{"id":4095,"date":"2021-09-12T17:20:55","date_gmt":"2021-09-12T15:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=4095"},"modified":"2021-09-12T19:13:15","modified_gmt":"2021-09-12T17:13:15","slug":"she-came-out-of-nowhere-the-racialisation-of-emma-raducanu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/she-came-out-of-nowhere-the-racialisation-of-emma-raducanu\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018She came out of nowhere\u2019: the racialisation of Emma R\u0103ducanu"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

It\u2019d take a certain level of curmudgeon not to have been even just a little bit taken by the women\u2019s competition at the 2021 US (Tennis) Open, and the seemingly irresistible rise of Emma R\u0103ducanu. After all, here the winner was an 18 year old qualifier playing in her second Grand Slam having only been in the WTA main draw for 4 months (after a wildcard entry at Nottingham in June 2021). Class background aside, the summer of struggles and successes is more like the plot line of an improbable but emotionally powerful made-for-TV movie than professional sport. It becomes even more improbable when we see that she had beaten last month\u2019s Olympic champion and didn\u2019t drop a set in the two week competition, or when we saw (or learn) that she\u2019d fallen worryingly at a key moment in the final, that she\u2019d expected to be knocked out of the competition early on so that when she picked up the trophy her flight home was nearly a fortnight ago, and that her opponent in the final, Leylah Fernandez, was also a teenage (relative) newcomer. At the beginning of the summer neither was ranked in the top 50 (R\u0103ducanu was ranked 150), and both make their only slightly younger peer Coco Gauff, with a couple of seasons in the main draw under her belt, seem old at 17 (let alone Serena Williams who\u2019d won four Grand Slams singles titles before R\u0103ducanu was born).<\/p>\n

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Emma R\u0103ducanu during a 2018 Wimbledon qualifying match (source Wikicommons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s a story that is crying out for mythologizing, fairy tale clich\u00e9s from the sporting and other commentariat. Of course, we have had them with much of the coverage of R\u0103ducanu\u2019s summer soaked in forms of awe at \u2018magical runs\u2019 combined with variously subtle and explicit infantilisation and denigration. Much of this was associated with her 4th<\/sup> round withdrawal at Wimbledon \u2013 although the assorted assertions of a lack of \u2018resilience\u2019 (a laudable virtue made dangerous by its appropriation in neo-liberal valorisation) look shallow, as do the patronising \u2018cut her some slack, she\u2019s just a kid\u2019 (as opposed to a novice) approaches (which I found myself checking in my mid-summer responses, the infantilisation of women athletes is a powerful force).<\/p>\n

The clich\u00e9 that has been most prevalent in the UK (at least) is more insidious, in part because it is seemingly less problematic. Much of the discussion \u2013 in various media settings, across metaphorical (for those of us working from home) or actual water coolers and no doubt other settings \u2013 has included some version of the statement that \u2018she came out of nowhere\u2019. It\u2019s easy for us to look at that and treat it as some kind of vacuous journalistic space filler, as a kind of \u2018um\u2019 before moving on to the next point of substance. Easy as that may be, it is dangerous: one of the really interesting things about clich\u00e9s of this kind is not how often the commentariat use them, but how we take them for granted and therefore the sort of ideology-work they do.<\/p>\n

The most obvious bit of ideology-work this phrase does is maintain the fantasy of sporting genius and meritocracy as a necessary explanation for the explosion on the scene of a previously unknown, prodigious new talent (sport is only one of many cultural industries that maintain this fantasy \u2013 music does something similar). Not only is this fantasy powerful, it is also a formative force in contemporary corporatized, capitalist sport \u2013 but before we go there, the phrase does at least two the things of note.<\/p>\n

First, to use the \u2018she came out of nowhere\u2019 clich\u00e9 as much as they do does no favours to the commentariat; it makes them seem unaware of the sport they are reporting on. In doing so, however, we can see a concealment of this ideology-work. The phrase invites an empirical response of the kind that goes: \u2018OK, you may say that but you\u2019re missing years of training, playing the circuit, county competitions and more\u2019. This response is entirely factually correct \u2013 but facts are of little use in rebutting ideology with its common sense power and affective appeals to emotional truths. That \u2018she came out of nowhere\u2019 reinforces one of sports\u2019 most powerful fantasies of \u2018natural talent\u2019 as being enough. Yet this in itself is among the least of the clich\u00e9\u2019s dangers.<\/p>\n

Second, that \u2018she came out of nowhere\u2019 can also be seen through the increasingly powerful discourse of ethno-nationalisms associated with the extreme right wing, fascist facilitating forces, in global politics, including the dominant fraction in Johnson\u2019s Tory government that is shaping current British political discourse. The British are very keen to claim athletes as theirs, building of the fantasy of, with a couple of notable exceptions, having invented and exported sport in a fully formed manner to the rest of the world (they\u2019re also good at blurring distinctions between British and English, but that\u2019s another issue of persistent imperialism).<\/p>\n

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Leylah Fernandez, summer 2021 (source, Wikicommons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

R\u0103ducanu is hard to fit into this ethno-nationalist fantasy of sporting Britishness, being of Chinese and Romanian descent and born in Canada. If the notion of a young woman standing in for the nation wasn\u2019t problematic enough, her Chinese-Romanian heritage must be sending these ethno-nationalists into a spin. In the UK, China is being built up \u2013 much as it is elsewhere \u2013 as the major threat to \u2018Western\u2019 political, economic and cultural power and influence, even while it remains vital as a market, financial, investment and manufacturing source. What\u2019s more, during the vicious frenzy of anti-immigrant claims in the lead up to Brexit, Romanian workers were high among the list of EU arrivals alleged to be threatening the British way of life (their absence from agricultural workforces since Brexit is a different story). The negative imagery of both states means that \u2018coming out of nowhere\u2019 allows R\u0103ducanu to be relatively smoothly hailed into Britishness: she is not racialized as problematic, but is safely \u2018from nowhere\u2019. That she is a tennis player is also a big part of this \u2013 the standing of tennis as a national marker means that it is unlikely that Fernandez, also Canadian born and of Ecuadorian and Filipino descent, would be as problematic in the Canadian context.<\/p>\n

This problematic ethno-nationalist context sits alongside another form of racialisation in and of sport that gives the clich\u00e9 its third and most insidious form of power, the one that sustains Whiteness. The subtext of the empirical response noted above is one that undercuts the fantasy of the dominance of \u2018natural talent\u2019 that has framed the myths of sport throughout modernity. This fantasy is most obvious in the way athletes of African descent as well as many Indigenous peoples are constructed \u2013 as vigorous, virile, licentious bodies where corporeal power is held to be a marker of intellectual limitations and must be constrained and ’tamed’, appropriated and sidelined. This myth of \u2018natural talent\u2019 also sustains the normalisation of Whiteness as the defining reference point balancing body and mind, the physical and the intellectual, and casts athletes of colour, of majority world descent, as aberrant and in need of discipline and control.<\/p>\n

That R\u0103ducanu is cast as \u2018coming out of nowhere\u2019 shifts her to this majority world descent group (racialized as not \u2018really\u2019 White, but in being from \u2018nowhere\u2019 able to be hailed into Whiteness). While the clich\u00e9 allows her to be claimed as British it also implicitly (in its ideology-work) invokes this ambiguous Whiteness and therefore her \u2018natural talent\u2019 as the primary reason for her extraordinary success. This is a version of racialisation that sustains, in a complex relationship, the myth that athletes are not workers (including because they have \u2018natural talent\u2019) that is at the heart of many of the current struggles for justice in US college sport or that there is a genetic basis to racialized sporting participation and successes. It is a racialisation that underpins key aspects of contemporary capitalist sporting labour and its associated forms of exploitation.<\/p>\n

The clich\u00e9\u2019s power then lies in its appeal, first, to the myth of \u2018natural talent\u2019, second, to the deeply ingrained sense of sporting Whiteness allowing R\u0103ducanu to be accommodated as British and, third, to the power of sport\u2019s meritocratic fantasy. The ideology-work of the \u2018coming out of nowhere\u2019 clich\u00e9 points to the vital role of the commentariat in maintaining regimes of power through sport. It should also not distract from R\u0103ducanu\u2019s success: I remain more than slightly in awe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019d take a certain level of curmudgeon not to have been even just a little bit taken by the women\u2019s competition at the 2021 US (Tennis) Open, and the seemingly irresistible rise of Emma R\u0103ducanu. After all, here the winner was an 18 year old qualifier playing in her second Grand Slam having only been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":4111,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_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}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4095","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-okategoriserade"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/emma-raducanu.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JbBl-143","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}