Sex and gender are in the news again. While in the academy boundaries are blurred and sex as well as gender can be seen as socially constructed and subject to social and cultural inscriptions that shape classification, in sport there remain very clear definitions of female and male with competitions being for women or for men. Things may not be quite so clear, however as is evident in the enormous coverage given to the 800m gold medallist Caster Semenya. She is fast, so fast that other athletes questioned whether she was a woman, leading the IAAF to instigate gender verification tests, albeit in a procedure that, quite wrongly was leaked before the final at the World Athletics Championships in August.

Caster Semenya
[image © copyright José Goulão, some rights reserved]

As a sociologist who writes about bodies in sport, I feel fortunate to have been asked to comment, if depressed that many of the media interviews have been prefaced by some reference to Semenya’s ‘masculine’ appearance. It is hardly surprising that the athlete has a lean body with muscles; most athletes do. Bodies are shaped by sporting practices and these practices shape sport, but bodies are gendered and women in sport have to negotiate racialised, heterosexist stereotypes. Semenya’s raised levels of testosterone may tell us more about what happens to the body of an elite athlete than establishing any certainty about gender categories.

The debate, especially as manifest in media coverage, has invoked expert scientific and medical commentary in its path from claims of unfair practice and a body variously described as ‘manly’ and with a ‘strikingly musculature physique’ to sympathy for defiant resistance to the humiliation of gender verification testing and the claims that this very fast woman, must be a man.

Gender testing has a long history in sport, even though compulsory tests were abandoned at the Olympics in 1992. Tests have changed from those based on the embodied features which ‘experts’ can see to DNA and chromosomal tests to the current more complex panoply of procedures that include psychological testing. Perhaps there is some acknowledgement of the complexity of gender identities and the weakness of a distinction based on the categorisation of human beings into two sexes; intersex and a range of different forms of development mean that many people than we imagine do not conform neatly to the clear genetic and physical criteria that the regulatory bodies of sport deploy.

The very term 'gender verification' suggests that we could get at the truth. A team of experts will find out, but gender is more complex. The current coverage of Semenya's case illustrates how troubling gender is in sport. Images draw upon stereotypes of what constitutes masculinity and femininity in the current case, as in so many in the past. Women athletes have to reassure us of their femininity, through comportment and appearance, even when they, through the body practices of their sport, necessarily have very different bodies from their female non-sporting counterparts.

Public debate is always framed by a moral discourse of 'fair play' that invokes the unfair advantage that men who pass a women might gain in sport, but what is most alarming and distressing about these cases is the humiliation that women undergo in being subjected to 'verification' and the public and expert scrutiny that is reserved for women. The drug testing which has largely replaced the genetic testing in the Olympics could be carried out without a specifically gendered emphasis. Then maybe we could celebrate the achievements of a woman who can run very fast.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

Subscribe to Kath Woodward's posts

 

Cricket has been in the news. The move of the IPL (Indian Premier League) to South Africa after the attacks on the Sri Lanka team in Lahore is clearly a big news story on the international politics pages as well as, if not more so, than on the sports pages. The future of the IPL is crucial to the economic survival of the sport; a key matter in these times of economic recession and decline in sports sponsorship. These worrying times mean that news of success in sport is even more welcome.

The most successful cricket story for English cricket fans in recent weeks might, or should have been, England winning the world cup -no not the England men’s team, but the women’s team, beating New Zealand by four wickets to win the ICC Women’s World Cup in March 2009.

Yes, there was media coverage (the six best games were broadcast to 100 countries world wide) and even interviews with captain Charlotte Edwards on BBC radio sports programmes and not just Woman’s Hour. Even cricket fans might have trouble naming the members of the team though. What’s happening here-or not happening for women’s sport? It’s not just that we can’t name the team; we don’t really know anything about the players even if we do their names.

Women’s games do get a bit more coverage now, if nowhere near as much as men’s cricket, but that’s the only reason the sporting public are not as engaged with women’s sport as they are with men’s. Sport generates its own meanings and what happens on the pitch or in the field matters, but why are the fans not so gripped by the tensions and excitement of women’s sport? Success in competition provides a great impetus for creating wider interest; think of the 2005 Ashes series and the great boost given to English men’s cricket by their success. Success can go a long way towards encouraging young people to play, although the resource problem applies to men’s and women’s cricket, but tradition means the situation is worse for the women’s game. However, the increased interest in men’s cricket after 2005 came partly from the increased coverage of cricketers off the pitch as well as on.

Although sport is enmeshed with popular culture, which is often seen as a female terrain of interest in celebrity, we read more of the feelings and inner lives of male cricketers than female. Kevin Pietersen’s anxieties about being away from home and on losing the captaincy almost get more coverage than his competence on the pitch.

This is not a superficial point. The women’s team are not represented as complex real people in the terrain of popular culture which means that the success of the team doesn’t have the same resonance. The politics of success in sport includes a range of different materialities, of resource and of organisations and institutions, of the sport itself and how it’s played, and of culture and representation.

Media coverage is just one of the dimensions of sporting success, as I’ve argued before in this blog; visibility matters but it’s the form it takes that matters too. Visibility extends beyond ball by ball coverage (although that would be great); being in the public eye can contribute to how success is seen and understood and how much or how little those in sport can benefit from success on the field.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

Subscribe to Kath Woodward's posts

 

In sport athletes sometimes push themselves to the limits and beyond. Boxers still come out when they should probably stay in their corner and throw in the towel. Corporeal achievement is crucial, so perhaps it’s not surprising, even if damaged limbs and a whole season out or even a career destroyed are sometimes the outcome.

In other areas of experience, where bodily competition is not so central, it may be more difficult to comprehend the French justice minister Rachida Dati’s decisionto return to work only five days after giving birth by caesarian section. Perhaps, as an ambitious, successful woman of 43, she was anxious about showing any signs of weakness?

Rachida Dati.
[image by Ma Gali, some rights reserved]

It certainly made the papers and she did look stunning: a supreme embodied achievement. It was newsworthy, because most people don’t don 5 inch stiletto heels a few days after surgery, even if they have a reputation for wearing stunningly fashionable clothes and dressing impeccably in the day job. The tabloid press did focus on what she was wearing with some voyeuristic pleasure, for example the Daily Mail’s concern with her being ‘more glamorous than ever’.

More seriously, could it be the feminist concerns with women’s hard won rights to maternity leave being so flagrantly disregarded by a high flying successful woman in high office that make this an important matter to explore in the political public arena? As Madeleine Bunting noted in the Guardian, 'this is bad for her and bad for us too’.

As a public figure, Dati also has some responsibility and her actions have meanings about what is important for all of us. Dati’s actions make it clear that, not only are the rights that women have fought for to protect their physical well being as mothers, but also the relationship between the mother and her child which represents emotional intimacy, much less important than career success. Breastfeeding her baby and its accompanying intimacy will be very difficult under these circumstances, but although breastfeeding may be promoted by health professionals it occupies a very uneasy place in contemporary culture.

Bunting’s feminist political argument is countered by French claims that things are different across the channel, as Agnès Poirier argues. Poirier suggests that ‘French women view themselves as women first, mothers second’ and ‘don't see maternity as their sole raison d'être. You could call it feminism’. However, it is still more usually women who give birth and women who breastfeed. (A US woman who had her breasts removed, grew a small beard and became legally male as Thomas Beatie, subsequently gave birth very publicly as a man, albeit with a woman’s reproductive organs, apart from the excised mammary glands. The beard, like the shoes, may be a distraction).

There are, of course different feminisms, but Poirier’s version is somewhat disembodied with no recognition of the specificities or values of embodied experience. Resting after major surgery, accessing the legal and civil rights that are embedded in contemporary neoliberal governance and investing in emotional life do not constitute throwing in the towel or turning your back on competition and success.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

Subscribe to Kath Woodward's posts