{"id":3137,"date":"2018-09-04T00:42:56","date_gmt":"2018-09-03T22:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=3137"},"modified":"2018-09-08T20:00:13","modified_gmt":"2018-09-08T18:00:13","slug":"beyond-the-gender-boundary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/beyond-the-gender-boundary\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the gender boundary"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the (northern) summer of 2018 has drawn to a close, there has been extensive media discussion of women\u2019s bodies \u2013 not that that is unusual: all manner of media platforms are sites for commentary on and policing of women. The last few weeks have been particularly notable, however, in part because of the sheer pettiness of the policing, at least on tennis courts, and in part because of the fight back we have seen against body control and disciplining.<\/p>\n

It is timely to remind ourselves that the instances of repressive body control and discipline we\u2019ve seen of late have not been one-off or the product of the views of retrograde individuals but systemic. It shouldn\u2019t need to be said, except that we\u2019re surrounded by discourses that celebrate the individual as a change-maker and achiever, as an oppressor and villain, downplaying collective activities and systemic relations. It is easier if we can reduce the good and the bad to the singular, and if movements can be personified in a leader or representative, be they Pankhurst or Putin, Trump or T\u00fapac Amaru, but it silences those who struggle. Too often, those of us in and around sport weaken those struggles by failing to look beyond the boundary, and missing the places where issues in our world connect to other fields and practices. This is pervasive in sport’s banal, mundane and extensive control of women.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Much of the policing of women\u2019s bodies is about clothing, which in many areas of sport turns on definitions of appropriate sportswear, eroticism and the scopophilic. In some case, we find very narrow and highly specific rules: many sports have prescriptive uniform requirement rules, and that\u2019s not even taking into account contact sports. In other cases, the rules are much more open to interpretation, which leaves athletes at the mercy of judges and officials (and admittedly here there is a case to be made for retrograde individuals).<\/p>\n

The policing has been most obvious in tennis. There is the case of Aliz\u00e9 Cornet<\/a>, reprimanded by an umpire at the US Open for adjusting her shirt courtside (she\u2019d put it on back to front) and in doing so exposing her bra. Now, this was a sports bra \u2013 not unknown as a sole item of upper body clothing for women athletes on hot days, an item of clothing that became an icon of women\u2019s athleticism when Brandi Chastain whipped off her shirt in a goal celebration during the 1999 Women\u2019s Football World Cup \u2013 and entirely appropriate wear for a serious athlete. There was a public outcry \u2013 at the penalty, not the sartorial correction \u2013 on the basis of equality, principally. The line of reasoning went, why penalise Cornet when on hot days the chaps get their shirts off courtside between sets to cool down? The US Open organisers apologised to her, and that was that. Except that we\u2019ve not heard that much about the apology, just the chastisement. That\u2019s a potent silence that polices.<\/p>\n

More high profile has been the edict by French Tennis Federation President Bernard Giudicelli that Serena Williams\u2019 \u2018catsuit\u2019 would not be allowed again<\/a>. Williams is currently the darling of the tennis circuit, quite properly \u2013 she\u2019s a great player, she has wonderful on-court and media presence, she\u2019s getting kudos for an impressive return to the game after the birth of her daughter at the beginning of the year. What\u2019s more, her clothing choices have long been a subject of commentary and she\u2019s got a sense of style about her presence and appearance. On top of that, the French Open \u2018catsuit\u2019 was also reportedly designed so that the leggings helped lessen the risk of blood clots, which have been a concern since giving birth. Giudicelli\u2019s attempt explicitly to control women\u2019s on-court appearance annoyed many. Williams has been clear in her statements that Grand Slam tournaments get to make their own rules; that still didn\u2019t stop her turning out a few days later in what looked remarkably like a tutu, with all the symbolism that has \u2013 of delicacy, of athleticism, of power, of grace. It\u2019s hard not to read that as a rebuttal of Giudicelli\u2019s policing; it has certainly endeared her to many.<\/p>\n

Williams was not the only athlete answering back to Power by her actions in the last week of August. At the same time as she was appearing in the US Open the Asian Games took place in Jakarta. These are not events that ever get much coverage around the North Atlantic, partly because sport media coverage is notoriously nationalist in its frames, and partly because of deep-seated orientalist structures in global news media. The big story in the Asian Games for me was not a winning time but the silver medal won by Dutee Chand in the 100m<\/a>.\u00a0 Chand\u2019s medal is as much, if not \"\"<\/a>more, of a statement of defiance as Williams\u2019 tutu because of its more direct global systemic significance. Outside India, many of us are only aware of Chand because of her successful 2015 challenge to the IAAF\u2019s hyperandrogeny regulation<\/a>\u00a0attributing some athletic success by women to an \u2018excess of testosterone\u2019 (it was a little more complex than that, but not much). The Court of Arbitration in Sport struck down the regulation and gave the IAAF 2 years to produce evidence that would allow a high testosterone measure as an indicator of hyperandrogeny and a source of competitive inequality in track events. The IAAF came back with one, it seems seriously flawed, study resulting in a new regulation affecting middle distance runners only: Caster Semenya being the highest profile athlete affected. It is bad science and governance to base any regulation on one scientific study, no matter how good that single study is. The IAAF has made sure that the hyperandrogenism question remains an on-going struggle<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 but for me, Chand\u2019s medal \u2018gives the finger\u2019 to the IAAF: the organisation had used and is still using bad science to try to define \u2018woman\u2019 for athletic events. Chand in response seems to say: \u2018you tried to tell me I wasn\u2019t a woman, I beat you in court and look here I am, still competing\u2019. It was also a moment of personal success; it is a victorious moment to relish.<\/p>\n

These are exciting moments of rejection of patriarchal efforts to control bodies, to define bodies, to police women: Williams is important because her individual act reminds us of the absurdity and contingency of rulemaking; Chand, though, is important because her court case supported by activists, scholars and lawyers<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 feminists struggling for social justice through the law, through science, through community activism \u2013 changed the system, at least temporarily. Chand might be the personification of a wider movement; although that doesn\u2019t make her success any less sweet as we are inclined to see only the individual.<\/p>\n

One of the problems in making sense of these cases is that in sport studies we\u2019re not very good at making the links to other aspects of body policing and patriarchal power. There is a powerful counterintuitive issue current in the fashion industry, specifically \u2018modest fashion\u2019. It is precisely the oxymoronic suggestion of \u2018modest fashion\u2019 that makes it so compelling and important. It is a trend that has grown out of Islamic fashion: there has been a small group of high-end designers working in that field for several years, but \u2018modest fashion\u2019 has a much greater reach. It is a challenge on two fronts: one is to patriarchal power and a masculinist gaze that determines how women\u2019s bodies appear and are performed in public; these bodies must be seen, must be clothed and must move in particular ways. The second is to an orientalist outlook that denies the fashionability of modest (halal) clothing, wrapped up in the language of the dull uniformity and oppression of the burka, the niqab, the jilbab, the hijab. Modest fashion, which now extends to a market well beyond the fashionable Muslimah to include many \"\"<\/a>non-Muslim women uncomfortable about the defining male gaze, resists patriarchal power in favour of women\u2019s agency; its presence is growing with a notable impact in the industry\u2019s front people if the current profile of Shahira Yusuf<\/a> or Halima Aden is anything to go by. Residents of the San Francisco Bay Area are lucky to have a major exhibition<\/a> due to open late this year. Yet despite the centrality of bodies in movement to industries such as contemporary fashion, despite the similarities in the politics of women\u2019s bodies in sport and fashion and despite the profile developments such as modest fashion are getting, we\u2019re analysts of two industries (sport & fashion) that largely ignore each other.<\/p>\n

By not paying attention to the kinds of insight the fashion industry can give us, no matter how much we in sports studies talk about these issues of women\u2019s body policing and therefore gender policing only in sport, we\u2019re doing little more than critique. If, instead, we built these links between challenges to control across boundaries we are better able to explore the systemic means of policing. A likely effect is a greater impact through more support for struggles bringing about change, helping more people to see their world differently and bringing about change more effectively \u2013 but to do that we\u2019ve got to break institutional barriers (our university employers are becoming increasingly silo-like, and we\u2019re enforcing disciplinary boundaries in part through the plethora of journals and rigidity of the walls we erect to mark the remit of our work) and stop reading only the sports pages. Until then, we\u2019re shouting into the void.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the (northern) summer of 2018 has drawn to a close, there has been extensive media discussion of women\u2019s bodies \u2013 not that that is unusual: all manner of media platforms are sites for commentary on and policing of women. The last few weeks have been particularly notable, however, in part because of the sheer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":3156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-okategoriserade"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t