Margery Wolf – A Thrice Told Tale

Wolf, Margery. A Thrice Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1992. Print.

Summary:

Key Terms:

• fieldnotes – “the first ordering of what we know” (91).

Important Quotes:

• “Whether or not an anthropologist believes she creates, interprets, or describes culture, she must recognize that she creates ‘Others’ as the result of her work, and that she must bear some responsibility for those Others” (12).
• “Feminist anthropologists are struggling with ways of transforming the objects of research into subjects, who themselves identify and design the research projects they think are needed, who retain control over the written outcome of the research, and who jointly publish with the anthropologists” (52).
• Frances Mascia-Lees: “Our suspicion of the new ethnographer’s desire for collaboration with the ‘other’ stems not from any such refusal to enter into dialogue with that ‘other,’ but from our history and understanding of being appropriated and literally spoken for by the dominant, and from our consequent sympathetic identification with the subjects of anthropological study in this regard” (52).
• “Perhaps I/author was attempting to lead the reader to the conclusion that authorial authority is dangerous, that accepted truths about the nature of reality are flawed, and that cloaure is misleading” (55).
• “our truths will always be partial at best” (85).
• Rena Lederman: “Fieldnotes are dangerous. Observations are noted or written down in order to aid memory, but reading fieldnotes can challenge memory. It threatens to return one to uncertainty about what was what; it acts against the sense of the whole that one carries around in one’s head. Fieldnotes can contradict the single, anthropological voice we are all encouraged to adopt in our formal ethnographic writing at home by recording–however indirectly–the voices of the people we lived with when doing fieldwork” (89).
• “There is no final truth” (92).
• “Our agenda, whether we are engaged in adding to the descriptive material on women’s experience or in building theory, is to expose the unequal distribution of power that has subordinated women in most if not all cultures and discover ways of dismantling hierarchies of domination” (119).
• Stephen Tyler: “While it is laudable to include the native, his position is not thereby improved, for his words are still only instrument’s of the ethnographer’s will…[N]o amount of invoking the “other” can establish him as the agent of the works and deeds attributed to him in a record of dialogue unless he, too, is free to reinterpret it and flesh it out with caveats, apologies, footnotes, and explanatory detail” (120).
• Frances Mascia-Lees: “From women’s position as ‘other’ in a patriarchal culture and from feminists’ dialogue and confrontation with diverse groups of women, we have learned to be suspicious of all attempts by members of a dominant group to speak for the oppressed, no matter how eloquently or experimentally” (122).
• Sandra Harding: “Feminists in the scientific tradition have attempted to reform and transform the theories and practices of these traditions in order to create less partial and less distorted representations of the world than the mainstream androcentric ones. They want less false stories about nature and social life; they want scientific explanations that can provide useful guides to improving the conditions of women” (125).
• “Experience is messy…When human behavior is the data, a tolerance for ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and instability is essential…[W]e must constantly remind ourselves that life is ‘unstable, complex. and disorderly’ everywhere. As ethnographers, our job is not simply to pass on the disorderly complexity of culture, but also to try to hypothesize about apparent consistencies, to lay out our best guesses, without hiding the contradictions and the instability” (129).
• “Whether we are talking about nonexploitative methodology in field research or authority in writing ethnography, we are talking about power–who has it, how it is used, for what purposes. This is what the study of gender, class, and race is really about: how subordinated sectors accommodate to and resist the power of privileged sectors, how privilege (like resistance) is camouflaged, how power is earned, learned, and occasionally spurned” (133).
• “In our desire to avoid objectifying our informants, we run the risk of patronizing them” (135).
• “Feminist work has always been under suspicion, often for the same things the postmodernists’ critiques now celebrate–like questioning, objectivity, rejecting detachment, and accepting contradictory readings. Feminists who have only recently gained some academic security might think carefully about whether intense reflexivity in their research and writing will be evaluated as being in the new postmodernist mode or as simply tentative and self-doubting” (135).

Discussion:

 

Mary A. Boutilier and Lucinda SanGiovanni – The Sporting Woman

Boutilier, Mary A. and Lucinda SanGiovanni. Sporting Woman. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics,
1983. Print.

Summary:

In this book, Mary A. Boutilier and Lucinda SanGiovanni critique the theories and methodologies traditionally used to study women in sports, noting that positivist, value-neutral research fails to challenge the sexist nature of sport. They argue that “the liberal aim is to be ‘one of the boys’ and to gain equal access to an institution which we believe is in need of radical change” (47). In other words, the push for women to gain access to the historically male arena of sports has caused women to uncritically accept the androcentric foundations of the institution and adopt masculine values, thereby contributing to their own oppression. Boutilier and SanGiovanni believe that sport ha the capacity to be a liberating environment for women, but only after the foundations of the institution have been challenged to reflect women’s experiences and values as well. In order to do this, they argue that research on women in sports must be humanist in nature, drawing attention to issues of power and control and offering solutions and/or alternatives. The authors also advocate for a socialist feminist approach that acknowledges the ways in which class and sexism (and race?) intersect. The authors provide a history of American sport that reveals its androcentric and capitalist foundation: sport has become incredibly regimented and quantified, with the end goals being control of individuals and profit (through a single-minded focus on winning). Women’s participation in sport has always been accompanied by an apologetic and social acceptability is based on the image of the ideal woman, with it being deemed more appropriate for women to participate in less-competitive, non-contact, individual sports like golf, swimming, and gymnastics. They note that existing research on women in sport (in 1983) is still in the preliminary stages, not yet producing anything of theoretical significance and often being flawed by poor sample selections, essentialism, or oversimplified concepts.

Key Terms:

• conceptual maps – “assumptions, values, premises, concepts” (ix).
• SportsWorld – “that ‘amorphous infrastructure’ identified by journalist Robert Lipsyte that ‘helps contain our energies, shape our ethical values, and ultimately, socialize us for work, or war or depression’” (xiv).
• normative orientation – sport sociology that “originates by making value assumptions about what sport should be, then accumulating evidence to determine the extent to which sport reflects these assumptions” (6).
• non-normative orientation – sport sociology whose goal is “the empirical description and explanation of what is in contrast to what ought to be” (6).
• functional-systemic paradigm – “The prime concern is how persons and groups function in sporting roles and processes and how sports contribute toward maintaining society’s stability and integration.” In this paradigm “the sport sociologist’s aim is to show how and why sport maintains existing social and cultural life. The conventional arrangements, policies, ideologies, and actions that comprise sport as a social institution are rarely questioned; the connections between sport and other institutions–the family, school, government, the economy, the mas media–are treated as unproblematic; the issues of power, control, conflict, and self-actualization are ignored. ” (7).
• muckraking paradigm – “Oriented toward social change, researchers seek to challenge myths about sport, to expose covert problems as endemic to the essence of sport as presently structured, and to motivate groups and individuals to social action based on these insights” (8). The authors note that one problem to this paradigm is that it fails to offer solutions to the problems it uncovers.
• humanist-existential paradigm – “a ‘man-centered’ sociology that serves human goals and needs, one that is sensitive to forces that impinge on self-actualization for those involved in sport” (8).
• traditional/mainstream sociology – “characterized by value-neutrality, moral detachment, positivism, and the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake” (9).
• humanist sociology – “stresses a value-committed science, one that recognizes the moral involvement that sociologists bring to their work. It is an activist approach to sociology that seeks to use knowledge about social life to enhance human freedom and dignity” (9).
• liberal feminism – “sees the root of women’s oppression as caused by the lack of equal civil rights and educational opportunities for women…Liberals believe that the elimination of discrimination based on sex can be accomplished by reform within the present structure of American society…They assume that once these rights and chances are mandated, all women–regardless of their race, ethnicity, age, sexual preference, social class or marital status–will have equal access to these opportunities and will be equally rewarded for their talents” (14). Obviously, this assumption is problematic.
• Marxist feminism – “rejects the possibility of any real equality existing in a society where wealth and power exist in the hands of an elite ruling class.” They believe the root of women’s oppression is the existence of a class system in society. “Once social classes are destroyed, private ownership and profit abolished, and the means of economic production redistributed to the society as a whole, the oppression of women will disappear” (15).
• radical feminism – “insists that the major source of women’s oppression is a deeply rooted sexism requiring radical transformation of both personal and social existence” (16).
• socialist feminism – “argue[s] that both economic inequalities and sexism should be seen as fundamental and equally important forms of oppression, neither having clear predominance over the other” (16). As such, it acknowledges the interactive nature of the sources of sexism, patriarchal culture/social organization, and class oppression.
• play – “an activity which humans engage in for no other purpose or goal than the participation in the action itself…It is performed for its own sake; it is an area of free, nonutilitarian activity; it is processually complete and requires no end product; it is inherently human. To play is to be human, to be human is to play” (24).
• an apologetic – “an explanation of why it’s okay for women to be where they are not expected to be” (34).
• reactive aggression – “behavior with intent to harm” (55).
• instrumental aggression – “a by-product of working toward non-aggressive goals” (55).
• personality traits – “enduring and stable predispositions that account for the consistent patterns of individual behavior” (61).
• interactional approach – “posits an interrelationship between individual personality and situational factors” (62).
• androgyny – “the combination in an individual of both feminine and masculine behavioral characteristics” (66).
• motivational theory - “conceptualizes behavior as the product of interacting forces. These forces include not only relatively stable motives (trait-like predispositions to act in a certain way) but the activation of these motives due to specific situational factors” (68).
• symbolic interactionism – believes “that objects, actions, and individuals are devoid of meaning until meaning is attributed to them through the social processes of communication and negotiation” (85).
• false consciousness – “the subjective acceptance by subordinate groups of the dominant group’s ideology” (94).
• institution – “a cluster of interrelated values, norms, and expectations that are developed by people to meet a particular societal necessity” (96).
• informal sport – “physical activity carried out in a playful manner and mainly for the participants’ enjoyment, with rules devised by the players themselves to regulate the competition” (97).
• organized sport – “the elaboration of some elemental organization to order the sport, such as official rules, formal teams, schedules, leagues, tournaments and the like. These elements of organization are intended to benefit primarily the participants in their pursuit of the sporting experience” (97).
• corporate sport – sport that is “dominated by the demands of profit and power and is controlled by large bureaucracies” (97).
• continuity theory – “maintains that there is an integration between phases of the life cycle, and the habits, preferences, and dispositions that individuals develop become a part of life’s activities through the process of socialization” (138).
• conflict theory -
• symbolic interactionism -

Important Quotes:

• “Because sport has always been a male domain, it had developed male-centered games, styles, values, jargon, rituals, and interpersonal relations that can be summed up briefly by references to ‘locker-room’ culture and ‘jock’ roles” (xv).
• “inequities in power can lead to corruption of social relations and an estrangement of the less powerful from the meanings and enjoyment of the activities they pursue” (xv).
• “Scientists are people with consciously and unconsciously held beliefs, values, and feelings that affect every stage of the scholarly process. Our best hope is to recognize and admit to ourselves and to our readers these subjective influences and to struggle with the tension between them and the call to be as truthful as humanly possible. Our worst predicament is to pretend to be value-free, deluding ourselves and others that theory and method are immune to our subjective orientations” (6).
• “research in the name of value-neutrality supports the status quo” (7).
• “There is no intrinsic benefit to the present values, beliefs, and ideas that compromise the dominant themes of American sport and shape this powerful institution. For example, we believe that the exaggerated emphasis on competition, material success, bureaucracy, hierarchy, professionalism, and conformity are but a few sporting attributes that serve those in power and prevent sport from enhancing the quality of our lives as individuals” (11).
• “Sport, like other institutions, is conservative by nature and definition, serving to inculcate and celebrate select values, rules, and behaviors believed to be necessary for maintaining society. Like all institutions, sport channels our ideas and actions in culturally acceptable ways, limiting our vision and experience to only those approved by dominant cultural demands” (11).
• “Sport is a patriarchal institution. Sport has been created and shaped by men without regard to the existence and experience of women. It is clearly a patriarchal institution, celebrating masculine power, values, and behaviors. It is on an equal footing with political, military, and economic institutions in training, encouraging, and rewarding the primary emphases on competition, discipline, rationality, control, product and victory that reflect the major androcentric values of society and the profile of what is considered quintessentially masculine” (18).
• “there has been a general failure to extend the opportunities for women’s sports participation to minority women, poor women, older women, lesbian women, fat women, working women, handicapped women–that is, to all those women who do not fit the model image of the promising athlete, who may not be a ‘good investment,’ who do not have easy accessibility to schools and elite athletic clubs, or who want something different from what SportsWorld has traditionally offered” (18-19).
• “women’s capacities are being measured against male standards in sports that are structured to favor precisely those characteristics grounded in men’s biology. The implied assumption is that male performance is the benchmark against which females should be judged and encouraged to strive for, without a complementary attention to the deficiencies of male performance and efforts to encourage their improvement in these areas” (21).
• “The spontaneous, joyful, innovative ruleless, flexible world of play has little or no resemblance to the organized, competitive, structured, rule infested world of modern corporate sport” (26).
• “Sporting events are religious happenings; sport, according to some, has become the new ‘opiate of the people’” (27).
• “Classism pervade the history of sport as it does every institution” (35).
• “The social acceptability of sport [for women] is predicated on an ideal image of what a woman ‘should be’” (35).
• “The motivations of the participants were also legitimate only if they were ‘feminine.’ Play, enjoyment, social contact, cooperation, physical fitness, weight control–all were acceptable. Competition, aggressiveness, physical mastery, and ‘character-building’ were defined as masculine and therefore unacceptable” (35).
• “Sport is another segment of life which pits women against women and certifies that the female-to-male bond overrides and outweighs any bond between women” (44).
• “Social suspicion of the female athlete is increased when the female is black, from a lower class, lesbian, or necessarily must develop characteristics that are defined as ‘masculine,’ such as stength…Social approval is retained for sports in which the participants are all white, from higher social classes, and for whom there are no doubts about their sexual preference” (45).
• “Aggression in sport is not truly comprable to aggression in other social settings, because it is both legal and normative behavior, that is, it is an acceptable and expected feature of that particular social situation” (56).
• “blind imitation of the male model will not necessarily promote equality. Instead, the desire to beat men at their own game, to prove that women can be just like (i.e., as ‘good’ as) men reflects an admission of fundamental inferiority. It implies that women have not yet grasped the possibility that female ways may be superior to male ways, not only for girls and women but for all human beings” (60).
• “Girls have traditionally been negatively rewarded for their involvement in sport, and a successful woman athlete used to be prone to all three negative consequences of achievement: social rejection, questioning of her femininity, and disbelief that a girl could perform such athletic feats” (71).
• “The list of promised benefits [of sports] is extensive and includes the development of such characteristics as perseverance, competitiveness, drive, industriousness, and character, as well as as sense of fair play, the ability to deal with people from different social backgrounds, and the ability to win and lose graciously” (76). These characteristics are more often associated with boys than girls.
• “The societal pictures of the healthy female and the healthy athlete differ considerably. Research indicates that males are perceived as independent, active, competitive, adventurous, self-confident, ambitious, and rough, among other traits. Females, on the other hand, are perceived as dependent, passive, noncompetitive, nonadventurous, unambitious, gentle, and not self-confident…The traits attributed to women are hardly those expected on the playing field, where the valued assets are competence, self-confidence, persistence, assertiveness, and action–qualities more in keeping with perceptions of males. Again, conclusions are quite clear. To be a proper athlete, and individual must be male” (79).
• “sexism pervades the entire culture. It is promulgated by family, church, school, government, business, and other social institutions. It is taught o us from infancy and incorporated into our consciousness; it shapes our self-images and affects the way we relate to others and how we experience the world” (94).
• “any effort by women to eradicate sexism must be directed initially at two goals: first, they must throw off the veil of..false consciousness so that they can see clearly the reality of their objective situation; second, they must identify the various forms that sexism takes in society” (94).
• “sport, as an institution, has accumulated over time elements that complement those of other institutions and help it to buttress the foundations of society. It is in this sense that sport is often called a microcosm of society, reflecting the basic values, beliefs, rules, and ideas, of the larger system” (98).
• “The composite picture of an individual who participates in sport is the red-blooded, wholesome, virile man, one sound in body and mind, whose belief in religion and patriotism, guided by self-discipline and the competitive spirit, will make him successful in sport and in other social endeavors. As a socializing agency, sport allegedly instills these qualities in young boys so that they will be able to successfully assume not only sport roles but also their roles as breadwinners, workers, soldiers, and citizens” (99).
• “Sport, like the family, education, the mass media, and religion, socializes its members to maintain existing cultural patterns. It does this by instilling in people the requisite motives and skills to assume socially valued roles in other institutions and to desire the rewards offered by these institutions. It is no wonder then, that sport participation is encouraged by religious leaders, school administrators, business and labor representatives, and officials of the military and the government. Nor is it surprising that those who have been critical of sport continue to be viewed with suspicion and hostility and defined as traitors and heretics who must be exorcised from the body social. As Edwards explains it, ‘any attack upon the institution of sport in a particular society would be widely interpreted…as an attack upon the fundamental way of life of that society as manifest in the value orientations it emphasizes through sport. Hence, an attack upon sport constitutes an attack upon the society itself’” (99).
• “Sport is our ‘civilized society’s most prominent masculinity rite.’ It is on the fields, courts, rinks, and playgrounds of America that boys learn to be men and to value masculinity. It is in their games that they assert their difference from girls and their superiority over them. It is in sport that they learn to compete, to control, to take risks, to be strong, and to achieve mastery over self and others. It is in sport that they begin to understand why and how they are to become men” (101).
• “to allow women into sport would be an ultimate threat to one of the last strongholds of male security and supremacy. To put it another way, if women can play sports then ‘men aren’t really men’” (102).
• “It is in sporting activity that men are allowed the rare opportunity to express those feelings forbidden in most of their other roles. They can embrace each other unself-consciously, holding and hugging, touching and kissing without threat of ridicule and suspicion. They can express fear, hesitancy, pain and doubt and be nurtured by other men They can grieve together and be comforted. They can be irrational, cooperative, sentimental, and superstitious in he accepting presence of male camaraderie. In sum, in the absence of women, they can allow themselves to express what sexist ideology insists must be suppressed if they are to lay valid claim to being ‘real men’” (104).
• “Our concepts, hypotheses, and theoretical models should be grounded in and derived from women’s actual sporting experiences. We should not superimpose onto these experiences our preexisting ideas that stem from an understanding of men’s sport participation” (127).
• “The process of becoming people who transcend the limits of present sex-role categories and the process of participating in sport that surpasses the limits of present institutional arrangements requires that we remain receptive to criticism, suspicious of ultimate solutions, willing to be unpopular, and optimistic about our abilities to effect social change” (128).

Discussion:

This book is quite dated (1983), but it is helpful for understanding the early research on women in sports and how the crucial debates mentioned by the authors are reflected in the current literature.

 

Joy Crissey Honea – “Xclusion at the Winter X Games”

Honea, Joy Crissey. “Xclusion at the Winter X Games: The Marginalization of Women Athletes in Alternative Sport.” Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations. Ed. Linda K. Fuller. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 141-152. Print.

Summary:

In this chapter, Joy Crissey Honea

Key Terms:

• alternative sports – “participant controlled and directed, individually focused, with less emphasis on competition than traditional sport, and…are more likely than mainstream sports to encompass their own subculture” (142).

Important Quotes:

• “while most mainstream sports focus on head-to-head competition, alternative sports put more emphasis on individual achievement and aesthetic pursuits, and while the majority of mainstream sports are controlled and directed by governing bodies or other umbrella organizations, alternative sports are usually controlled and directed by the participants themselves” (143).
• “Men’s performances were more likely to be characterized as powerful, daring, and committed, while women’s were more likely to be described as graceful, clean, and smooth” (148).
• “males are the referent, and if women are accomplished at the sport, they are being ‘like guys’” (148).
• “This characterization of women as different from men in their athleticism is yet another assertion of the inherently male nature of the sport, the insinuation being that women cannot truly ride like men, so it is better that they develop their own style” (148-9).
• “Female participants were accepted as contestants so long as they did not challenge male supremacy in alternative sports” (149).

Discussion:

 

Gina Daddario – Media Masculinity, and The World’s Strongest Man

Daddario, Gina. “Media, Masculinity, and The World’s Strongest Man: Exploring Postmodern Sports Programming.” Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations. Ed. Linda K. Fuller. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 129-139. Print.

Summary:
In this chapter, Gina Daddario

Key Terms:

• pastiche sport form – “brings together different sporting styles to create a ‘nostalgic blend’ of past and present” (131).
  
• postmodern sports – “a hybrid of two or more familiar spectator sports where the cultural similarities, more than the subjective and experiential ones, link the sports together” (131).

Important Quotes:

• “Although masculine in nature, some of these sports share characteristics with sports considered feminine…as they revolve around individualized performances where athletes compete against a posted score rather than an opposing team or a singular opponent. With this particular competitive orientation, postmodern sport might help challenge the masculine hegemony that shapes our perceptions of competition as a direct confrontation between teams or opponents” (136).
• “Perhaps it is time for cable programmers to expand the demographic dimensions of their sporting audiences even wider by extending air time to underrepresented sports, such as women’s sports. These could be a hybrid of sports with less emphasis on risk and more on the aesthetic form, resulting in a postmodern subgenre appealing to a more gender-inclusive audience” (137).

Discussion:

 

Robert Sirabian – Gender, Cross-Dressing and Sport

Sirabian, Robert. “Gender, Cross-Dressing, and Sport in Lewis Nordan’s The All-Girl Football Team.” Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations. Ed. Linda K. Fuller. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 115-125. Print.

Summary:

In this chapter, Robert Sirabian uses Lewis Nordan’s short story, The All-Girl Football Team in which the male football players and female cheerleaders switch places and assume the dress and behavior of the other group, to explain the performative nature of gender and suggest that traditional gender construction can be undermined and challenged. He claims, “The cross-dressed figure invokes ‘a space of possibility,’ a site in which to create alternatives to traditional gender identity, to envision new identities free from regulatory norms that stem from society and its institutions” (120). Sirabian claims that sport offers a similar site in which to contest gender norms by revealing that gender is representation.

Key Terms:

Important Quotes:

• “With the popularity and continued growth of women’s athletics, what were once exclusively masculine values of sport–toughness, competitiveness, self-confidence–have become athletic values defining individual participants, including young girls/teens” (115).
• “While sport mirrors social concerns and issues, constructed through mainstream cultural and linguistic practices, it also has the capacity to transform social and individual perceptions” (116).
• “Focusing on the body, shaped through training, sport participates in the production, reiteration, and transformation of norms” (116).
• “Whereas sport may provide women the opportunity to define themselves by gaining power and strength, much of sport still fosters the body as object to be watched and defined along split gender lines. Traditional sports culture maintains clear divisions between masculinity and femininity, often reinforcing gender logic to demonstrate women as inferior or that ‘muscles are good but too many muscles are unfeminine’” (119).
• “While the female athlete might try to achieve independence from prescribed roles within sport, its structures emphasize compliance to a collective feminine norm. The same is true for male athletes, who are often forced to obey masculine norms–competition, aggression, pain” (123).

Discussion:

 

John Mark Dempsey – All-Skates, Witch Wool and a Blouse Full of Lungs

Dempsey, John Mark. “All-Skates, Witch Wool and a Blouse Full of Lungs: Dan Jenkins’ Use of Masculine Sexual Language.” Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations. Ed. Linda K. Fuller. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 91-102. Print.

Summary:

In this chapter, John Mark Dempsey explores how masculinity in sports is constructed in Dan Jenkin’s novels. Dempsey finds that the blunt “sexual language spoken by Jenkins’ characters serves…to promote hegemonic masculinity…, to assert a swaggering masculinity, to provide protection against emotional vulnerabilities, and to show defiance of convention. Most importantly, Jenkins uses frank sexual language to portray reality and to target hypocrisy in its many forms” (91). Jenkins’ novels are full of “misogyny, scatology, bigotry, and sacrilege” (92), and Jenkins claims that his characters use this kind of language because that’s the way athletes talk, . Though Dempsey fails to fully explore the implications of Jenkins’ claims, his justification for his language choices implies that sport is essentially a masculine and misogynistic domain where women’s only place is as a sexual object.

Key Terms:

• hegemonic masculinity – “idealizing the traditional masculine characteristics of toughness and competitiveness, while at the same time subordinating women and marginalizing gay men” (94).

Important Quotes:

• (From Bryson) “Sport is a powerful institution through which male hegemony is constructed and reconstructed” (94).
• (From de Klerk) “Because expletives contravene social taboos and are often used to shock people, or indicate contempt, they have become associated with power and masculinity in Western cultures” (97).
• “This is not the language of the timid, but of men who revel in excelling in a violent, uncompromising world” (98).

Discussion:

I’m deeply troubled by this essay because Dempsey never challenges, and in fact seems to justify the misogyny exhibited by Jenkins’ characters. By claiming that Jenkins is merely representing how real athletes talk in an attempt to avoid hypocrisy, Dempsey lets Jenkins off the hook for naturalizing this kind of talk. The language of Jenkins’ novels reveals how sport may function to encourage the construction of hegemonic masculinity, but neither Jenkins nor Dempsey seems to see this as problematic in any way. It is unclear what affect this has on the female characters in Jenkins’ novels, but it seems as though the message this sends to readers is that sports are meant to be an exclusively male domain, in which women will never be able to be anything more than the sexual objects of men. Because Jenkins’ novels are fiction, it is hard to say how true this representation of sports really is; however, it is helpful for understanding the specter of the sporting world that is held in the minds of the general public. Whether or not athletes really behave in this way, the public’s acceptance of Jenkins’ representation reveals that it is a commonly held belief that the sporting world is a man’s world in which a woman’s participation will always be suspect.

 

David Thompson – Hot Wheels and High Heels

Thompson, David “Turbo.” “Hot Wheels and High Heels: Gender Roles in Stock Car Racing.” Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations. Ed. Linda K. Fuller. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 77-88. Print.

Summary:

In this chapter, David Thompson explores women’s experiences breaking into the hegemonically masculine world of race car driving. Using interviews with various female stock car drivers, Thompson shows how racing is constructed as a purely male sport, one which requires the women who want to be a part of it to become just as aggressive and just as addicted to the sport as the men are. Thompson points out that the relationship between car and driver is that of a heterosexual romance, with the always female race car being the “baby” of the always male (even when she is a woman) driver. The race itself also takes on the characteristics of male sexuality, with the drivers fighting to assert dominance and racing “like sperm racing for the egg” (85). Although Thompson does not make this claim, his evidence would seem to suggest that in order to be taken seriously in the sport, women have to renounce their sex and “become” men. This process of un-gendering, or perhaps re-gendering, is necessary for the female drivers to differentiate themselves from the other women at the track: the pit bunnies (groupies for racing) and trophy queens.

Discussion:

I’ve omitted the “Key Terms” and “Important Quotes” sections from this entry because this essay is not as useful to me as I had hoped. Thompson alludes to an interesting trend I’m seeing in the sports literature that indicates that women often have to take on masculine traits in order to be successful in sport (although there is also a simultaneous trend of women athletes feminizing themselves in order to not be seen as overly masculine or as lesbians–see Staurowsky), but he doesn’t ever explore the implications of his findings. Thus, the binary between masculine and feminine is maintained, and it appears as though there is nothing subversive in the actions and attitudes of the female race car drivers.

 

Ellen Staurowsky – Reflections on Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism

Staurowsky, Ellen J. “Reflections on Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in the Aftermath of 9/11.” Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations. Ed. Linda K. Fuller. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 63-75. Print.

Summary:

In this chapter, Ellen J. Staurowsky explores the way in which after the September 11th terrorist attacks, heroism was coded as exclusively masculine and the traits of the masculine hero became synonymous with those of the sports hero. As a result, hegemonic masculinity becomes even further idealized, coming to stand as the symbol of our nation’s strength and perseverance. To question this masculinity or to question the state’s hyper-masculine military response to the tragedy, is to be effeminate, morally corrupt, and unpatriotic. Sport then becomes a training ground for America’s heroes and a celebration of the ideal man: “undaunted by competition, edgy, aggressive, confident, arrogant, confrontational, physically intimidating, and strong” (67). In addition to bolstering hegemonic masculinity, representing heroism in this way lead to an erasure of women and women’s concerns in the wake of the terrorist attacks and instigated a backlash against feminism with people claiming that the attacks proved that certain arenas were the province of men for a reason and women had no business interfering with them.

Key Terms:

• manhood formula – “blending physicality with masculinity and service to one’s community and country” (69).

Important Quotes:

• “innocence, naivete, and vulnerability are encoded as feminine while destruction and protection are masculine” (64).
• Michael Kimmel: “Traditional definitions of masculinity certainly have their imperious sides, brimming with homophobia and sexism, But they also contain the capacity for quiet heroism, selfless sacrifice, steadfast resolve, deep wells of compassion and care, and yes, a love that made these men magnificent” (65-66).
• “the construction of masculinity is revealed as an active process, where valor and personal sacrifice become the substance for readers to reflect on and consider as part of the expectation of what it is to be a man in America” (70).
• “The danger in this uncritical form of patriotism, tied to notions of hegemonic masculinity, is the conclusion reached by Charlotte Allen, who believed that the male suffering and heroism in response to the events of September 11 was proof of the wrong-headedness of women seeking to intrude in places where they had no place” (72).

Discussion:

Though this essay has little direct relevance to my project, I think it will be useful for understanding the emotional and ideological aspects of sport. In the minds of Americans, sport is a male domain where godlike athletes prove themselves. Sport is a struggle for dominance, with each man vying against the others to be the strongest, fastest,most aggressive, and most intimidating player on the field. I would argue that even in team sports, our nation’s fixation on the hero causes these to be individual, rather than cooperative, struggles.

When a woman enters into the domain of sports, then, she doesn’t fit the idealized conception of an athlete that has been culturally ingrained in us. We deal with this by placing women’s sports in a separate sphere, minimizing instances where men and women would compete alongside or against one another, so that we can create a different set of expectations for their performance. Women athletes tend to deal with this by either trying to distance themselves from their gender in order to prove that they are as fierce of competitors as men or by doing the opposite: feminizing themselves to clearly show that they are not attempting to be like men. I realize that the creation of this binary is problematic, but it is one that I see developing in the literature, though I’m not yet sure whether this is really happening or this is just how the authors are representing women’s sports. I feel as though roller derby questions this binary, allowing women to be feminine and physically aggressive simultaneously, but it’s hard for me to believe that roller derby is the only sport that challenges this binary. I’m hoping that some of my future reading will help to complicate the role of the woman athlete a bit more.

 

Lindal Buchanan – Regendering Delivery

Buchanan, Lindal. Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Antebellum Women Rhetors. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Print.

Summary:

In this book, Lindal Buchanan argues that the traditional fifth canon of delivery needs to be reconceptualized because it fails to account for the social and ideological forces that shape women’s rhetorical performances. She argues that women rhetors deploy gender and utilize space in rhetorical ways to navigate the various forces that shape the contexts in which women speak. Buchanan asserts that “A gendered fifth canon addresses who is and is not entitled to stand and speak in public spaces, examines how women educate themselves (formally and informally) for public speaking, identifies the rhetorical strategies developed by women determined to deliver civic discourse despite social prohibitions, and recognizes that gender ideology influences the forms of public expression available to women rhetors” (10).

Key Terms:

• hypokrisis – (aka elocution) “how orators convey their messages in terms of volume and tone, rhythm and speed, gesture, movement, and expression” (2).
• pronuntiatio – “the vocal elements of delivery” (2).
• actio – “the gestural” elements of delivery (2).
• eloquence – (as defined by Thomas Sheridan) “the just and graceful management of the voice, countenance, and gesture in speaking” (16).
• republican motherhood – “American women need[ed] to be educated and eloquent…[so they could] raise knowledgeable, virtuous, patriotic sons who would in turn ensure the continuing vitality of the nation”(21, 23).
• cult of true womanhood – the feminine gender ideal of the early nineteenth century (that primarily applied to white, upper and middle class women) with the “four cardinal virtues [of] piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (26).
• antebellum – pre-Civil War America
• feminine delivery style – “disguised the fact that women were engaged in public discourse” (80) by “asking male family members to support and promote women’s public efforts, employing conversation rather than oratory, and avowing a commitment to conventional gender roles while behaving contrary to them” (79)
  
• masculine delivery style – “delivering rhetoric in public settings, directly speaking to mixed-sex audiences, unapologetically addressing political matters, and employing discursive genres conventionally reserved for men” (91).
• surrogate delivery – the oratorical practice that “required a man to serve as a mouthpiece for a woman rhetor, who usually sat silently onstage beside him” (87).
• virago – manly woman (111).
• collaboration – “a cooperative endeavor involving two or more people that results in a rhetorical product, performance, or event” (134)
• productive collaboration – “those in which two or more people contribute to the crafting and completion of a rhetorical product” (134).
• supportive collaboration – “those in which one person’s efforts contribute indirectly to another’s rhetorical production and delivery” (135).

Important Quotes:

• “rhetorical delivery is a socially situated act and…the surrounding context exerts enormous pressure on the speaker, imposing constraints, affording compensating strategies, and establishing audience expectations” (3).
• (from Roxanne Mountford) “Delivery involves space, the body, and the place of both in the social imaginary…Delivery is based in and on cultural norms and the breaking of those norms” (3).
• “‘Women were, at least according to the men who wrote about them, “naturally” submissive, forbearing, quiet and self-sacrificing; but this inborn character was surprisingly susceptible to corruption by the wrong influences.’ Antebellum educators worried that competition would encourage schoolgirls to develop ‘unnatural’ qualities like ‘selfishness, envy and aggressiveness’ and thereby damage the delicate female character” (53).
• “Whenever women approached the academic platform, issues of power, gender, and discourse inevitably erupted” (67).
• “[Women and men] were to fill distinct but complementary roles in their respective spheres, women destined for ‘the fireside, the cradle and the nursery, which involve the least of glare and notoriety, and the most of retirement and reserve,’ men ordained for ‘those spheres which demand most of an iron sternness and persistence of will, and a hard intellectual fibre, as tough and tearless as whip-cord’ (68).
• “Speakers are expert and authoritative; women are submissive. Speakers operate in the public sphere; women are domestic. Speakers call attention to themselves, aggressively take stands, affirm their expertise; ‘true women’ are retiring, their influence is indirect, they have no expertise on matters outside the home. The public realm is driven by ambition; similarly, speaking is competitive, energized by the desire to persuade others. These are traditionally masculine traits related to man’s allegedly lustful, competitive nature” (78).
• “first and foremost, women rhetors had to discover means to justify their speech and participation in extradomestic affairs, a task that required considerable ingenuity…’The act of invention for women, then, begins in a different place…women must first invent a way to speak in the context of being silenced and rendered invisible’” (78).
• (from Catharine Beecher) “The ap[p]ropriate character of a woman demands delicacy of appearance and manners, refinement of sentiment, gentleness of speech, modesty in feeling and action, a shrinking from notoriety and public gaze, and love of dependence, and protection, aversion to all that is course and rude, and an instinctive abhorrence of all that tends to indelicacy and impurity, either in principles or actions” (98).
• (quoting Mountford) “‘the body is not only an instrument of expression but is also itself expressive of meaning’ capable of conveying multiple messages to the audience about the speaker’s performance of gender and rhetoric” (117).
• “when maternal rhetors entered public spaces, society’s feminine ideal accompanied them like a shadow shelf, and they were evaluated as well for their fit with or divergence from the chimerical true woman” (121).
• “The woman rhetor was scrutinized for her private performance as well as her public presentation. The audience evaluated her sexuality, gender, body, and ethos for their correspondence to or divergence from an idealized true woman, and both the speaker’s motivation for appearing in public and the state of her home and children became matters for speculation” (130).
• “the traditional fifth canon, with its material focus on the orator’s voice and body, is completely blind to the ideological inflections of delivery, thus underlining the importance of reconsidering rhetorical precepts from the vantage point of differently located speakers” (130).
• “collaboration permitted women to negotiate, challenge, and, ultimately, reshape feminine gender norms through the assumption of new discursive roles in the public forum” (136).
• “Women, their hands busy with domestic tasks, construct arguments while surrounded by others; men create in solitude and quiet. Women compose in short bursts and contend with constant interruption; men compose in concentrated, continuous sessions, writing ‘undisturbed’ and shutting ‘themselves up for days with their books and thoughts.’ Gender thus creates inequities in the rhetorical process itself, a situation unacknowledged by men and society” (154).

Discussion:

 

Michael Robidoux and Jochen Bocksnick – Playing beyond the Glass

Robidoux, Michael A. and Jochen G. Bocksnick. “Playing beyond the Glass: How Parents Support Violence in Minor Hockey.” Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations. Ed. Linda K. Fuller. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 45-60. Print.

Summary:

In this chapter, Michael Robidoux and Jochen Bocksnick argue that how parents behave in the stands at youth hockey games affects the young players actions on the ice. The authors based their findings on observations of  three Canadian PeeWee hockey teams in the same regional area, recording field notes and videotaping the games. The authors found that, though there are strict rules governing parental behavior at matches, parents often yell comments that encourage violence (e.g. “Nail him!” “Hit him!”) that result in the children becoming more aggressive on the ice. Far from being a violation of the rules, the sort of speech is common place, a natural part of the game. The authors argue that such normalization of violent discourse helps to produce “a culture of violence” that is potentially dangerous to the sport and the youth who play it.

Key Terms:

• rink rage – “parental/spectator violence at minor hockey games” (45).
• spectators - “driven to watch and observe sport because of their appreciation for sport and the associated athleticism” (47).
• fans - “have an overtly biased approach to the event. The interest in the performance (i.e., winning a contest) of a specific team/athlete supersedes other interpretations of the game” (47).
• hostile aggression - “the intent [of the action] is to harm” (48)
• instrumental aggression - “the aggressive behavior is a means to attain an end lying beyond the realm of harming” (48).
• speech community – those who share “knowledge of rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech” (51).

Important Quotes:

• “everyday discourse is filled with acts of violence that tend to go unnoticed, if not reduce its danger. In fact, the danger is only enhanced and fosters what we have observed to be highly volatile situations” (56).
• “aggression spoken by parents and enacted upon by the youth is understood in this community as natural–an inevitable consequence of the game. Spectators, players, coaches, and referees contribute to these attitudes through their words. their actions, and their complicit responses that reinforce the legitimacy of these behaviors, producing what can be understood as a culture of violence” (58).

Discussion:

What I struggle to understand in this essay is the level of violence that the authors are referring to in their study. Unlike Atkinson’s essay in this same volume, it appears as though the violent behavior the parents are encouraging in this study is well within the rules regarding acceptable contact in the sport. I’m wondering, then, how the authors expect the parents to change the way they talk about the sport without changing the nature of the sport itself. Though the authors distinguish between hostile and instrumental aggression in their literature review, they do not distinguish between the forms of aggression that the players and parents exhibited during their research. The implication here is that all violence is bad and should not be encouraged even within the context of a full-contact sport. While I can see why the authors would want to avoid creating a culture of violence, I am troubled by the fact that they are conflating the aggressive play that occurs within sport with violence that occurs outside of it. It implies that players cannot distinguish between the two contexts, that because I hit people when playing roller derby that I will be aggressive in life outside of derby or that there is something potentially damaging that could occur as a result of being physically aggressive within the context of sport.