A Performative Feel for the Game

How Meaningful Sports Shape Gender, Bodies, and Social Life

Trygve B. Broch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030351281
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030351298
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Applying a cultural sociology of performance, this book interrogates how the meaning of sport intersects with gender. Trygve B. Broch points out uncertainties in the causal arguments made by key figures in the cultural studies tradition, instead advancing a meaning-centered study of sports as involving both a social and an athletic performance. Sports not only reflect or reverse social realities, but capture and keep our attention when we use and experience them as a means to reflect on social life, injustice, and hierarchy. More specifically, blending approaches from media studies with ethnography, Broch explores the women-dominated sport of handball in Norway, a country that considers gender equality a basis of democracy. As such, the analyses here show how broadly available meanings about sameness and equality are mediated and experienced through a performative feel for the game.

© The Author(s) 2020

T. B. BrochA Performative Feel for the GameCultural Sociologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender

Trygve B. Broch¹

(1)

Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Elverum, Norway

Trygve B. Broch

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

During the 1970s the Norwegian handball federation decided to invest in their female players. In their talent-pool, women outnumbered men by two-thirds and the best female athletes were far closer to the top international level than the men were. When Norwegian handball made its decisive breakthrough with a World cup bronze in 1986, attention was focused on the women. Not all the game-parts of this quiet 1980s revolution were televised but the strategy was visibly paying off. 33 years later, 27 medals richer, 12 of them gold, the team draws about 1.6 million viewers in their country of about 5 million citizens. Until recently, the men’s team has resided in the shadow of the women, with only scarce media attention and still being outnumbered in the federation. Despite their brave participation on the global stage, in comparison to the first sex of Norwegian handball the score count remains 27 to 2 medals. Named “the almost team,” the public imagination has long defined the men handball as the second sex of the game.

How does the meaning of sports intersect with gender? Critical theorists have answered this question in plenty. They hold that gender is about inequality, conflict, and the rational pursuit for power. Sports mirror this social reality, they argue, and proceed in critique. Indeed, sports do create inequalities, a ritualistic separation of winners from losers. Contest is at the very heart of its organization and makes it tempting to forge realism with criticism. But, sports are also about cultural mastery, of belonging and emotional impact. Sports carve out worlds filled with magic, drama, and irrational significances. This enchanted prospect not only shapes its organized play but also its power over gender inequality and social action. Sports are part of our projects of solidarity, never fully obtained yet shared attempts to use codes, myth and narratives to shape moral action. Meaningful sports are the achievements in which actors deal with conflict and solidarity in ways that can sustain its actions. It is here, in the interpretive drama of sport that its emergent force to shape the material and gendered life resides. Sports meaningfully intersect with gender at its many junctures of solidarity and conflict . We need both sides of the story and document its clashes. Such will be my argument.

Numerous critical theorists have studied sports as narrative, ritual, and performative. After the cultural turn, they have used these concepts to stoke “the utopian and dystopian imagination of the reader.”¹ In eloquent ways, they have got at the polluted inequalities that surround and saturate sport. Fruitfully so, a wealth of research documents how sports were historically produced by men, for men, to breed patriarchal masculinity. Today they still often start out and end with this thesis of sports as male preserves and women athletes as contested terrain. To the point in which analytic results have become predictable and scholarly efforts seem to have fading returns. Critical theory or cultural Marxist sociology , has thus become problematic and in need of a cultural sociology, or a new-Durkheimian sociology, to balance the books.² Certainly not the functionalist Durkheim postulating ritual consensus but one that is rebuilt in the light of a cultural sociology of how meaning is, at times, a messy realization.³ Paradox, dynamics, and contest—variation, creativity, and breaches must remain central to the study of power. My way to get at this is by revitalizing a set of modalities used by the cultural theorists of the past to show how sport, play, and games allow us to question inequality and shape freedom. A cultural sociology of performance allows us to study how cultural codes, myth, and narratives enter the sport experience through play. The result is a deeply interpretive alternative studying how webs of significance mesh sport and society on the court.

Barthes (2007) argued that sport is a social theatre in which actors and audiences share in cultural experiences and analysis. Sport is both dead serious and lighthearted play. Its outcome is unknown. Participants, like real-life actors, try to balance the tension between social organization and creative freedom. Universal game rules allow sports to be played globally, in spite of the national, cultural, and personal diversity of its actors. Freedom in play permits contestants and observers to give global sports its local flare and individual dazzle. Classical theorists, from Huzinga and Caillois, to Goffman and Geertz, said that game play allows meaning, attraction, and immersion by felicity.⁴ It generates magic and mystery by giving everyday life a new form. With play theory, enchantment and felicity again become central pieces to how sport puzzles society. Still, we cannot ensue analyses of sports in some old school humanities drones. Proceed to theorize or celebrate an ideal human condition by looking for a universal of our imaginative capacity and wonderful civilizations. The classics assist our twisting and turning of sport, our looking for contemporary readings of its bodies and actions. This is where it ends and where a cultural sociology of sport begins. Athletes and onlookers are always taking account and ignoring, being pulled toward action and pushed away from another. Driven between the poles of boredom and involvement, we are seduced and repelled by our conceivable worlds of meaning. Performance theory allows us to reveal how this happens, how particular cultures elicit specific passions and guide actual choices by actors and spectators at the sport theatre. We do not have to prioritize inequalities over freedom or the social over meaning. If meaningful sports are culturally contingent, we are left at the edge of our seat to play sociological theatre critics of how sport shape gender.

Through the empirical lens of Norwegian handball, the global sport/gender-nexus is twisted in ways that allow us to pursue blind spots and challenge the alleged universality of prior studies . The critical theorist too quickly loses track of possible democratic ambitions in sports. The non-apologetic, non-gender-bending, tough women athlete is barely conceivable. Her democratic man colleague has gone missing. In Norway, handball has the merit of being a women-dominated sport in a country that makes it a point of honor to place the principle of gender equality at the basis of democracy. From the 1980s, on swells from the 1979 Law of gender equality, from the 1981 first women Prime minister and the 1984 male President of Norwegian sports strategizing about recruiting women, Norwegian handball rode the waves of the women’s movements and the huge expansion of the welfare state. With an anthropological proclivity, I am teased to imagine how these cultures can possibly have shaped gender power . How the image of the triumphant handballgirl, situated in one of the world’s most gender equal countries, has made her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender
• Part I. Media, Sport Enchantment and Gender
• Part II. Socialization, Sport Felicity and Gender
• Back Matter