{"id":4701,"date":"2023-09-13T18:28:04","date_gmt":"2023-09-13T16:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=4701"},"modified":"2023-09-13T18:28:04","modified_gmt":"2023-09-13T16:28:04","slug":"sport-socially-divided-spuriously-unified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/sport-socially-divided-spuriously-unified\/","title":{"rendered":"Sport: Socially Divided, Spuriously Unified?*"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Clare Hunt of Australia in action during the 2023 Cup of Nations match between Australian Matildas and Spain at CommBank Stadium on February 19, in Sydney, Australia (Shutterstock\/IOIO IMAGES)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is often claimed that sport has a unique capacity to unite whole nations and even the entire world.\u00a0 Especially during what Dayan and Katz in their book<\/a> Media Events<\/em> call \u201chigh holidays of mass communication\u201d like the Summer Olympics, euphoria is felt and expressed by many, not least in the media.\u00a0 When mega-events are in play, even those who do not care much for sport get drawn into the spectacle because the media paper our cultural walls with it.<\/p>\n

The 2023 FIFA Women\u2019s World Cup<\/a>, hosted by Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, is a case in point, and one strengthened by the fact that this astonishingly successful spectacle was devoted exclusively to women\u2019s sport.\u00a0 However, that there was so much surprise that women\u2019s football could attract huge stadium and TV audiences<\/a> and generate so much collective emotion highlights a major fault-line in sport\u2019s putative unity \u2013 gender.<\/p>\n

There was little time to bask in the afterglow of the Women\u2019s World Cup when the medal ceremony in Sydney was marred<\/a> by the antics of Spanish Football President Luis Rubiales.\u00a0 Having grabbed his crotch in celebration, he then forcibly kissed the lips of Jenni Hermoso, a player he was supposed to be respectfully congratulating. \u00a0The ensuing international scandal rumbles on<\/a>, obscuring the achievements of the Spanish women\u2019s team and focusing on \u201chegemonic masculinity<\/a>\u201d in football and other sports.<\/p>\n

Gender Divisions<\/h3>\n

As a social and cultural institution, sport was founded on and sustained by gender inequality<\/a>, with ramifications far beyond that arena.\u00a0 It offered an anointed space where men could assert superiority over women, naturalising their claim to physiological advantage and entitlement to homosocial congregation.\u00a0 Apart from a few individual, predominantly middle-class, non-contact sports like tennis and golf, women found little room for professional advancement in sport.\u00a0 Even in such instances, the men\u2019s version is generally deemed to be more exciting and of higher quality, and so more watchable and saleable.\u00a0 For example, why is the men\u2019s final always the climax of Grand Slam tennis tournaments, and why have the riches of Saudi-backed LIV Golf<\/a> not yet been extended to women?<\/p>\n

There are signs of progress towards gender inequality in 21st century sport, as professional women\u2019s leagues proliferate and pay parity \u2013 though not equal overall remuneration \u2013 achieved in some countries and sports.\u00a0 Yet, Forbes<\/em>\u2019 2023 list<\/a> of the world\u2019s highest paid athletes contains only one woman, Serena Williams<\/a>, at number 49.\u00a0 Having recently retired it seems unlikely that she will return to the list, although the also-retired Roger Federer remains there at number 9.<\/p>\n

Divide and Unite<\/h3>\n

Gender is but one area to be considered in answering a broad question like \u2018does sport unite or divide us\u2019?\u00a0 Of course, the \u2018or\u2019 could be replaced with \u2018and\u2019, meaning that the answer must be \u2018yes\u2019.\u00a0 Alternatively, in traditional social scientific terms, dialectical framing could be applied: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.\u00a0 In either instance, sport both unites and divides in myriad ways.\u00a0 I argue, though, that the evidentiary weight is on the side of division.<\/p>\n

It is often forgotten that sport is a specific form of institutionalised physical culture that is not an endless re-run of an imaginary Ancient Olympics, but a product of modernity.\u00a0 What we routinely call sport only emerged in the nineteenth century, when folk games became regular, regulated physical contests with rules and even laws. \u00a0It was also transformed into a valuable product that created its own industry and forged crucial links with others, especially the media.\u00a0 As Allen Guttmann<\/a> influentially put it, these developments signalled a move \u201cfrom ritual to record\u201d and, for Jean-Marie Brohm<\/a>, constructed \u201ca prison of measured time\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sport also became a compulsory part of the school curriculum and an important aspect of leisure, with the noble values of amateurism emphasising fair, honourable play.\u00a0 The ruthless pursuit of winning and, even worse, getting paid to play, created a deep divide within sporting culture.\u00a0 This split, for example, led to the secession of rugby league<\/a> from rugby union, which after a period of \u2018shamateurism\u2019 became fully professional itself.\u00a0 Today, with the development of what I call a vast \u2018media sports cultural complex<\/a>\u2019 in which staggering sums change hands and illiberal nations burnish their reputations by refining their \u2018sportswashing\u2019 techniques, the term \u2018amateur\u2019 is commonly used as an insult.<\/p>\n

Sport is a sprawling enterprise that encompasses everything that manifests in spaces from classrooms to boardrooms, parklands to cathedral stadia.\u00a0 It is increasingly difficult to think of all this as a singular phenomenon, although advocates of sport are prone to exaggerate its universality and to downplay its deficiencies.\u00a0 This is because sport and physical activity are often misleadingly combined, meaning that almost any kind of movement like a morning jog, stroll or swim can be counted as sport for statistical purposes. \u00a0But that classification evacuates its structured competitive element, not to mention the material rewarding of a minority.<\/p>\n

This blurring of what constitutes sport is the basis of one of my criticisms of Andrew Leigh\u2019s<\/a> book Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy<\/em>.\u00a0 He emphasises the virtues of sport \u201cat its best\u201d and offers a series of uplifting, heart-warming stories of sport playing a socially unifying role.\u00a0 But, to be a social scientist first and sport fan second means going beyond appealing mythologies and cherry picking the most favourable phenomena, although I\u2019m aware of sometimes engaging in the reverse practice \u2013 perhaps it could be called lemon picking.<\/p>\n

When I and colleagues at Western Sydney University\u2019s Institute for Culture and Society surveyed a representative sample of adults as part of our Australian Research Council Australian Cultural Fields <\/em>project<\/a>, we found that 61.2 per cent played no organised sport at all and only 44.5 per cent had watched sport live at a venue in the past 12 months.\u00a0 On the other hand, 84.9 per cent had watched some sport live through the media (mostly television). \u00a0So, if sport does in some sense unite us as an activity, it mainly involves watching it on screen. \u00a0We found, like other researchers, that sport participation<\/a> also varies by gender, class, level of education, cultural background, location, and age.<\/p>\n

Such variable patterns of \u2018sportingness\u2019 raise the thorny issue of who constitutes \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018we\u2019.\u00a0 Andrew is quite confident about these categories, but after conducting another ARC research project<\/a>, A Nation of \u2018Good Sports?\u2019<\/em>, in Greater Western Sydney, I am rather less so.\u00a0 I found that sport can be quite isolating in culturally diverse, demographically dynamic contexts<\/a>.\u00a0 Although, in contrast, it may also work as a conversational lubricant in helping to forge connections in the workplace between people of different origins.<\/p>\n

Sport can present barriers to people with backgrounds that make them feel isolated in, say, alco-centric sport clubs, while also presenting tantalising opportunities for gender norm resistance by girls from cultures that may disapprove of female athleticism.\u00a0 These are the complexities exposed at ground level, but they are produced under circumstances where capacities to participate in sport commonly reproduce and even exacerbate social inequalities.<\/p>\n

\u2018We\u2019 tend to think of other people as being uncannily like \u2018us\u2019 in multiple areas of life, including our experience of and orientation to sport.\u00a0 If our attitude is positive, we are unlikely to attend closely enough to the language of sport<\/a>, in media commentary, spectator talk and exchange between combatants.\u00a0 Too often what is heard is less than edifying.\u00a0 Whole nations are stereotyped as robotic or volatile; Indigenous peoples represented as both mystically talented and feckless, and people of colour animalistic and lacking in qualities of leadership; women are declared to be inferior to men, and men disparaged as feminine or stigmatised as homosexual; trans gender and non-binary athletes are called cheats and freaks; real or imputed disability is rendered as insult, and so on.<\/p>\n

I am not, of course, claiming that most sport discourse is always so damaging and negative.\u00a0 There is considerable mutual respect and kindness in sport, and progress within sport organisations and among sportspeople in ruling such hurtful language out of order.\u00a0 To pick one example more-or-less at random, it is now eight years since ACT Senator David Pocock called out homophobic abuse<\/a> on the field of play.<\/p>\n

Nor am I arguing that such attitudes are exclusive to or even over-represented in sport.\u00a0 The key point is that sport is an especially effective vehicle for hostile language and, on occasion, violent behaviour, precisely because it is structured around competition and conflict.\u00a0 Andrew Leigh is quite right to say that sport at its best is beautiful to behold. \u00a0But how often is it so?<\/p>\n

Sport<\/a> at its most professional and esteemed has developed too much in ways that prize profit over persistence, forging a Faustian pact with gambling and performance-enhancing, body-jeopardising substances, and is overly accommodating of the compulsively corrupt and the morally bankrupt.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to end on a depressing, downbeat note.\u00a0 Sport today may be on balance more divisive than unifying, but we need not abandon hope every time we enter a stadium or pass through a sport media portal.<\/p>\n

Social Goals and Penalties<\/h3>\n

To return to the gender question in our Australian Cultural Fields<\/em> research<\/a>, a striking finding was that women typically aged 35 and above, in lower management\/professional\/intermediate occupations, who had completed an undergraduate and often a postgraduate degree in the Humanities and Social Sciences outside the elite Group of Eight universities, constituted the cultural taste cluster most indifferent and hostile to sport.\u00a0 Based on stadium\/live site attendance and media statistics and my very unscientific sample of conversations with such women during and after the 2023 FIFA Women\u2019s World Cup, sport in Australia may have taken a sudden, unifying turn.\u00a0 More than once I heard that, if only more elite sport were like this, then it would soon find a loyal new band<\/a> of previously alienated adherents.<\/p>\n

The final lesson, then, is that sport can unite rather than divide us.\u00a0 All it needs to do is reinvent its structures and practices, rediscover its ethical mission, and reimagine who are \u2018us\u2019. \u00a0A societal success preferably achieved without the accompanying heart palpitations induced by a penalty shootout.<\/p>\n

\n

* This is a shortened, revised version of my presentation to The Inaugural Social Sciences Week<\/em> Great Debate \u2013 <\/em>Does Sport Unite or Divide Us?<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 My debate opponent was the Hon Dr Andrew Leigh MP, and the event was organised by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia with support from Synergy Group.\u00a0 It was held at the National Library, Canberra, 5 September, 2023.<\/p>\n

\n

Copyright \u00a9 David Rowe 2023<\/strong>
\nEmail: d.rowe@westernsydney.edu.au<\/a>
\nTwitter: @rowe_david<\/a>
\nWebsite: https:\/\/westernsydney.edu.au\/ics\/people\/researchers\/david_rowe<\/a><\/p>\n

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