberal feminism to describe the changing operations of gender relations and the articulation of gendered subjectivities in sport. In demonstrating the ways in which each form of feminism can be used to explain how discourses of sport (and femininity) are internalised, embodied and practiced by young (sports)women, they highlight the complexity, and continuing utility, of feminisms for making meaning of, and responding to the conditions of women's sporting lives.

Indeed, within feminisms, the nature and character of different women's positions in sport and society is contested and there are overlaps and conflicts in relation to a feminist agenda (Mansfield et al., 2017). Attempting to plot a cursory view of existing material is fraught with exclusions and this is not my intention. Nevertheless, feminist theorists are distinguished by a political commitment, or sometimes an ethical commitment, to identifying and challenging social injustices faced by women (Wilson, 1986), a position adopted in this book. While running a 5 km event to raise money may seem trivial in the face of larger social injustices faced by women, its very everydayness brings into sharp relief the problems and patterns of gender power relations in sport, and the motivations and meanings of female involvement in sport. Who minds the children to facilitate training? Who organises the fundraising within a family? Whose bodies are front and centre in advertising for cancer campaigns? Fitness philanthropy is no less a space through which to articulate the political commitments of feminists in challenging the gendered nature of sport.

Men and Sport

While the primacy of men's participation in sport across those areas where women are marginalised and under-represented has been the subject of critique and challenge from feminist scholars, I suggest that the challenge tends to be levelled at particular versions of masculinity and sport; that conceived as ‘hegemonic masculinity’. The concept owes its intellectual legacy to the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell (1987, 1995), and can be understood as a representation of what men should be and do (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Hegemonic masculinity provides a theory for the ‘pattern of practices that legitimize the patriarchal system in society’ (Martinez-Garcia & Rodriguez-Mendez, 2019, p. 2). Essentially a culturally idealised form of ‘being a man’, hegemonic masculinity is both a way of identifying and understanding those attitudes and practices among men that involve men's domination over women and the power of some men over other (often minority groups of) men.

While hegemonic masculinity continues to have considerable theoretical traction, scholars are increasingly recognising that masculinities (plural) are a contested concept (Anderson, McCormack, & d Lee, 2012; Flood, 2002, 2008; McKay, Messner, & Sabo, 2000; Pringle, 2005, 2011). Anderson (2005, 2009), for example, distinguishes hegemonic masculinity from orthodox masculinity, arguing that ‘scholars frequently confuse Connell's notion of hegemonic masculinity as a social process with the archetype described as maintaining social dominance’ and that it is the ‘presentation of the archetype that is esteemed in sporting cultures as orthodox masculinity’ (Adams, Ander...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Sport, Gender and Charity
• 2 Embodied Labour and Sports Charity
• 3 Emotional Labour and Fitness Philanthropy
• 4 Families, Fitness Philanthropy and Domestic Labour
• 5 The Enterprising Self: Philanthropic Labour and Sports Charity
• 6 Reflections on Sports Charity and Gendered Labour
• References
• Index