Gender Politics and the Olympic Industry

H. Lenskyj

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349450763, 9781137291141
• eBook ISBN: 9781137291158
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how the Olympic industry has shaped hegemonic concepts of sporting masculinities and femininities for its own profit and image-making ends, examining its continuing marginalization of athletes on account of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class.

1

Introduction

Abstract: This chapter discusses the author’s background and the experiences that inform the theoretical and methodological approach used in the book, that is, an intersectional analysis of gender politics and the Olympic industry. A rationale for the structure of the book and an overview of each chapter are provided, as well as an explanation of the scope and limits of the research.

Lenskyj, Helen Jefferson. Gender Politics and the Olympic Industry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137291158.

In 1985, when I was writing Out of Bounds: Women, Sport and Sexuality, an analysis of the history of women and sport in Canada, the US and the UK from the 1890s to the 1980s, I was guided by radical feminist Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality, in combination with neo-Marxist insights concerning “common sense” and hegemony.¹ In short, as I would have summarized it at the time, the history of western women and sport is a history of male control over middle-class female sexuality, with the growth of women’s sport viewed by the ruling gender-class as a threat to patriarchal hegemony.

Following its publication, one favourable review noted that the book served as a “Rosetta Stone” that helped to decode a century of constraints on women in sport.² I am now undertaking a similar decoding of Olympic history by broadening my original focus on what contemporary theorists term “heteronormativity.”³ The use of gender or sexuality as sole categories of analysis risks perpetuating “the whiteness of sport studies and queer scholarship,” as Mary McDonald demonstrated in a 2006 article that critiqued, among other examples, Pat Griffin’s 1998 book Strong Women, Deep Closets and my 2003 book Out on the Field: Gender, Sport and Sexualities.⁴ As McDonald rightly noted, although the importance of an intersectional focus, looking at race, sexuality, class and nation, was mentioned, that analysis was not fully developed in either book.⁵

Much has changed in critical sport scholarship since the 1980s, and the theoretical insights of the past three decades need to be taken into account. These developments have been influenced by significant work in critical race studies, globalization studies, transnational feminist theory, cultural studies, queer theory and various interdisciplinary fields. Since the categories of sex, gender and sexuality are further complicated by race/ethnicity and social class, they need to be considered in more nuanced ways if they are to have explanatory value in relation to the Olympic industry.

My first direct encounter with the Olympic industry occurred in 1990 when I was contracted to write a research report on the status of women in the Summer Olympics for the City of Toronto Olympic Task Force. In the late 1980s, Toronto was organizing its bid for the 1996 Olympics, the first of two unsuccessful attempts to date. Around the same time, I heard about the Bread Not Circuses (BNC) coalition, a group of community organizations that was opposing the Toronto bid. Its position was grounded in a socialist analysis of the negative impacts of the Olympic Games and other sport mega-events on vulnerable populations in the host city and region, as well as the drain on public money, the environmental impacts and the threat to human rights.⁶ In 1998, when Toronto was bidding for the 2008 Olympics, I joined BNC, just months before the International Olympic Committee (IOC) bribery scandals were exposed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

A 1992 conference paper on community involvement in Toronto’s 1996 Olympic bid process marked the beginning of my research on a set of social institutions that I term “the Olympic industry.” As I have explained in earlier work, I use the term “industry” to draw attention to the fact that sporting competition is the mere tip of the gigantic Olympic industry iceberg. Profit-making is the name of the game, and the International Olympic Committee, multinational sponsors, broadcast rights holders, real estate developers and the high end of the hospitality and tourism industries take home the gold. These aspects of the Olympic industry are largely concealed from view, thanks to a generously funded public relations machine supported by largely uncritical mainstream media.

In my critical Olympic research since 1992, I have examined issues of gender and sexuality, and in my research on gender and sport, I include Olympic-related topics. This book brings all these themes together. The scope is broader than my work on sport and gender, in that I pay particular attention to intersectionality, that is, interlocking systems of oppression based on gender, sexuality, social class, race and ethnicity, as played out in Olympic governance, international and national sports organizations, the mass media and the sport community. In existing research on historical and contemporary issues in women’s sport, as well as in western sport feminists’ political organizing, there is a longstanding pattern of reliance on a liberal analysis of women and the Olympics and an emphasis on reform, trends that I have critiqued extensively in the past. In the following chapters, I use insights from transnational feminism, radical feminism, critical race theory and cultural studies to continue that critique and to expose aspects of discrimination and oppression that have often been neglected in Olympic studies, sport sociology and sport history research. In doing so, I uncover the connections among these systems and the opportunities for resistance.

Over a span of more than 30 years, my work has reflected a combination of qualitative research methods, including participant observation in Canadian and Australian anti-Olympic groups, and interviews with recreational and elite athletes, activists, community leaders, environmentalists, housing advocates and investigative journalists. In addition, I have conducted content analysis of print and visual media sources, archival research and online investigation of resistance movements and the new social media.

The sport sociology subfield of Olympic studies, with some exceptions, has not arrived at what Australian sociologist R. W. Connell termed the “ ‘ethnographic moment’ … in which the specific and the local are in focus.”⁷ Sport ethnography was considered an emerging trend in 2002,⁸ but, in relation to the Olympics, structural barriers have limited researchers’ access to high performance athletes and to the inner workings of the Olympic industry. More ethnographic research would supplement the few biographies and autobiographies that have been published, and would add invaluable depth and insights into the experiences of Olympic athletes with diverse sexual and social identities. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview former Olympic swimmer Nikki Dryden, now a human rights lawyer, and her insights and her experiences as a young athlete have added immeasurably to this book.

The secondary sources that I have used cover many fields, including sociology, history, philosophy, social psychology, education, women’s studies and cultural studies, leading to an eclectic theoretical approach. All these methodological approaches and bodies of literature are reflected in the following chapters. Because I taught in the area of women’s studies from 1986 to 2007, my focus on gender has tended to be a focus on women, but the intersectional analysis used here broadens the scope of the discussion.

My original plans for the organization of the book changed as I began to write. I had divided Olympic history into two convenient periods – from 1896, the year of the first modern Games, to 1936 and from 1948, when they resumed after World War II, until the present. This periodization worked well for some but not all of the themes that I planned to investigate. It soon became apparent that my goal of identifying continuity as well as change required an overview of developments throughout the 20th century and into the 21st rather than an arbitrary division between the two periods. Nor is the discussion of historical themes purely chronological. There are countless examples of issues and controversies that arose in the early 1900s reappearing in slightly different forms to constrain women and disadvantaged minorities throughout the century, and some are recurring in the second decade of the 21st century. The most significant issues have involved the rulings of the IOC and international sport federations, media coverage, societal attitudes and the views of so-called experts on sex, gender and sexuality. Equally important, many resistance movements had their beginnings in the first period, and some of the early liberal versus radical debates that arose within these organizations in the early 20th century are still in evidence today.

It will soon become apparent that this book does not attempt to provide a comprehensive history of every Olympic Games, every sport or the experiences of every national team since 1896. There is more extensive discussion of summer sports than winter, and there is more sustained analysis of sports such as track and field, swimming and skating, mainly because of the many controversies over the male and female sporting body that have been played out in these contexts. For a thorough social history of the Olympic Games, sport historian Allen Guttmann’s extensive list of publications will answer almost any question.⁹ Although I have found his books indispensable, like other sport historians I challenge some of his analyses, but he is not, of course, the only scholar whose interpretations of Olympic history are scrutinized in the following chapters.

Among the secondary sources, in addition to the broad surveys of Olympic history, there are invaluable accounts of individual women and minority athletes, as well as events and themes hidden from history, in the pages of sport history journals and conference proceedings. The biennial International Symposium for Olympic Research held at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, since 1992 offered welcome opportunities for presentations and critical dialogue on these issues. A particularly significant contribution comes from Native Canadian scholar Christine O’Bonsawin, whose work I have cited extensively. There is a dearth of sport-related research written from the “insider” perspective of a minority group, one outcome of the systemic barriers based on gender and ethnicity that operate within the academy.

Writing about the experiences of Olympic athletes outside English-speaking countries presented the usual challenges. As transnational feminists explain, uncritical reliance on secondary sources authored by western scholars risks perpetuating ethnocentric and/or racist assumptions. As a result, some topics are not examined in detail because of a dearth of reliable sources in English, and I have been cautious about citing work by “outsiders.”

Another chapter in my original plan would have focused specifically on “the usual suspects,” as I termed them: the mass media. I soon realized that media coverage of Olympic sport, and the media’s contribution to, or generation of, controversies involving women, ethnic minorities and sexual minorities, was an integral part of every chapter, and should not be isolated from the rest of the book. I did not conduct a comprehensive review of the large body of research on media treatment of female Olympic athletes, since this is a particularly well-researched field in sport sociology and communication studies. Content analyses and quantitative surveys of print media are relatively easy to conduct online, and this may be a factor in their popularity. However, some discussions of media coverage present a decontextualized analysis of texts and images, and questions of intersectionality are sometimes overlooked. I found that the integration, rather than separation, of media-related themes provided a more effective means of conducting an intersectional analysis.

In yet another departure from my original outline, I have integrated examples of resistance to Olympic hegemony – the alternative international sporting festivals organized by women, gays and lesbians, workers, Indigenous peoples and other groups – throughout the book, as well as devoting a separate chapter to the topic. By doing so, I make resistance a continuing and salient theme.

Another early inclusion and later omission in the book was the topic of disabled sport and critiques of the Paralympic Games, in the broader context of the politics of disability and the disability rights movements of the past few decades. These important issues merit a book-length discussion of their own. Since by definition achievement sport recruits and rewards the fastest, highest and strongest athletes, the Olympic door is already closed to many people with disabilities. As sociologist Karen DePauw’s 1997 analysis shows, the ideal body in Olympic sport is represented by the able-bodied male athlete, thereby marginalizing women and people with disabilities. In this context, Paralympic athletes and the Paralympic Games will inevitably be measured against the so-called real Olympics, a trend reflected in condescendi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Beyond Binaries: An Intersectional Analysis
• 3 The Limits of Liberalism: Sex, Gender and Sexualities
• 4 Challenges to the Olympic Industry
• 5 In the Pool, on the Ice: Contested Terrain
• 6 Sex and the Games
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index